The Anchoress read a trivial-sounding blog post with Katie Couric's name on it, and responds, "I never thought I would say it, but I miss Dan Rather. I may not have agreed with him much of the time toward the end, but he had a curious mind, a willingness to ask questions and he possessed a voice and presence that conveyed…oh…gravitas."

Well, with the exception of his occasional "what's the frequency" freakouts, Rather did a pretty good of projecting the requisite gravitas on camera until he finally unraveled near the end, but Katie and Captain Dan are virtually identical in one respect: they're essentially actors who gets paid to put a dramatic intonation on dialogue that someone else has written for them. In Team America: World Police, the Janeane Garofolo wooden puppet (sorry for the redundancies) breathlessly shouts, "As actors, it is our responsibility to read the newspapers, and then say what we read on television like it's our own opinion"

Ironically, that's also a perfect description of the superstar anchorman or woman, as as Tom Wolfe noted in 1980:

Within the television news operations there’s such a premium put on not being a reporter. Everyone aspires to the man who never has to leave the building, the anchor man, who is a performer. The reporters are called researchers and are usually young women, and the correspondent on television is a substar, a supporting actor who prides himself on the fact that he doesn’t have to prepare the story. You talk to these guys and they’ll say, “Well, they sent me from Beirut to Teheran, and I had forty-five minutes to get briefed on the situation.” What they should say is, “I read the AP copy.” The idea is that as a performer you can pull together this news operation anywhere you go and the whole status structure is set up in such a way that you’re not going to get good reporters. Just try to think of the last major scoop, to use that old term, that was broken on television. I’m sure there have been some. But what story during Watergate? During Watergate there were new stories coming out every day. None were on television, except when television simply broadcast the hearings. The can do a set event. And that’s what television is actually best at. In fact, it’d be a service to the country if television news operations were shut down totally and they only broadcast hearings, press conferences and hockey games. That would be television news. At least the public would not have the false impression that it’s getting news coverage.

As television writer Burt Prelutsky wrote in 2005 as Dan was heading into the sunset, "Now, I’m not saying we should kill the messengers. I’m just suggesting it’s time we stopped canonizing them".

Found via Power Line, Mark Moyar, author of Triumph Forsaken, which Scott Johnson dubs a "revisionist Vietnam war history", is looking for war heroes in the New York Sun. Or to be more specific, he's looking to read about them in papers other than the New York Sun:

Neil Sheehan began his Pulitzer-Prize winning book "A Bright Shining Lie" by pronouncing the Vietnam War "a war without heroes." In the rest of the book, the Americans in Vietnam largely came across as fools, liars, criminals, or a combination thereof, with the exception of Mr. Sheehan and his fellow journalists, who were depicted as brave unmaskers of ineptitude and absurdity. Sheehan ignored the real heroism of many brave Americans — such as Marvin Shields, Carlos McAfee, Antonio Smaldone, and Steven L. Bennett, to name but a few — and many military victories, for American triumphs did not square with his claims about the war. He badly distorted press involvement in the war so that he and his colleagues, particularly David Halberstam and Stanley Karnow, could dodge the blame they deserved for promoting the disastrous coup against the South Vietnamese government in November 1963.

The Vietnam-era journalists began a tradition that today's press consistently upholds. We hear very little from most large press outlets about American heroes in Iraq and Afghanistan, men like James Coffman Jr., Danny Dietz, and Christopher Adlesperger, or about our military successes there. Instead of associating such names with these wars, Americans associate the words they hear most often from the press, like Abu Ghraib and Haditha. As in Vietnam, too, the shunning of heroes does not extend to the press's coverage of itself. Awards to journalists, both those who have spent time in Iraq and Afghanistan and those who have not, are considered worthy of lengthy news stories.

Publicizing American heroism and success is essential today for two reasons. First, it permits a nuanced view of Iraq and Afghanistan, one which cannot be discerned from the daily stories of sectarian murders and the photos of American troops who have just been killed. Second, American troops and the American people become more courageous and resolute when they hear of their countrymen's military heroism and success, past and present. In earlier times, Americans ingrained their traditions of heroism and victory into the country's youth through historical instruction. Today's history textbooks largely ignore America's military past, a reflection of the anti-military prejudices, lack of military experience, and cosmopolitanism that pervade the intelligentsia.

Most Americans outside of academia and the mainstream press, on the other hand, still understand the importance of military tradition, and they crave stories about valorous Americans at war.

The Sun's prominent Manhattan competitor inadvertently beclowned themselves when they wrote this on the same topic in 2005.

Update: Very much related thoughts from Daniel Henninger.

Rejoice, sinner! "Carbon atonement is no longer the exclusive preserve of the Malibu set -- with the Iowahawk EcoPals Network!"

Related (and less satiric) thoughts here. Meanwhile, Don Surber writes:

After reading the Editorialist’s coverage at the Washington Post of Al Gore’s overuse of electricity, I don’t want to hear about Republican hypocrisy ever again.

If Al Gore were a Republican, the story of his consuming 20 times the national average while lecturing the rest of us on cutting back on our energy use would be front page news from coast-to-coast. Late-nite comedians would have a field day. The editorial pages would puff up about Republican hypocrisy.

Instead we get excuses, excuses, excuses. . . .

As a proud member of the mainstream media, let me suggest that this double-standard — this refusal to hold Al Gore accountable for his actions which are contradictory to his words — only feeds the belief that the media is biased in favor of liberals — particularly born-to-the-manor, overfed, limousine liberals who consume 22,000 kilowatts of electricity each year in just one of his three homes.

As the Professor responds, "Well, look at the kind of people who own newspapers . . ."

Elsewhere, a look at crushing of dissent.

Roger Simon asks, "Does Dick Morris know?":

I find Dick Morris fun to listen to - he's witty and willing to go out on a limb. But is he right when he says that John McCain's campaign has already imploded? The Arizona Senator never even made a dent on the PJM poll, but I thought that might have had to do with the fact our readership doesn't much care for McCain-Feingold. The general public, however, is unlikely to know what McCain-Feingold even is. And yet they seem to be rejecting McCain. This could be in the area of pure instinct. People react to candidates on a primitive level that transcends issues.

Also, as Morris notes, overexposure is a big danger. Even Obama may already be overexposed. The trick to winning this endless election will be not peaking too early. Either that, or getting so far ahead everybody else just gives up. These are the dual strategies in long-distance racing and seem to apply here.

Mickey Kaus extolls the virtues of last-in=last out accounting in a presidential race:

Smart Tony Blankley piece on how the Faster (and Earlier) election process actually hurts challengers, eroding their traditional advantages. (They get stale quickly, for example. And if they show the beef--policy proposals--there's lots and lots of time to pick those policies apart, or for them to be overtaken by events.) ... The obvious solution, Blankley notes--echoing Emailer X--is to jump into the race late. Advantage, Gingrich and Gore. ... Actually, maybe Blankley's logic suggests a solution for McCain: He could let his campaign collapse, drop out, lay low for a few months ... and then jump back in at the end. The Rosie Ruiz Strategy. There's plenty of time for it. ... (True, it didn't work for Gary Hart in 1988. But McCain wouldn't be withdrawing because of a character-questioning scandal. He'd be withdrawing because Giuliani seemed fresher and more appealing--at the moment. By December, if Blankley's right, it would be McCain who seems fresh.) ...

It didn't do much for Ross Perot in 1992, as I recall, either. Although his proto-Rosie Ruiz stategy involved a much shorter timeout, and was accompanied by ravings of covert Republican operatives harrassing his daughter in Area 51 or something like that.

Meanwhile, Rand Simberg ponders if the Clinton campaign "is unaware of the Internet. Well, they shouldn't be (anyone recall the name Matt Drudge?), but I think they continue to underestimate its power, again, as I've noted in the past".

Well, the former solicitor general did call a James Cameron in California:

So, tell us about your interest in the historical Jesus.

Um, I guess I'm interested in Jesus, yeah. Where did you say you were from, again?

Christianity Today magazine.

Are you selling subscriptions or something?

No, we want to talk about your documentary.

What?

The one about Jesus' tomb.

Um, yeah, I think you have the wrong guy. I think you want the other James Cameron.

You're not James Cameron?

No, I am, but not …

… And your wife's name is Suzy?

Susanna.

Right. We found your number online. We figured the chances of you not being the filmmaker James Cameron are, like, a jillion to one. And you live in California, so that pretty much clinches it.

Heh. In a related post, Ed Morrissey writes on "How Discovery Channel Lost Its Groove" by backing Cameron's documentary:

Archeology involves a level of speculation, but the true scientists make sure to minimize it as much as possible -- and this documentary amounts to nothing but speculation.

Who will bear the brunt of this fiasco? James Cameron will go on to make more big-budget Hollywood movies, unless he's dumb enough to make another Terminator sequel. Simcha Jacobovici will continue with his "Naked Archeology" series on History International, an entertaining but usually unconvincing half-hour of pop archeology that presaged this disaster. Discovery Channel, however, will take a hit to its reputation for serious science.

I think that actually began to happen when they crafted this channel.

Last week I linked to Hugh Hewitt and Newsbusters' negative impressions of PBS's "News War" Frontline miniseries; as conservatives, it's not at all surprising that they'd have a beef with a PBS show. But while Jeff Jarvis is much closer to the demographic that PBS targets, he's also not very much impressed with their efforts:

I just watched the third part of Frontline’s News War and found it utterly unsurprising and profoundly disappointing. It delivered the obvious narratives it wanted to deliver: a war between mainstream media and the rabble of citizen bloggers, a cultural and quality line between old media and new, and a moral battle between the business and editorial sides of the news business, as illustrated by its lionizing of deposed LA Times editors John Carroll and Dean Baquet and its demonizing of Tribune executive and now LA Times publisher David Hiller. I was part of it, briefly, to fulfill their blogger-v-MSM storyline; here is more of what I said to them. I remain disappointed that they didn’t investigate the future of journalism, the opportunities and possibilities. Instead, they played the themes we have heard again and again, as if on a Top 40 radio station: tsk-tsking the tackiness, fretting about the news that the big guys are sure we need, evil Wall Street, looney citizens. I could sit down and fisk, as we say, all its cheap shots and lazy analysis and incomplete reporting but, frankly, I don’t find it worth the effort.

Meanwhile, Bill O'Reilly tells his viewers "journalism in this country is at a low point":

And it comes right before one of the most important presidential elections in history.

Much of the mainstream media now invested in promoting ideology at the expense of providing honest information.

* * *

We in the press have been granted special privileges by the Constitution. Those privileges are now being abused by corrupt editors and TV executives.

If "The New York Times" and NBC News can explain why they didn't cover the ACLU debacle, I'd like to hear it. If not, all Americans should turn away from them.

But they won't of course--at least not in numbers that generate any immediate attention from the legacy media, whose reaction to its slow erosion of viewers and readers ranges from surprising sanguinity to utter cluelessness. Which is why I've been wondering what--if anything--will happen as a result of what's been bubbling up for the last six months or so in the Blogosphere.

Frontline, which bills itself as "India's National Magazine" has a piece that Drudge is currently linking to, titled "Dangerous denial", with the following subtitle:

If all the people of the world had the same living style as the average American, the holocaust would have already visited us.

Of course, when it came to the real Holocaust, the world's most celebrated Indian was the very personification of "Dangerous denial", as Richard Grenier wrote in Commentary in 1983 as a mammoth rebuttal to the even-more-mammoth biopic then making the rounds:

Since the movie's Madeleine Slade specifically invites us to revere the "way out of madness" that Gandhi offered the world at the time of World War II, I am under the embarrassing obligation of recording exactly what courses of action the Great Soul recommended to the various parties involved in that crisis. For Gandhi was never stinting in his advice. Indeed, the less he knew about a subject, the less he stinted.

I am aware that for many not privileged to have visited the former British Raj, the names Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Deccan are simply words. But other names, such as Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, somehow have a harder profile. The term "Jew," also, has a reasonably hard profile, and I feel all Jews sitting emotionally at the movie 'Gandhi' should be apprised of the advice that the Mahatma offered their coreligionists when faced with the Nazi peril: they should commit collective suicide. If only the Jews of Germany had the good sense to offer their throats willingly to the Nazi butchers' knives and throw themselves into the sea from cliffs they would arouse world public opinion, Gandhi was convinced, and their moral triumph would be remembered for "ages to come." If they would only pray for Hitler (as their throats were cut, presumably), they would leave a "rich heritage to mankind." Although Gandhi had known Jews from his earliest days in South Africa--where his three staunchest white supporters were Jews, every one--he disapproved of how rarely they loved their enemies. And he never repented of his recommendation of collective suicide. Even after the war, when the full extent of the Holocaust was revealed, Gandhi told Louis Fischer, one of his biographers, that the Jews died anyway, didn't they? They might as well have died significantly.

America's would-be modern day Gandhi has a long record of using ridiculously exaggerated Holocaust metaphors (a trait that has since been acquired by his acolytes) to breathlessly describe his pet cause, as Jonah Goldberg noted last year:

In his 1992 book “Earth in the Balance,” [Gore] wrote that “today the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin.” He repeatedly refers to the unfolding ecological holocaust” and invokes Martin Niemoller’s famous quote (“When the Nazis came for the Communists, I remained silent; I was not a Communist. ... When they came for the Jews, I did not speak out; I was not a Jew. ...”) to label himself and other environmentalists “the new resistance.”

In “An Inconvenient Truth” and in interviews, Gore sticks to his guns. He quotes Churchill’s warning about the gathering storm of fascism and declares: “The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequence.”

And yet, as Betsy Newmark wrote when she linked to Jonah's post, "if addressing the crisis of global warming demands the same diligence and dedication that fighting the Nazis demanded, why isn't Gore proposing similar sacrifices today to fight global warming?"

For a start, they should be out there denouncing the movie Cars for glorifying the weapons of mass destruction that cars are in this global crisis. They should be campaigning against NASCAR. But, of course, they won't be doing these things because it would be political suicide. So, now we know where they draw the line. They'll talk a good game, but they won't actually propose anything or say anything that would offend potential voters. As Goldberg writes:

Once you compare a problem to the Holocaust — even remotely — you’ve lost your moral wiggle room. No politician, indeed no responsible person in this country, would endorse a comedic cartoon about genocide, never mind take their children to it. Give PETA credit. While it repugnantly compares the raising of chickens and cattle to Auschwitz, the organization at least has the courage of its convictions, and protests virtually everything that treats animals as anything less than people.

Environmentalists like Gore who invoke the Holocaust are too afraid to follow through. They want all the credit for denouncing what they consider a moral horror, but they’re unwilling to actually face the real consequences of their rhetoric. I don’t believe global warming is akin to the Holocaust. But if I did, I’d like to think I’d have more courage about it than Gore is showing.

Coulter was right about Gore's Edwardian digs:

“I kind of respect him more, it shows he is not stupid enough to believe all this global warming nonsense. He’s trying to get us to believe. Okay, fine, he may be a hypocrite but at least he’s not a moron.”

It's an "Inconvenient Hypocrisy" as Bill Hobbs writes, via Glenn Reynolds.

Update: Perhaps the Goracle isn't Gandhi, but another icon immortalized on the big screen:

It’s great that he’s using solar panels and all that, but notice he’s not disputing how huge his electric bill still is. What the hell is he doing in there? Is he a Terminator from the future and requires constant recharging? (That would explain pretty much everything.)

I blame Cyberdyne Systems.

Dr. Helen asks, "Have you noticed how differently those who criticize non-PC issues such as gun rights are treated by the media as opposed to those who dare to make a PC blunder such as saying something politically incorrect about a minority?"

I'd say it's a variation on Amon's Law.

Tammy Bruce writes, "USA Today Declares Republicans Not Part of 'the Country'".

I guess this is what David Weston of ABC meant in November of 2004 when he said that the media needed to send more foreign correspondents into the Red States.

Hugh Hewitt writes:

The GOP base has a trust issue with McCain, one that flows from the 2000 campaign, McCain-Feingold, the Gang of 14, the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill, the September 2006 derailing of the Republican end-game strategy. McCain is fading, and not because of his age or energy level, but because the GOP electorate has to absolutely believe that the next president will be as committed to victory as Bush has been. Senator McCain's avoidance of new media has been reinforcing the impression that he is unwilling to provide the assurances he needs to in order to regain the trust he has repeatedly broken with the GOP electorate over the years. There is time to turn that around, but Senator McCain is not making the effort, an effort that would begin by a relentless courting of the base rather than the Hardball/Meet The Press audience. Every week that Senator McCain delays launching that effort is a week in which the mayor and the governor gather more pledges and momentum. The big three could be the big two by Memorial Day.

No. There is another...

Meanwhile, Clay Waters looks at the New York Times' bad timing in light of today's assassination attempt on Cheney: "Today's NY Times Asks Why Is Cheney's Trip So Secretive?"

Update: John Hawkins shares his thoughts on the Democrats' current Big Three.

As Michelle Malkin writes, "We always hear 'Never forget.' But how many still remember anymore?" Lawhawk notes that yesterday was "the 14th anniversary of the first WTC bombing attack, which killed six and wounded more than 1,000 people". He has an update on where construction efforts to rebuild the WTC stand: "The Battle for Ground Zero, Part 219".

So says Ann Coulter about Al "Elmer Gantry" Gore. Glenn Reynolds writes:

Moralists are especially vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy -- ask any backsliding fundamentalist preacher. If Gore were less moralistic in his approach -- as he gains weight, he's even starting to look a bit like a younger Jerry Falwell -- the charges of hypocrisy would have less bite.

Roger L. Simon adds, "there's a deeper question beneath all this. Does hypocrisy count?"

Does it matter than Hollywood stars parade around in Priuses while keeping private planes and multiple homes that burn up who-knows-how much energy (in many cases enough to dwarf Al's)? Is it just that these people mouth off that raises our eyebrows or should they actually practice what they preach ?

Now I don't have a particularly Green Lifestyle, although I am thinking of buying a hybrid for my next car (primarily because I can't stand to stick another dollar in the Saudi gas pump) and the next time I build something I'll probably pay more attention to good window sealing (the code will probably make me do that anyway). But what's with Gore? How could he be so thoughtless and, yes, arrogant to go out there banging the drum for his film at the very time, according to public records, he increased his already sizable personal energy consumption. How embarrassing and how terrible for his cause. Maybe he doesn't really care about it at bottom - maybe it's all about him.

In the movie business you see a lot of that, a kind of narcissistic politics in which how you appear is so much more important than what you really are. It's as if there were two people - the private one bossing around the staffs while burning up more fuel than the Sultan of Brunei and the public one wagging a finger at the rest of us. Gore seems to have fit in well with these folks. In the long run, I suspect that doesn't augur well for the environment.

UPDATE: In Gore defense, the ex-veep apparently did purchase some "Green Power" chits for his manse. But I was just on the Steve Gill's Tennessee talk radio show where it was pointed out this is one of but three Gore homes - and no one seems to know how much time he even spends there. Plus... there's always the use of Gulfstreams, etc., to ferry Al to his next (well paid) global warming extravaganza. Who knows the total of his "carbon footprint" but it's probably bigger that 99.99% of humanity's. Still.. it's only hypocrisy. For the right cause, no problem. Right. Right?

Meanwhile, Tim Blair looks at a Hollywood celebrity who really does qualify for the latter half of Ann's equation. (Even if she did cause The Manolo to obtain the orgasm of the celebratory.)

Update: Welcome Tim Blair readers! Click here for even more Gore goring, as Al meets Gandhi, Jonah Goldberg, and even the Terminator.

Regarding the Oscars, Orrin Judd writes, "When we were kids everyone used to watch them--they used to celebrate the movies. Know anyone who still does now that they celebrate Hollywood's politics?"

Drudge has the early ratings:

ABC PULLS 27.4 RATING/42 SHARE IN EARLY OVERNIGHTS AT 'OSCARS'... MORE... IF NUMBERS HOLD, WOULD BE 3RD LEAST- WATCHED OSCARS, JOINING LOW 2006, 2003... MORE...

In 2006, Hollywood switched from a mass industry serving the public to a niche market for blue/green activists. It invented a strategy that junks the Red States. But every year flyover country gets to remind Hollywood that the loss is reciprocal, at least for one Sunday.

If the Drudge numbers are correct, at some point in the future, just as C-SPAN covers the bulk of national political conventions, watch for the Oscars to move up the dial, out of the over-the-air networks and into the realm of cable. Maybe E! or HBO could host them. Or Current TV.

Related:

Survey shows high ticket prices and poor film selections causing some to think twice about heading out to catch the latest blockbuster.

Do tell!

A theater owner in Spain has one solution; its arrival seems inevitable in the US.

Update: Outside The Beltway agrees:

Gore joins a growing line of liberal political activists to win major awards in recent years: The Dixie Chicks, Michael Moore, and Hillary Clinton come readily to mind in the “arts.” Then there’s Jimmy Carter and virtually every other recent winner of the Nobel Peace prize.

One wonders how long these awards will retain their credibility? It’s bad enough that actors and directors often win awards for mediocre late-career performances as a make-up for being snubbed for more deserving work over the years. But to so overtly use these awards to send a political message can’t sit that well with the majority of the country to whom that message is being sent.

Exactly.

(Via Jules Crittenden.)

Meanwhile, Libertas notes an inconvenient omission.

Nikki Finke: "In summary, it was the night that the Academy finally killed off what used to be its show-stopper of a movie awards":

By my calculations, Gore needs to reimburse the Academy and ABC for close to $3 million for this night's free and over-the-top political advertising. Just send the check directly to Obama, Al, since I know you and Tipper can't stand Bill and Hillary. By trying not to be controversial, Ellen delivered a truly forgettable performance. And that's far worse than being Chris Rock- or Jon Stewart-type awful.

* * *

Does the Academy realize they've got four hours-plus to remind audiences around the world that going to the movies is fun and not a chore like sitting through this show?

* * *

Exactly whose idea was it to let Jerry insult the theater owners who already are going out of business because of the lousy films Hollywood produces? What, you guys have a death wish?

Like I said...

In addition to Your Humble Narrator's interviews with Austin Bay and Adam Bellow, this week's Blog Week In Review podcast has hidden within it breaking news--The Manolo's first publication is due in March from Pamphleteer Press.

When William Goldman said,"Every Oscar night you look back and realize that last year was the worst year in the history of Hollywood", he probably had screenwriting on his mind, but Hollywood's songwriting isn't exactly going great guns either these days, as Mark Steyn notes:

What do these five songs have in common?

“The Way You Look Tonight”, “Thanks For The Memory”, “Over The Rainbow”, “When You Wish Upon A Star” and “White Christmas”.

Answer: They were all Academy Award-winning songs from the Best Song Oscar’s first decade.

And what do these five songs have in common?

“When You Believe”, “You’ll Be In My Heart”, “Into The West”, “Al Otro Lado del Rio” and “It”s Hard Out Here For A Pimp”.

Answer: They were all Academy Award-winning songs from the last decade.

Norma Desmond didn't know the half of it.

CBS does, as Reuters notes:

CBS Corp. will invest in virtual world content developer Electric Sheep Co., the U.S. television broadcaster said on Monday. hoping to expand its reach beyond the living room.

CBS will participate in a $7 million round of financing, which includes existing investors Gladwyne Partners.

Electric Sheep develops 3-D properties in virtual worlds like Second Life, an online society that allows players to create characters that exist in a world they help create.

"We believe that all these virtual worlds represent next generation communications platforms," CBS Interactive President Quincy Smith said in a phone interview last week.

Corporate interest in tapping virtual worlds to market brands and products have surged in recent months as marketers test new technologies to reach consumers who now split their leisure TV-viewing time with the Internet.

Electric Sheep, consultants and designers of properties in 3-dimensional virtual worlds such as Linden Lab's Second Life, have accumulated a portfolio of Fortune 500 clients that include Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, General Electric's NBC and Viacom Inc..

Reuters Group Plc is an Electric Sheep client.

Of course. How could they not be?

In between unctuous praise of "larger than life" Al Gore (and given his industry's collective backing of the man and his religious convictions, how could he do otherwise?) Tom Shales, The Washington Post's longtime liberal TV critic, absolutely buries this year's Oscars.

Rather ironic, considering that Shales has the exact politics that the film industry aims its product towards.

Update: Bipartisan consensus reached.

"I appeal to my colleagues in Congress to step back and think carefully about what to do next".

27 years too late, but Martin Scorsese finally cops an Oscar for best director and best picture, and Thelma Schoonmaker for best editor.

When I clicked on the IMDB page for Scorsese's next project, I thought jokingly, "Of course! He'll get Leonardo DiCaprio to star as the title subject".

Once again, Muggeridge's Law comes through, and I'm sure the actual picture will be a hoot.

Incidentally, the choice of a director's alter ego speaks volumes: Hitchcock had Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart. Scorsese has Leonardo DiCaprio, and seems as wedded to him these days as he was to Robert De Niro in both men's glory days.

"8:47 - At least Altman went quick unlike his films".

Gee, I don't know--he died annually at the box office since about 1971.

The Internet Movie Database is keeping a running tally of who's winning what on its homepage, if you're skipping the show like most Americans.

This just in: CBS cooks the books at Sixty Minutes. That's never happened before!

Hopefully Reuters, The New York Times, CNN, Newsweek, and Associated Press will combine forces to launch a full investigation.

As I said earlier today, I bet they’ve gone back to sleep in New York. I bet they’re back to sleep all across America.

Reuters has an interesting piece on Esmee Denters, an 18-year old resident of Oosterbeck, who's become the Dutch "It Girl" of YouTube:

Nearly 20,000 fans have subscribed to her YouTube channel to receive automatic updates, with about 200 added a day, putting her at No. 22 on the all-time most-popular list.

Denters has since traveled to the United States and met a veritable who's who of the music industry's leading executives, from Jason Flom to Antonio "L.A." Reid to Tommy Motolla. She has recorded demo tracks with Kelly Rowland and is fielding TV deals with Sony Pictures Entertainment.

As Reuters notes, "The obvious logical next step, then, is a record label deal, right? Not so fast":

"We may decide not to get together with a label," Denters said via phone, waiting for a flight from Los Angeles to New York for another round of meetings and recording sessions. "We may try new stuff. I've already accomplished so much on my own, we'd like to see what we can do with that."

Artists like Denters, emerging from the realm of user-generated media, have learned to tap the viral power of the Internet to do what acts a generation ago could only dream of -- build a grassroots following numbering in the thousands at very little cost or effort.

But being talented and building a fan base is only part of the equation. Artists who decide to go it alone must bear the full financial weight of the various aspects of a music career -- recording and production fees, distribution costs, marketing and promotion expenses and more.

These costs are falling in the digital age. Recording and production fees can be extraordinarily cheap, depending on the level of sophistication desired. Tech-savvy artists can further cut costs with a good laptop and ProTools.

Distribution can be done digitally through such firms as the Orchard or INgrooves, which take a flat percentage of each sale for their efforts. Physical sales can be handled by CD Baby at $4 a pop. There are a gaggle of online services designed to host commerce and promotional sites for unsigned acts as part of a "music social network," most notably PureVolume and Sellaband.com. Companies like Musictoday can serve as a one-stop shop for artists for Web site hosting and design, digital downloads, concert ticket sales, CD replication, fan club management, and merchandise sales and fulfillment.

For licensing, digital services like Rumblefish, PumpAudio and even some digital distribution firms like the Orchard promote their clients' work to advertising firms and film producers and charge only a percentage of the licensing fee in return. And since they've taken no recoupable advance, these artists get to keep all the proceeds.

In a TCS Daily piece back in 2003, I explored the war between Hollywood and Silicon Valley, particularly in the music industry, where so much can be done by a talented DIY-artist. These days, all of the technology visible here in Peter Gabriel's 1980-era studio easily fits into a PC with a good high-end sound card.

Because it's so much harder to achieve great visuals rather than great sounds, it will be a while before things level out in the movie industry. But fortunately, Hollywood's doing an excellent job of lowering their own standards, while technology on the grass roots level continues to become more and more powerful.

Update: NRO's Peter Suderman looks at American Film Renaissance, one attempt to level the playing field. It's a very good piece, but I'm not sure if I entirely agree with him when he writes:

Hollywood rarely markets its movies as explicitly “liberal films,” and, as the pageantry of the Oscars shows, the films themselves can be almost an afterthought. No, the movie industry may consistently pull the lever for the bluest of the blue state candidates, but the color it cares for most is green.

But only to a certain point.

As Allahpundit writes:

Tonight’s the night Hollywood takes a break from disclaiming responsibility for any of the culture’s ills to congratulate itself for having so much influence over the culture.

At 5:30 PM PST, the Libertas film blog will commence live blogging the Oscars; Hot Air has already launched their Oscars open thread, as has Tim Blair. And I can certainly sympathize with Allah who notes, "I haven’t seen a single movie on the long list of nominees so I couldn’t care less who wins".

Neither have I; and as recently as five years ago, I never thought I'd be saying that. That's always the risk of progressive politics: sometimes you progress so far in your search for Heaven-on-Earth, you alienate all of those you've left behind.

How bad has it become? Even Newsweek is complaining about the sucktacular level of Tinseltown's current product, but that should come as no surprise to our regular readers.

(Oh, and speaking of sucktacular, here's an oldie-but-a-goodie that has to be seen to be believed. Or not.)

So no live blogging here, but watch for updates from time to time, particularly if and when beclowning and becrowning occur to this prominent religious figure.

Update: Anytime--say hi to Mannix for me! (Scroll to 5:47.)

Gee, what a shock--Tim McGirk, the Jerusalem bureau chief for Time magazine writes:

Brace yourself. James Cameron, the man who brought you ‘The Titanic’ is back with another blockbuster. This time, the ship he’s sinking is Christianity.

As the Anchoress wrote this week, "We must be getting close to Easter" for these types of stories to start appearing.

Salman Rushdie could not be reached for comment.

Update: Much more from Bryan Preston.

Another Update: "So much for claiming there’s no war on Christianity. It’s been declared. War rages on".

Too bad newspapers won't explore the subject. They'd actually boost sales if they awoke from their Victorian slumber and quoted some of the players.

Most people believe the truth. But one fourth of the population is retarded. If they wanna believe we control everything with intricate plans, why not let them?

"Fidel I love you. We both have the same initials. We are both powerful men. And we both use our power for good."--Francis Ford Coppola.

Actually, they both use their power to substantially increase their own personal net worths. Except Coppola makes his by putting guns in his actors' hands, not in your back.

And of course, Coppola is far from the only person in Hollywood who loves Fidel.

(Via Maggie's Farm.)

In his Sunday Chicago Sun-Times column, Mark Steyn compares the zeitgeist of 9/19/1881 to five and a half years after 9/11/2001:

It's now accepted that Garfield died simply because of the amount of poking and prodding the doctors did with unsterilized instruments and grubby hands. Joseph Lister's ideas on antisepsis had become standard in Britain but not yet in the United States. Within three years of Garfield's death, Dr. William S. Hallsted opened America's first modern operating room at Bellevue: Today, if you suffered the president's wounds, you'd be home in three days. The metal detectors developed by Bell's successors are being used by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and air conditioning is a transformative technology: Look at the fastest growing region of the United States -- the so-called Sun Belt -- and imagine its growth without the cooled buildings that keep the sun at bay.

America is now five years on from an even more extraordinary event. How have the private and public sectors responded? With longer lines at the airport and the cutting-edge technological innovation of making you bend down and remove your shoes (and even your gel-filled bra) while bored officials wander up the line barking incomprehensible lists of prohibited fluids: that would be a state-of-the-art system for boarding the Mayflower. The government failures of 9/11? They've taken the Department of Bureaucratic Timeservers and renamed it the Agency of Homeland Patriotic Vigilance: same great service, new hat. The continuing torpor of State, the dysfunctions of the CIA are unthreatened by anything beyond the merest cosmetic reform. Minor border security changes such as requiring passports for travel to and from Mexico, Canada and the Caribbean take the best part of a decade to introduce; meaningful border security is scheduled for mid-century, though they won't say which one; as for support from the private sector, the Border Patrol's mission -- "prevent the entry of terrorists and their weapons into the United States" -- is so offensive that the NFL banned them from advertising in the Super Bowl program. "The ad that the department submitted was specific to Border Patrol, and it mentioned terrorism,'' NFL spokesman Greg Aiello told the Washington Times. ''We were not comfortable with that.''

When my book came out, arguing that the current conflict is about demographic decline, civilizational will and globalized pathologies, a lot of folks objected, as well they might: seeing off supple amorphous abstract nouns is not something advanced societies do well. You're looking at it the wrong way, I was told. Technocratic solutions, new inventions, the old can-do spirit: That's the American way, and that's what will see us through.

Well, OK, so where is it? The glamor boys of the moment -- Obama, Edwards -- run on watery pabulum from the easy-listening oldies playlist. Five years after 9/11, we're not looking ahead, we're looking back -- in the legislature, in the courts, in the media: Bush's "lies" about WMD, the Senate vote to authorize the "use of force" against Iraq, Joe Wilson's trip to Niger, Joe Wilson's self-leaking of his mischaracterization of his trip to Niger . . . rear-view mirror stuff, all of it, endlessly. On the dark shapes looming in the windshield -- Iran, Sudan and much else -- we operate ineffectually through yesterday's institutions, like the U.N. and the EU. Two billion dollars from American taxpayers go to the government of Egypt and in return they give Hezbollah's TV network a slot on the state satellite system. At the gas pump, we fund Hugo Chavez and the Saudi radicalization of Muslim populations around the planet. The obvious transformative technology -- an alternative to the global economy's oil dependence -- is as far away as it was on Sept. 10, and the Alexander Graham Bells of our day are busy inventing the ''self-repairing condom'' -- a marvel of nanotechnology to be sure, but not one with much strategic use unless you can supersize it and unroll it down every Wahhabi mosque.

Measure 9/11, 2001, against 9/19, 1881, and you will recognize the outpouring of grief -- ''The Sobbing Of The Bells.'' But in our time urgency and innovation are strangely absent: To modify Whitman, the slumberers decline to be roused.

To paraphrase just slightly an expatriate American saloon keeper at the start of December 1941, I bet they’ve gone back to sleep in New York. I bet they’re back to sleep all across America.

"Duct-Tape, Tranquilizers Part Of NASA's Plan For Mentally Unstable Astronauts In Space".

Yet another potentially hot story that the Victorian Gentleman won't be digging into anytime soon.

Jaron Lanier writes:

My Wikipedia entry identifies me (at least this week) as a film director. It is true I made one experimental short film about a decade and a half ago. The concept was awful: I tried to imagine what Maya Deren would have done with morphing. It was shown once at a film festival and was never distributed and I would be most comfortable if no one ever sees it again.

In the real world it is easy to not direct films. I have attempted to retire from directing films in the alternative universe that is the Wikipedia a number of times, but somebody always overrules me. Every time my Wikipedia entry is corrected, within a day I'm turned into a film director again. I can think of no more suitable punishment than making these determined Wikipedia goblins actually watch my one small old movie.

At least what Lanier is going through with Wikipedia is better than the off-and-on update that Beach Boy Mike Love's Wiki page seems to be undergoing at the moment. (After writing this post, I've checked Love's Wikipedia profile a few times this week. The A-word seems to appear and disappear quite frequently.)

(Via Charles Johnson, who spots further examples of what Lanier calls "Digital Maoism".)

It's Radio Free Ed! I'm turning the tables and hosting Blog Week In Review this week, interviewing Austin Bay and Adam Bellow. Tune in here.

As I wrote last month:

Remember when Arnold Schwarzenegger seemed like the opposite of Gray Davis? That was a long, long time ago. As was his speech at the 2004 GOP presidential convention, in which he claimed that in 1968 he was listening to Hubert Humphrey's Great Society-style proposals shortly after arriving in the US:

Everything about America seemed so big to me, so open, so possible.

I finally arrived here in 1968. What a special day it was. I remember I arrived here with empty pockets but full of dreams, full of determination, full of desire.

The presidential campaign was in full swing. I remember watching the Nixon-Humphrey presidential race on TV. A friend of mine who spoke German and English translated for me. I heard Humphrey saying things that sounded like socialism, which I had just left.

SCHWARZENEGGER: But then I heard Nixon speak. Then I heard Nixon speak. He was talking about free enterprise, getting the government off your back, lowering the taxes and strengthening the military.

(APPLAUSE)

Listening to Nixon speak sounded more like a breath of fresh air.

I said to my friend, I said, "What party is he?"

My friend said, "He's a Republican."

I said, "Then I am a Republican."

A recent post on the Politico.com site describes the Governator thusly:

Schwarzenegger, a Republican who favors abortion rights, stem-cell research, gay rights and gun control, will give a speech at the National Press Club on Monday stressing the importance of centrism in American politics.

The irony is, Arnold's positions on most issues would be to the left of so many of the '68-era Humphrey.

Mark Steyn is spot-on, as always:

If you want to know why American newspapers are dying, plough through this Boston Globe snoozefest on political blogging until you get to this paragraph:

Meanwhile, most presidential campaigns have hired consultants to promote their candidates to bloggers. One candidate, former North Carolina Senator John Edwards, came under attack for allegedly insensitive statements that had been made by two bloggers he hired. They eventually resigned.

"Allegedly insensitive"? You’re referring to two foul-mouthed gals who call Christians "Godbags" and do semen gags about the Virgin Mary and sneer at stillbirths, and all you can say about it is "came under attack for allegedly insensitive statements"? That’s not the story, that’s the sound of the genteel Victorian matron discreetly draping chintz over the provocative piano legs of the story***.

Why would anyone pay money for anything so wan, weedy, wimpy, and washed-out? As long as major newspapers think this kind of prissy evasion is "good journalism", they’ll continue to bleed readers. Because no-one who enjoys reading can read sentences like that, and no-one you’re trying to convert will think it’s a pleasure worth acquiring.

(***Those piano-leg covering matrons are only apocryphal, unlike the "allegedly insensitive statements", which are plastered all over the Internet.)

Last year, I dusted off Tom Wolfe's Victorian Gentleman analogy to describe today's newspapers, so needless to say, other than the choice of analogical gender, I concur with Steyn's bleak assessment of modern American newspapers.

And for the very reasons the above story on Edwards' bloggers was diluted down to meaningless treacle, I wouldn't expect much coverage of this news item either, despite--maybe because of--its potential blockbuster implications.

Remember this 1993 AT&T commercial narrated by Tom Selleck? Pretty amusing to watch it again today and realize that all of the gee-whiz technology in the ad is either here now already, or particularly in the case of the clunky looking PDA/tablet computer with an AM-style telescoping antenna sending (oooooh) faxes from the beach in the last shot, already obsolete:

(Not sure which, if any, of these technologies were actually brought to us exclusively by AT&T itself, but still, it was a stylish look at the minor wonders of the near future.)

The proverbial picture that's worth a thousand words--and a trillion or so dollars.

In other news from the world of pop culture flotsam and jetsam, Kathleen Parker has an interesting take on last week's stereo trainwrecks. "Between hourly updates on the decomposing body of Anna Nicole Smith and the balding of Britney Spears, we can confidently declare that the Jerry Springerization of America is complete". (Indeed, when you add to them this element of the triptych):

At the same time we might recoil from these prurient displays, we're also involuntarily mesmerized. The human wrecks of Britney and Anna Nicole transcend the usual roadkill metaphor, however, because we're participants -- not just spectators, but also instigators.

We are the mirrors to their vanities.

For former child stars like Britney, who didn't get to develop a normal sense of self, identity comes from what is projected by the audience. What happens when the projection stops, or when it shifts from admiring to critical?

If you're Britney, apparently, you take out the shears and turn the rage on yourself.

Anna Nicole, who was without talent except the ability to attract our attention, existed only as an object. She posed; we ogled. But what happens when no one's looking? If you're Anna Nicole, apparently, you take more drugs and make a spectacle of yourself as a slurring, stumbling bimbo with her own reality TV show.

The parallel sagas of these two sad divas -- one dead and one self-destructing -- have the feel of reality TV that has spiraled out of control. Too much exposure. Too much celebrity. Too much attention -- if never enough.

The desperation that drove them both to extremes, and then to the brink, may have been born of the truth that reveals itself to all celebrities eventually: What the public giveth, the public also taketh away.

As William Conrad once stentorianly exclaimed over the images of Iron Eyes Cody, the great wooden non-Indian, "People start pollution; people can stop it". We project our cultural obsession with human disaster zones such as Britney and Anna Nicole infinitely into the future, but that doesn't have to be the case.