No one, certainly no one here in Dymaxia, can argue that in some important ways,
the range of content available to consumers today, is broader than at any time
in history thanks mainly to what's come to be called the long tail of the
Internet. Even within the limited scope of our
BlogDrome section, we are able to
consistently reblog meaningful, thoughtful, sometimes jarring, sometimes
amusing work being freely circulated by dedicated bloggers on the isthmus of
media, technology, economy and politics.
Grassroots or Citizen Journalism, as it has come to be called, is a powerful
means for getting information amplified and out into the public forum. The
advent of powerful and diligent search engines that constantly troll the
Internet for updated content and RSS feeds that notify consumers when their
favorite sites have new content to offer, have made a major contribution to the
speed and depth of the stream. Diligent consumers can also use their browsers to
access content provided world wide by media organizations once found only in the
largest of libraries, days old. Large organizations like the NY Times, the
BBC and others make available video and audio feeds, podcasters offer a wide
range of talk out of the control of the near monopoly radio broadcast networks.
Yet, against this backdrop of expansive long-tail content availability, it's not
hard to argue that the big picture is darker, and far from a golden age. Take
the dominant force in content production, the US entertainment/media complex.
"The business", appears to be suffering a crisis of its own
making. For years, it has increasingly tweaked its products in its successful
attempt at ever wider audiences and near-complete hegemony. Time-Warner, the
largest of these conglomerates, Disney, Viacom, Fox and the media wing of GE
carefully manicure the
distribution and cross-marketing of their products.
And just as the US has achieved sole superpower status by outspending the rest
of the world, developing the most technically sophisticated military ever
fielded --able, at least on paper, to take on foes anywhere in the world and near space
with Rambo-like impunity-- Hollywood
has built a bulllet-proof product line that is designed to span a wide range of markets with a
common denominator for nearly every taste. The ideal product, in this formula,
is a movie that has enough testosterone and estrogen stimulation for the
teenagers who flock the live screens, a simple enough plot line and character
pool familiar enough to be recognizable from Auckland to St. Petersburg and a
secret blend of contemporary camp sauce to pique the appetites of the ever
growing stay at home DVD aftermarket.
In so doing, Hollywood has succeeded --some would say, perhaps too well for
their own good (especially, since most recently year over year box-office numbers are down for
the last 20 weeks running)-- in chasing out the competition. Only India has been
able to sustain a thriving domestic film industry. Countries, that played major
creative roles in early film history, like Italy, France, Germany, Britain,
Japan, Sweden, Russia, etc. have, for all practical purposes, gone out
of business. Only tiny Denmark seems to have managed to avoid annihilation.
Italy, for just one example, turned out more movies annually in the early 60's
than Hollywood now produces in a decade. It is impossible to imagine our
cinemateque minus the likes of Eisenstein, Tarkovsky, Bunuel, Lang, Dreyer,
Fellini, Rossolini, Bergman, Visconti, Vigo, Resnais, Godard, Losey, Wenders,
Fassbinder, Misoguchi, Kurosawa, etc., not to mention the many great American
directors who first learned their trade abroad, people like Wilder, Hitchcock
and Von Stroheim.
On the broad information front, the situation is equally bleak: the network nightly news
has become such a tepid shadow of itself that its sometimes impossible to
distinguish it from shows like Entertainment Tonight. Does anyone still tune
into 60 Minutes expecting to see them to break a story on the level of the Enron
or MCI ponzi schemes? In today's atmosphere, can we really expect to see the
Washington Post able to take the heat of pursuing a story of the scope of
Watergate? Can we be sure that the NY Times would have the guts to release the
equivalent of the Pentagon Papers this time around? In the past they had to
resist the accusation of being anti-American, pro-communist; today they will
surely be accused of being anti-Christian.
In the lead up to the ongoing war, all of the leading news-breaking media
organizations --the number of these is unfortunately quite limited-- have
acknowledged burying critical stories that questioned assumptions that were the
main rationale for the invasion. Would anyone seriously argue today that minus
the threat of WMD and a terrorism link with OBL and the promise of a cakewalk, a
majority of Americans would have gone along with the invasion plans? Noticably,
although Americans and Iraqis die every day from bloody attacks, there appears
to be some sort of ban on photo coverage of these gory events. We do know that the Pentagon has made it
impossible to cover through images the stream of coffins returning to the country.
But how seriously has this same MSM taken the revelations coming out of the Air
Force Academy. In the wake of stories about fundamentalist Christian control of
the Academy's leadership, and even manifested bizarrely by its football team, the Academy's
Lutheran chaplain resigned this week and took the charge onto Nightline that
it's common practice in the Institution to deny the existence of a
Constitutional separation of church and state. When the training ground for the
elite officer corps of the US Air Force, the guys that command the flight of the
fighters and bombers and the missile launchers, is challenged on Constitutional
grounds by its own Christian chaplain, this has got to be worthy of in-depth
reporting! Hopefully, MSM
editors will prove us wrong and have already assigned top journalists to a story
that the Pentagon felt needed a press conference during the week.
With major newspaper readership in a downward spiral, many Americans get their
news in short bursts from the radio and television or by taking quick glances at
their local dailies. The all news channels tend to parade their rosters of
talking heads who generally spout talking points listing canned party line positions, which, of course
is really most useful for people trying to read the tea leaves of inside-the-beltway
Washington.
The format on NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered and
talk venues like the Diane Reim Show, Talk of the Nation,
Science Friday etc. provide opportunities for a wide variety of
beyond-the-sound-byte discussion. On television, PBS's News Hour with Jim
Lehrer has little competition in the time it takes to treat four or five
major daily stories.
Another program that can often be counted on for in-depth reporting and some guts in
taking on tough issues has been ABC's Nightline, which unfortunately
appears to be in its death throes.
Given the preponderance of public broadcasting programs on our short list, it
should come as no surprise that the entire public broadcasting system is under
attack by the Administration and the conservative right. The campaign against
public broadcasting has been multi-pronged this time around, which makes it a
much more deadly strike than in the past when Congressional funding, alone, was
put under attack. Deservedly, public broadcasting has a large and vocal audience
that has been successful in pushing back the funding attack. This time around
the Administration has appointed an ally, Kenneth Tomlinson, to head the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the parent organization for PBS and NPR.
Behind the scenes, Tomlinson has fought what conservatives call bias on NPR and
PBS, managing first to get Bill Moyers removed from his program Now.
Moyers, an experienced and passionate journalist and one of the founding fathers
of public broadcasting, was punished, it seems, for offering, among other
things, the kind of pro-immigrant and labor stories that have disappeared from
media coverage but would hardly have raised an eyebrow 40 years ago, when PBS
was founded. For "balance", PBS was convinced to run a Tucker Carlson show and
one featuring the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, a group that consistently
takes conservative positions in contrast even to stories published by WSJ's own
journalists. This week, in typical fashion, it distinguished itself with a long
piece denying once again the validity of the role atmospheric carbon dioxide
plays in global warming
Thursday, Tomlinson managed to get Patricia S. Harrison, the assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs, selected as the new President of CPB, after three days of closed meetings by the corporation’s board of directors. She was co-chair of the Republican National Committee from 1997 to 2001.
The attempted funding cuts for public broadcasting were meant to go very deep.
They were aimed across the board at stations but also at particular programs.
One irony, from this "conservative" Congressional attack is their focused aim at PBS's children's programming. In the cultural wars that have pitted the Bible Belt
against Hollywood, it might have been assumed that PBS, the home of Sesame
Street, et al. would be supported by parents offended by the Saturday morning fare
coming from an industry they oppose.
But in a longstanding inside the Beltway tradition most recently exemplified by
uber-lobbyists Jack Abramoff and Mike Scanlon, official Washington particularly
relishes an opportunity to please their big contributors while hiding behind
their culture
war cloak. In the case of Abramoff and Scanlon, it was Christians and Indian
tribes being played against an exceedingly profitable middle, while in the case
of weakening PBS, that same vilified entertainment industry, itself a major
contributor, could hope to eliminate competition via the lobbying capital of
conservative groups. The coincidence that NPR's Morning Edition, the most
listened to early morning radio program in the country, and that competitor in
every market, Clear Channel -- a major contributor to conservative causes-- is
nothing to snicker at. Neither, does it go unnoticed in a very competitive TV
advertising climate, that PBS has the ability to consistently attract a
prime-time TV audience of affluent trendsetters away from the major networks.
America's economic problems flowing out of the massive trade deficit (see,
China's
unsolicited bid to buy Unocal this week, as just the latest wrinkle), the out-of-control housing
market, the accelerating exportation of manufacturing and service jobs, the
growing budget deficit, looming problems in the health system, etc. not to
mention a way out of the Iraq quagmire, are going to boil out of the mud at some
point. After years of happy talk, Americans are going to have to face very
likely a combination of grave issues with very complex solutions at some point
soon. They are going to need well sourced information that may not please
anyone. Only a very tiny portion of that will come from citizen
journalists.
When it comes to overemphasizing the power of the long tail, we might
be reminded of the ancient Chinese parable of the blind men and the
elephant. In the tale, the blind man who hangs onto the tail, declares with
great assurance that the beast is like a rope.