Category: Blog Post

The Strib did a nice job last Sunday in their Op-Ex section on immigrants.

Some views from both sides, including some of their own pieces and the obligatory screed from the Center of the American Experiment. (Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a link to the series, so you’ll have to dig the section out of the recycling pile if you want to reread it.)

Included in the section was a very short sidebar written by two religious leaders: Evangelical pastor H. Gene Follis from Rochester and Catholic Bishop Harry Flynn from St. Paul.

You should read it yourselves and make your own judgments about which iteration of Christianity attracts you, but I want to comment on one thing Follis said. He argues that big government, and its taxes, hinder his brand of Christians’ ability to give to the poor. The government, he says, is taking too much of the money that Christians would otherwise willingly turn over to their less fortunate brothers.

He goes on to say, “America’s founding fathers predicted that a democracy without a strongly biblical/moral foundation will spawn a growing percentage of the people voting in favor of their own maintenance…”

Now aside from this putting anyone who’s in favor of using tax money to help the poor firmly in the not biblical/moral camp, he now also seems to shove those who vote in favor of their own interest over there, too.

So, keep that in mind the next time you vote. You can vote for the candidate who promises to lower your taxes, but only if you promise to give every penny of what you get back to people in need. Otherwise, I guess we’ll be seeing you in hell along with Bishop Flynn and all the other Democrats.

We are sure you will be relieved to learn that we have finally received our copy of the 80th anniversary New Yorker. We have not had much chance to crack it, beyond the usual elements—the table of contents and Talk of the Town, although we noticed a long memoir by Roger Angell about his stepfather, E.B. White, for which we have secretly and selfishly prayed for years now. (We’ll get to it when our own gala anniversary issue is finished, today or tomorrow—with any luck.)

We have several initial impressions which we wish to dash off right now before we get back to the coal mine. First, has anyone ever done a study about who gets their issue of the New Yorker first among we the rustics here in subscriber country? We are convinced that the tonier neighborhoods of the Twin Cities get their copies before we do. In fact, we feel like we are among the last to hear that particular plop on the porch, just before the dog goes ballistic for the mail carrier.

It is probably not so much a conspiracy as a broad-ranging effort to “platform” the circulation, first to the people who matter: the tastemakers, the buyers of diamonds, jaguars, and durable goods, the poet-philosophers, the small-engine repair shops, the dental hygienists, the art students, the barristas at national coffee chains, the city impound lot, the outhouses of non-winterized cabins, and finally—The Rake’s front porch.

One other quick point—coming! We’re coming, hold your horses—we enjoy it when The New Yorker dwells self-consciously on its own history. In recent years, this has typically been expressed as a trip into the archives to dig up great old covers and to assign art essays to contemporary staff writers. When these sorts of things get published as separate stand-alones, we really get enthused; here, they’ve salted the issue with this material.

There are not very many periodicals that can get away with publishing art covers—even the New Yorker must bow to the marketplace and wear an explanatory wrap on its newstand copies, a kind of terry cloth robe bearing like initials the most prestigious bylines in the present issue—Harold Ross would be appalled, of course. The Stranger (great) and Chronogram (so so—boy would we have loved the chance to edit this high-potential placeholder, in a parallel lifetime) are the only others that come immediately to mind—but neither of these offer pure art covers either, being slightly tainted by the irresistible urge to constantly bait readers with words, banners, and suchlike crumbs of bread leading into the wilderness of words within.

Much has been made of how the Daily Show is capturing the young, 18-34 year old demographic which newspapers would love to get their hairy palms on. For some reason, the big newspaper companies across the land think the way to do this is to print bigger pictures and fewer words and vulgar jokes. If possible, they’d like to reduce the paper to a lot of grunting. The main reason they insist on this tragically misguided approach is that, being big, they are also incredibly arrogant and corrupt with personnel issues. It makes no sense to hire a forty-something, mid-level company man or woman to edit a paper supposedly designed to attract a twenty-something reader, and yet that’s what they’re doing in Chicago, Denver, and elsewhere.

They seem to think–and we’ve heard their editors say—that they are creating papers for people who don’t read papers. But that is a much different thing than creating a paper for people who CAN’T read papers. (We think the reason the kids aren’t reading the newspapers is that they are more critical and savvy than their parents, and their parents’ friends who edit newspapers. In other words, the editors of youth papers are reducing the product to the purest form of what turns OFF young, smart readers.)

It is also an old prejudice and stereotype that, because a newspaper is cheap or free, then the content has to be compatibly low in value. (They’ve been hearing it for so long from advertisers that they actually believe it; why shouldn’t they? Advertisers are paying the bills, not readers! But if your publication is worth a damn, the readers pay the advertisers to pay you. See?)

But we’re not going to let the kids off the hook here. There is real risk in putting the kids in charge. We note with horror a few recent misfires, and we have some sound advice earned the hard way. Listen up, children: Humor does NOT work if you don’t care, in your heart, for your target. The difference between good satire and bad satire is this simple smell test—if the humorist lacks compassion or interest, it will show, and it will suck. Make fun of the things you care about. If you care about money and power, get out of the humor business now. (Hint: The Daily Show is genuinely funny because Jon Stewart cares.)

This is, by the way, a corollary of the longstanding Taking Candy From a Child principle. It is not funny to make fun of the weak, the infirm, the powerless, the dead, or the unloved. It is just mean, and you will go to hell where no one will ever laugh at you again.

There’s been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth among the people who write about media concerning the case of NY Times reporter Judith Miller and Time Magazine reporter Matt Cooper, who are facing prison time for doing what they think of as their jobs.

In case you haven’t been paying attention to such things, Miller and Cooper are in trouble with a federal judge for their refusal to name confidential sources to a grand jury investigating who leaked Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA agent to Bush Administration shill Robert Novak after Plame’s husband Joseph Wilson contraticted the President’s assertion Iraq was buying uranium from Niger. (You can also read Novak’s explanation of how and why he did it here.)

Now a lot of us have been wondering why Novak isn’t under threat of jail, because he’s the one who certainly knows who told him about Plame, when Miller, who wrote not one word for publication about the matter, and Cooper, who wrote about the investigation into the leak, are.

Miller and Cooper are asserting their First Amendment right to keep sources confidential, but that ain’t flying with either the judge who is threatening them, or the three judge panel of the D.C. Appeals Court who affirmed his decision. Unless they can get the full Appeals Court, or the Supreme Court (which has already issued a ruling that doesn’t exactly support their position) to hear the case, it looks like the reporters are headed for the hoosegow.

Now, these reporters make a good argument that reporters can’t do their jobs if, in effect, the government uses them as extentions of their own police investigative powers. After all, who in government or industry is ever going to blow a whistle if they know the government can force reporters to give them up?

Today in Slate, Jack Shafer, (the most thoughtful media writer around for our money) has a different take. He suggests Cooper and Miller get a better lawyer, specifically the guy who wrote the law being used to pummel them.

I’ll leave it to you to consider what Shafer hopes will be a better legal strategy to keep Miller and Cooper out of jail, and whether or not, in this case, it’s better to plead it out and let the First Amendment live to fight another day.

Of course, this could also be resoved by a Congress who has the best interests of the nation at heart. Such a Congress would extend its previously passed protections for whistle blowers to those who provide the loud whistle in the first place–the press.

We have always had mixed feelings about Michael Wolff, the media critic and self-appointed expert on the nexus of Internet, media, and business. His main credential has always been his spectacular failure at publishing on the web, so it has always seemed odd that his judgment is considered golden when it comes to all things related to media. (The things we admire about Wolff: He’s a pretty good stylist, and he is fearless about skewering sacred cows in the media business. When you’ve been burned like he has, and still have the bank book he has, you know there’s an invulnerable safety net of some kind under the man.)

In his remarks to some convoluted conference on information, transcribed today at I Want Media, we started to realize precisely what it is we don’t like about him: He is a black-hearted cynic and a crab. Today, the tune he is singing goes basically like this: “Information wants to be free. (By the way, I was the first one to coin that phrase, y’know.) That is a truth that will kill media companies, because it devalues information across the board. If you are in the information business—as all media companies are—you are in a dying industry. You’re like the farmer who keeps planting corn after the industrial revolution.”

Here, we’ll let you read a few telling points for yourself:

“In the marketing and information business, there’s always a balance of power. In the magazine business, because there was this other revenue stream that allowed the magazine people to maintain what was commonly referred to (but what is almost never referred to anymore) as this church and state separation, we can do this thing. We can put out our product and we can have a marketing relationship with your product at the same time. It’s a sort of a parallel relationship.

“…As soon as you got rid of the subscription side, that parallel relationship started to change. And what you had was a marketing relationship, which almost in every case — certainly in the magazine business — took over the information side. And so in all but a few cases magazines have become marketing vehicles.

“…Why can’t anyone hold an audience? Well, people can’t hold an audience because there’s lots of competition and lots of other things to do. And media companies can’t hold an audience because what they produce is shit.

“…they just turn the dial or throw the magazine. We’ve created a situation of such high disposability of information that, of course, the value is going to drop.”

By way of illustration, Wolff suggests that the Wall Street Journal “stopped mattering” after it started charging for its content online. We’re not sure what this means, considering that the WSJ is still one of the most widely respected, profitable media companies in the world; if it is not the nation’s largest circulation newspaper, it is its second-largest. Wolff admits that the product did not change in any way—and he admits that it is still one of the greatest periodicals around. So what does he mean when he says it does not matter anymore, merely because Dow Jones clings to the silly idea that people will pay for their content online? If we had to hazard a guess, we’d say he’s talking about the elusive, evanescent quality of “buzz” that is primarily an inert gas that changes the voices of publishers, editors, and media critics—and that’s about all. (In the best case, ad buyers begin to huff the stuff, and then it’s Katie-grab-your-guns.)

See, the basic problem here is that Wolff reduces all information to a commodity—at the same time insisting that the media biz is dying because it provides a steady stream of “shit” for content. He gets moralistic about media content when it suits his grumpiness, but this is logically inconsistent, because he seems to believe that all content is interchangeable—it’s just ones and zeros, afterall. The steady move toward free content has, in his mind, compromised the line between marketing and credible editorial content.

He is probably right in the main, but this should be seen as an opportunity for contrarians. Just because the trend is toward free content does not mean that content has to be shit. The New Yorker and Vanity Fair are not crap publications because they make no money from their readers—nor because their cover price is but a laundering operation to defray the high cost of distribution. They are good because they are good.

Being a free publication ourselves, we have a few ideas on this subject. It is certainly true that readers have come to expect a great deal of information for free—both on the web and in the analog world. But the widespread availability of information does not automatically equalize all information, nor “devalue” it. (One could ask a very telling question from the other side of the equation—does the ubiquity of advertising devalue all advertisements? Maybe—but that just means there is pressure for advertisers to produce more memorable, higher quality ads, not fewer, less memorable ones. ‘Twas every thus: Quality is judged by, well, quality.) The existence of blogs does not compell us to set aside our dog-eared copy of Moby-Dick, nor does our rereading Moby-Dick prevent us from checking up on our favorite blogs.

We’re honestly kinda tired of this widespread dyspepsia that reduces the human mind—and the human attention span—to a sort of closed-economy with only so much warehouse space. The attention economy is merely the normal, longstanding human transaction of making quick, precise judgments as to what is worthy, and what is not. The vehicle of delivery, and the price of delivery have merely been distractions from which Wolff has fashioned a very lucrative punditing career indeed.

In yesterday’s Times Book Review, A.J. Jacobs was allowed a rare privilege—he wrote a review of his Times reviewer, the alleged humorist Joe Queenan, and it was better than the original review. Heck, it was better than Jacobs’ book.

You may recall that A.J. Jacobs was a front-of-book editor at Entertainment Weekly and then at Esquire. At one point during his illustrious rise through the magazine world, he proposed a very funny article—he would attempt to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in one year. That article then became a book, with the tongue-in-cheek title “The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World.”

We’re green with envy that Jacobs was granted this sort of favor (we assume his claim to have received the meanest review in Times Book Review history carried some water with editors there; this guy has made a very handsome living indeed on hyperbole. Watch your back, Neil Pollack!). Especially after he admits that he’s had quite a ride on a PR shimmy-shimmy that included our humble little magazine. We were tempted to leave it at that, because there is nothing more pathetic than a writer complaining that his tea is not sweet enough.

But we went back and re-read Queenan’s review, and we’ll hold Jacobs’ coat on this one. The hemorrhoidal Queenan accused Jacobs of writing what he calls a misguided, juvenile, tired book just “to fullfill his book contract.” What a grump!

If there is one thing that is harder than writing humor, it is writing about or reviewing humor. It is an old adage of editing that a humorless piece about humor is less fun to read than the phone book. Couple that with an assignment you’re not crazy about (making fun of the weak, a wicked path indeed), Queenan is certainly projecting. He either can’t stand other humorists (yawn, how predictable is that?), or he was pissed at his editors at the Times for charging this book against his account, or he’s just an ungracious, unfunny jerk. Among humorists, the biggest cause of spleen-inflammation is a fat wallet, maturing irrelevance, and jealousy of youth.

As a young friend of mine once said, “We will bury you.” Depending on how long you intend to live, it is probably wise to cultivate sympathy for your pallbearers.