Category: Blog Post

One of the great myths promoted and promulgated by the me-first neo-con crowd is not only that the mainstream media is lousy with liberals and liberal bias, but that liberals are inherently “elite” or elitist. We’re not sure where this whole idea comes from, given the well-documented connection between labor and liberalism, as well as the more subtle connection between obscene wealth and selfishness. (This bizarre “limousine liberal” inversion has reached all quarters: Teaching evolution, fer chrissakes, is now considered a badge of liberal elitism, which means that every credible scientist on the face of the planet is a deluded elitist liberal.)

But if you’d like an object lesson in reality, you could do worse than checking out “Left of the Dial,” the Air America documentary that will be broadcast on HBO Thursday night. We haven’t seen it ourselves, but we read that it is a more dramatic story than you might think—the story of how the liberal radio network got off the ground, after very nearly dying in childbirth. As it turns out, the only limousine liberal involved in Air America was Al Franken himself, who in the eleventh hour had to step in and write some hefty personal checks to keep the nascent network going. Many of the network’s key employees worked without pay or benefits in order to see the mission through.

See, there’s the difference between the left and the right in a nutshell—only a Democrat would spend his own money on a cause that was larger than himself. In some quarters, this is called a non-monetary return on investment—but you didn’t hear it from your present goverment monopoly, which looks upon all such do-goodism as essentially evil. (God helps those who help themselves, you know… and presumably punishes those who help others.)

Sometimes editors are assholes. Lots of times. Most of the time. This seems to be a job requirement. But editors should really be assholes for the right reasons, and we certainly try to be an asshole for the right reasons. Still, even if we do it for the right reasons, we’re still being an asshole.

There is a lot of talk these days about how an editor must “personify the brand,” to put a face on the operation, and we try to do this too, whenever we are called on. On the other hand, our first and highest committment is to the magazine itself—to protect its integrity and quality, and this can be an all-encompassing activity all by itself.

We were thinking the other day about the Ross and Shawn years at the New Yorker. Few people realize why the New Yorker is the best magazine in the world today: It is largely because of those legendary editor’s unquestioning, unwavering, absolute committment to their magazine. Harold Ross never had a byline in his magazine, and William Shawn had just one. That amounts to more than sixty years of a weekly magazine in whose pages its editors-in-chief appeared just once. (Since the New Yorker has never published a masthead, the words “Harold Ross” did not appear in the magazine until a week after he died, in 1951.) It’s hard to imagine that sort of thing happening today.

Another anachronism: Staff writers at the New Yorker were never really guaranteed anything. Even the finest feature writers of the time received no assurances that what they wrote would ever get published ~unless it was good enough~. They got no preferential treatment, other than assurances that what they wrote would be given all due consideration of the editors. In the meantime, writers could borrow money against their “drawing account” and they might sign first reader agreements that paid them a little bit of dough, but they were expected to eventually write something publishable to cover their debt to the magazine.

Such a scheme would never fly today, and it shouldn’t. All things considered, writers probably have less security today than they did back in the forties and fifties—if for no other reason than the rise of the middle-class, and the widespread belief that writing is a romantic thing to do, and anyone can do it. But it is astonishing to consider how Ross and Shawn were able to float such an operation (it continued, we have heard, well after Conde Nast bought the magazine in 1986). They could for one very simple reason: They valued quality above all else, and the result was that any serious writer would die (then and now) to get into its hallowed pages. (Some have literally paid to get into the magazine—though in the advertising space, of course.) Ross and Shawn were, therefore, assholes for the right reason, in all probability. But writers seemed to understand that no matter how maddening the editors were, they advocated (politely, diplomatically) first and last for the integrity of the written word. That actually meant something to everyone involved in producing the New Yorker.

Well, if you didn’t already believe the people who run the National Rifle Association are crazier than a hummingbird on crack, read this from NRA first vice president, Sandra S. Froman.

It seems that if only the teachers at Red Lake had been totin’ heat themselves, they could have protected their students from Jeff Weise’s rampage. I bet the good folks of Red Lake wish they’d thought of that themselves. Yup, all we need to do to make our school safer is bring in more guns.

Damn near as funny as Ms. Froman’s pronouncements were those of President Bush, who this morning talked of how committed the federal government was to the people of Red Lake. If you’ve ever been to Red Lake, and I have, you’ll know what an utter crock that is. Of course, maybe W will introduce an amendment to the No Child Left Behind act that would fund body armor for all students. We could use the money that we’re not spending on the body armor for our soldiers in Iraq, perhaps.

P.S. If you want to read a good series on what life is like for some people on an Indian reservation, look what the Strib did here.

A couple of interesting meditations on the newspaper industry today. Generally, we just feel like we want to disagree on principal with such grandiose pronouncements as Michael Malone makes today over at ABC news, namely that “newspapers are dead.” All you need to do to refute such a silly claim is to look over the past fifty years of media history. Both television and radio were supposed to obsolete the printed word, but they didn’t—in fact, they helped build a readership which saw the inherent, qualitative differences in media. Now, according to Malone—a weird holdover from the heady days of the Web’s initial revolutionary zealots—the web will be the final coup de grace.

We hate to break it to Malone, but he simply doesn’t matter as much as he thinks he does: It is not the readers who will determine the fortunes of newspapers. It is the advertisers. We all know that readers are the third wheel in this relationship, have been for a long time… Recent circulation scandals are not scandals because they reflect badly on Americans reading less. They are a scandal because newspaper executives are lying to advertisers about their rate-bases. The basic paradigm—that advertising in print works—has not changed one iota, and there is a massive support industry designed to convince advertisers and publishers that their endless toil has the result they want to believe it does. (Interesting, innit, how there has been so much trouble transferring that same confidence to the web, where the science and technology of tracking actual readers through the content is so much more advanced.)

More to the point, as Jack Shafer makes clear in his excellent piece today about the strange maneuvers of Philip Anschutz, the only thing that is really outdated about newspapers today, in a concrete business sense, is the margins in which they continue to operate. Thirty percent is typical at a strong metropolitan daily! Those are numbers anyone in the media buisness, outside of television, would die for.

We’re not sure we agree with Shafer’s assertion that these healthy margins are due to “harvesting market strength” in the short term— but then we live in a city with one of those exceptional dailies that has actually managed to sustain growth in circulation. The other thing that is exceptional about the Twin Cities is that Kinght-Ridder—the bedraggled bridesmaid here—is everywhere else considered forward-thinking, whereas here the Pi-Press’s website is one of the most shamefully useless sites on the web, which comports well with the generally cadaverous scent of the whole operation down on Cedar Street.

No, newspapers will stick around just as long as TV, radio, and the web stick around, but they will continue to evolve—some for the better, some for the worse, many for free…. but all somewhat independently of whether the reading (listening, browsing) public thinks there is any value in them.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Terri Schiavo, which, I think, puts me in some pretty good company–that of people who believe life is sacred and we shouldn’t allow it to end without good reason.

Like the abortion and death penalty debates, poor Terri has become a nexus of American confusion among our nation of laws, our nation under God, and our nation currently being run by the people who only believe in the law or God when it suits their political purpose.

As for what I think of whether Terri Schiavo should die, I couldn’t put it nearly so well as Harriet McBryde Johnson did on Slate yesterday. If Terri can live, like any profoundly injured or ill person–with care and feeding–she should. What’s being done to let her die is wrong, but it does have a rationale I can understand. It is not murder theologically unless Michael Schiavo believes it to be. He doesn’t. Unlike DeLay, Frist and Bush, he’s not a cynic. And whether Michael Schiavo is right or not, someday he will know when his own time comes.

What makes the political right’s attempt to keep Terri alive even more vile than her husband’s desire to let her die though is beautifully summed up by this piece by Dahlia Lithwick, also posted on Slate yesterday. She points out the irony of the right’s signature “defense of marriage” at the same time they are willing to put government firmly between a man and his wife. (Lithwick also notes that the money which has paid for Terri’s care came from a malpractice lawsuit of just the sort Congress wants to limit.)

When it comes down to it, I think I’d rather have someone like Michael Schiavo representing my interests than DeLay, Frist or Bush. I can only hope that that epiphany I spoke of above comes, too, to that unholy trinity. It would be great if it came early in November 2006, but I can wait for St. Peter if I have to.

We had a laugh a few months ago, when there was that little dust-up between the gay fellows over at Powerline and the Star Tribune’s Nick Coleman. They’d all been in a running firefight—liberal this, neo-con that—and while we’ve come to appreciate the deceptively euphonious rhetoric of the full-time bloggers and Rather-slayers, they were far outmatched in wits by Coleman, who is, after all, a professional.

But that little flap went nookular when the bloggers’ boss at TCF Bank decided to step into this little flea-circus with a sledgehammer. Bill Cooper, an excitable, longtime GOP honcho, pledged that his bank would buy no more advertising with the Star Tribune so long as he was at the controls. (We commented at the time that TCF stockholders and directors were no doubt gratified with Cooper’s decision to make sure the last anyone heard about the company was that its CEO was making such an aggressive personal stance with ~their~ money.)

Now TCF has ingeniously gone one better—they’ve committed to buy the naming rights to the new stadium at the University of Minnesota for the kingly sum of $35 million. That kind of cabbage would have bought a lot of advertising in the Strib, of course, but we think it’s a brilliant move. Given that the daily—and all dailies like it—have rolled over on this insidious form of commericalizing public information, TCF will get its advertising and brand extension into the fish wrap anyway, without having to give the employers of Nick Coleman one red cent. Take that, you pantywaist, glue-sniffing liberals!

We note that the words “Target Center” have appeared in the pages of newspapers around the land more than one thousand times in the last month—ninety-seven times in the Strib. The cancelled NHL season didn’t prevent the words “Xcel Energy Center” from being recorded in the Newspaper of the Twin Cities nearly sixty times in the last three weeks.

This give us a great deal of Adidas-brand pride in the Visa-Mastercard ingenuity of the entrepreneurial spirit, still so manifestly alive and well here in the United States of Halliburton.