There are several vital tricks to surviving life at a daily newspaper, like I did at the Pioneer Press for fifteen years. One is a developed affinity for list-making, especially end-of-the-year list-making. So, Rake readers, as my first act in this space, a list … of the best and worst in media for 2006.
The Best …
• Dexter Filkins and John Burns of the New York Times, and CNN’s Michael Ware, from Iraq; MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann from New York: Long before the media peloton found the gonads to describe what was happening in the Mideast, the first three offered vivid reporting from inside the shattered society. Exploiting the freedom of cable news, Olbermann has lifted righteous indignation to an art form.
• Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert: It is impossible to under-appreciate the salutary effect of the mirror Stewart and Colbert have held up to America’s cowed, corporate journalist/pundit class, and Colbert’s appearance at last spring’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner (also see, “Worst of … ”) was a watershed moment, dividing the relevant from the fatuous.
• Dan Froomkin’s White House Briefing blog for the Washington Post: While every Capitol Hill and prep-sports reporter is rushing to produce an “edgy” blog, usually while straining to drain it of the pedantic institutional voice long-revered as “balanced” and “objective,” Froomkin has broken through the firewall with consistently well-informed aggregation and spot-on analysis.
• Reality Check by WCCO-TV’s Pat Kessler, and Is That A Fact? by the Strib’s Eric Black: These truth-assessing vehicles, driven by deeply sourced, mainstream, veteran reporters, represent the sort of thing I used to think was a fundamental responsibility of journalism, namely, ascertaining and saying out loud what is true and what isn’t.
• Hugh Laurie as House, and Ian McShane as Al Swearengen on Deadwood: One of my pet theories holds that an essential quality of adulthood is the desire to forgo sentimentality in entertainment. TV characters like House and Swearengen evoke the kind of snarly, sinewy associations with real life that gird you for battle in the company mines tomorrow morning.
The Worst …
• Fox’s If I Did It O.J. Simpson special: I still say Fox will attempt to air a live execution before the end of the decade. But until then, offering a homicidal psychopath sweeps-month prime time to discuss how he “might” have cut his wife’s head off is about as low and crass as it gets. To listen to Fox mogul Rupert Murdoch feign remorse only added to the insult. Rupert, try this: “We’re very sorry … that we were going to lose money. But we’re negotiating for the Britney/K-Fed sex tape as I speak.”
• The Washington, D.C., media cognoscenti at last spring’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner: If you ever wondered how Cheney and Bush got the press to cheerlead for the invasion of Iraq, your answer could be plainly seen on the lifted, tucked, and self-satisfied faces of the media elite as they reacted with befuddlement and horror to Stephen Colbert’s vivisective “praise” of Bush’s, and their, manifest incompetence.
• The disparity between political advertising and political reporting on local television: A University of Wisconsin survey of seven Midwest TV markets showed local TV news devoted twice as much time in the 2006 election season to political advertising as to political coverage. At what point does someone step in and say, “You get these broadcast licenses for nothing, and this avalanche of noxious ads is free money to you. So get off your asses and do your community the service of telling them who is lying and who isn’t.”
• Bruce Sherman: Who? Sherman is CEO and chief investment officer of Private Capital Management LP, of Naples, Florida. More than any other individual’s, Sherman’s demands for greater profits (excuse me, “shareholder value”) were responsible for Knight-Ridder, the newspaper company, selling off properties like the St. Paul Pioneer Press, which eventually fell into the hands of a sweatshop company by the name of MediaNews. Along the way, hundreds of middle-class families were hit by lay-offs as Knight Ridder papers gutted their newsrooms. Did I mention that Sherman’s contract paid three hundred million dollars if he delivered the “shareholder value”?
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