The Rake Magazine

Tag: google

  • John McCain Nude – 64 Results

    It was on the far right, literally. A tiny block of space someone had purchased to help The Rake live another day. Pay up, and you can paste your sign/add your link/sing your song on my web page/television/telephone/window/door/floor/car/bus/butt/etc…

    In
    the ultimate capitalist pervasion of everyday life, this heat-seeking
    piranha of an ad jumped at me, propelled by the finely tuned instincts
    of specialized software, somewhere in cyberspace, sensing Barack
    Obama’s name on the page and inferring from it the presence of
    intellectual prey.

    There I was, and there it was, so close:

    "The Real Barack Obama (link) The truth behind the canditate (sic)" – "Barack Obama Exposed – Free!" (with another link)

    I hesitated. The piranha bit down hard. I clicked!

    …and could almost feel the blood rush:

    "From
    his radical stance on abortion to his prominence in the corruption
    scandals that has been virtually ignored by the mainstream media,
    Barack Obama is not fit to be Senator — not to mention the next
    President of the United States. Obama has declared his presidential
    intentions, but it is up to well-informed and energetic conservatives
    like you to spare our nation from the scourge of a far-left President
    Barack H. Obama."

    Presidential
    politics is the grand stage of the most aggressive promoters, the
    truest believers. Neglect their theater and they will seek you out,
    seek to turn you out. I slept through the 2004 and 2000 elections. Even
    now, I was placidly detached. But this impassioned gnome of an ad leapt
    from the stage, snatched me from the placid pages of an innocent,
    literate webzine, and forced me, drove me, deep into its chosen thicket
    of passion and intrigue.

    I was in the hunt. I clicked a link, then another, and got:

    "It
    must be just me! I mean, does anyone else see the lying racist? The
    Obamination of this country is about to walk right into the Democratic
    nomination and no-one is doing a damned thing about it! PEOPLE…Obama
    hates this nation and WHITE people! HELLO! Is anyone out there? Are you
    folks so stupid and blind that it is already over? Is America already
    doomed from the inside out? Was President Lincoln correct when he said
    this nation will only be defeated from within?! Jesus people…can’t
    you see what is happening here? Wake up! The man will not cover his
    heart during the National Anthem…oh god…I could go on forever!"

    Hokey
    smoke! From clever, benign, literacy to full frontal attack in three
    clicks. I recalled twentieth century sites affixing Bill Clinton’s name to
    the legends of dead people, many legends, many dead people – the
    Clinton Body Count, they called it. One page had animated graphic blood dripping down the sides. I
    remembered admiring the enthusiasm (and the graphics!) more than the
    argument. Had I convinced myself that towering invective was unique to
    Bill? The question begged for investigation.

    I enlisted Google.

    "Barack Obama exposed" brought 38,500 Google "results". Oh, my! A huge number. But compared to what? I tried for context.

    "Hillary
    Clinton exposed" scored 12,600 pages, a bare third of Obama’s total; "John McCain exposed" an almost negligible 2,350. It’s an Obama
    phenomenon. But why?

    My
    brain churned through the usual suspects. Is the web’s free wheeling
    candor a cultural Petri dish, nurturing explosions of racist bacteria?
    Does Obama’s generic celebrity merit the poisonous paparazzi pursuit of
    Paris or Britney? Are the White Knights of the Right so certain of
    their enemy that they write off Hillary as a dead woman walking?

    Or
    was I, naive in the ways of The Web, missing the connotation of
    "exposed"? Perhaps it’s that Obama is, how to put this delicately, hot?
    I tried something else.

    "Barack Obama nude" brings 725 results, but "Hillary Clinton nude" launches 21,200 pages.

    Aha! The light goes on. Sealing the deal, "John McCain nude" scores a pitiful 64. That’s it!

    It’s
    about testosterone. The Bad Old Surfer Dudes want to see women naked
    and new kids trashed. What about McCain? 64 "results" close that
    question. Nobody cares about the old guy. He’s not a threat.

    I’d
    like to think elections are about ideas and principles, about who would
    do the best job. But there’s waaaay more than that. Frank Luntz
    theorizes it’s about talking to the reptilian brain: "80 percent of our life is emotion, and only 20 percent is intellect." I think I’ve found supporting evidence.

  • All the News That Fits—and Then Some

    There’s an awful lot of talk about the news lately, but not, unfortunately, the sort of constructive conversation that promotes critical thinking and engages people with their neighborhoods, their country, or their world. No, what people are talking about is the media, or, more specifically, and more onerously, the business of media. The Star Tribune is losing readers, pages, and staff. (Did that venture-capital firm buy it just for its prime downtown real estate?) The Pioneer Press is facing the same challenges, and rumors have been circulating for over a year that it will cease to exist altogether. The corporate hijacking of local “alt weekly” City Pages seems finally to have succeeded, at least in a manner of speaking. (New Times indeed—just who the hell is this Hoffman character, anyway?) And it’s not just with these outlets. Almost everywhere you turn the quality of news is being questioned as resources and profits continue to dwindle. It’s just too expensive, it seems, to chase meaningful stories these days, and the competition has never been fiercer for advertising dollars.

    Enter the internet, the longtime boogeyman and sworn enemy of print media everywhere. As it turns out, it just might be the best tool any news reporter, storyteller, or publisher ever dreamed of. With more than half the U.S. now online—and two-thirds of them getting their news online—the web is suddenly a sexy proposition for all sorts of formerly hidebound print junkies. The venture capitalists are intrigued as well—you’d have to suppose that in a recessive industry, not having to pay for ink, paper, press operators, and distribution would bode well for the bottom line.

    And so, with (undoubtedly) noble thoughts and high aspirations, many Twin Cities newsies have been turning to the web as a panacea for a host of the ailments currently bedeviling the news media. Former Strib publisher and editor Joel Kramer got the attention of media insiders across the country when he launched MinnPost, his long-anticipated online news site, in November. At about the same time, erstwhile City Pages editor Steve Perry debuted his own site, The Daily Mole, which he mothballed last month after a frustrating three-month run; now he is taking the reins at the Minnesota Monitor. Perry’s new employer, like a number of other local sites (including Twin Cities Daily Planet, the Minnesota Monitor, Cursor, and MNSpeak), had been up and running on the web long before that pair of high-profile upstarts made their splash at the tail end of 2007.

    It turns out that the web, with its atmosphere of almost unbridled democracy (a sort of anarchic egalitarian free-for-all, if such a thing is possible), has breathed new life into the moribund American Dream. Freedom of speech. Free exchange of ideas. Anybody can play. People with a little bit (or a lot) of hubris can barge their way online and plant their flags. Every citizen (or non-) can put his (or her) voice out there. And anyone can hit the jackpot, which is, of course, measured in mouse clicks. (You can be sure even the gal blogging about what she had for breakfast is watching her numbers.) In the online world, clicks mean dollars.

    The trouble, of course, comes in setting up a new online economy. How many clicks for how many dollars? What’s the rate of exchange? In a world where Britney has been the top search term for six of the past seven years, and where information is expected to be free, how can anyone make news financially viable?


    Making a play with traditional journalism

    Determined to uphold professional distinction above all else (presumed translation: no Britney stories), Joel Kramer latched on to a stable of reporters cast off in the recent newsroom purges on both sides of the river and set out to create a quality local news source. With the exception of a few videos and slideshows, MinnPost’s editorial model is little more than traditional newspaper journalism distributed online (in fact, until a few weeks ago, Kramer insisted on distributing fifteen-hundred Xeroxed printouts for those committed to words on paper).

    While web-based businesses across the globe save on rent by having staff work from home, Kramer resists this as well. He is proud of MinnPost’s old-school newsroom, which features open space to encourage dialogue, an office for the business staff, and conference rooms and workstations around the perimeter. Just as newspaper reporters rush to meet an evening deadline, MinnPost contributors—drawn from a pool of fifty-six freelancers—submit stories each morning so that web editor Corey Anderson can post them online at 11 a.m. This also runs counter to standard web protocol, where news is live twenty-four-hours and reporters bypass editors by posting their stories directly on the website. “Our goal is not to exploit the web,” explained Kramer, “but to provide quality journalism.”

    Can MinnPost make profitable use of an online medium without fully engaging its resources? Nora Paul, Director of the Institute for New Media Studies at the U of M, says no. “[Kramer] hasn’t embraced what’s interesting about online,” she argued, “which is the ability to create packages with a shelf-life, and that will have utility for a long time.” According to Paul, online news organizations need to find new and compelling ways to tell stories, and develop creative ways to pull together data. While most local online news sources have not availed themselves of Paul’s expertise, newspapers across the country are turning to her for the winning formula. Last month, eleven top newspapers, including The New York Times and the Washington Post, met with Paul (and five graduate students) to formulate questions they want answered about offering news on the web. What’s the best way to display video? Do news crawlers attract more clicks than breaking news digests? What’s the most engaging way to tell a story?

    Above all, the web offers flexibility. “Online, the walls should be much more porous,” explained Paul, “so that you have an evolving story-telling space.” In other words, there’s no excuse for anything static. Online news is more a process than a product; it’s created through interaction and various points of view, so stories build up almost organically, with varied perspectives, in varied forms, from varied arenas. Ideally, the end result is a much broader picture, and arguably a more compelling story than we’ve been reading on paper for centuries.