He's two cult Web memes in one--but is Domo an XP or Vista kind of guy?

Mary Mapes, the woman who brought you RatherGate, wrote yesterday at the Huffington Post:

Americans aren't responding to the old plays -- the fake fears, the faux outrage, the conservatives who yell "Communist" at the news cameras, the pompous right-wing bloggers who once held such sway. I know all too well how scary and effective these old tactics were in 2004. Today, they are toothless. Ha, ha. Nothing makes me happier than seeing once swaggering players like Powerline, Free Republic and Little Green Footballs forced onto the sidelines, left to limply watch this campaign pass by like a parade in which they play no meaningful part. They just don't matter anymore.

Mapes' post is titled, "The Monster is Dying"--so "conservatives who yell 'Communist' at the news cameras" are declasse, but attacking conservatives as a monolithic "monster" on a Weblog is reasoned nuance journalism. Charles Krauthammer, call your office!

But behind each of those "monsters" was at least one person who in one form another said, "I don't know how many people will actually listen, but why shouldn't my voice be heard as well?" (Just as the founder of the Huffington Post presumably said as well at some point.) Much like a certain Ohio tradesman with entrepreneurial dreams who is now called "the now infamous Joe the plumber," on over 500 Webpages. Or as another journalist with the same initials as Mary Mapes wrote today:

So much for the Standing Up for the Little Man, so much for Speaking Truth to Power, so much for Comforting the Afflicting and Afflicting the Comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.

And calling one half of the Blogosphere "toothless" because their presidential candidate isn't an effective purveyor of the same message as they are seems awfully disingenuous to the other side--I don't think the bloggers at, say, the Daily Kos would take kindly at being called, by extension, toothless in 2004 because John Kerry was such a feckless candidate. It also fails to take into consideration that pundits supporting the out-of-party are able to go on the rhetorical offense, something that the right-hand of the Blogosphere will likely have ample opportunity to do so over the next four years.

But if indeed "The Monster is Dying", what a run! In September of 2005, a year after RatherGate broke, Mapes admitted that she had never heard of any of the blogs that she quotes above, even as she was a working TV producer at a corporation which billed itself at the time as "America's Most Watched Network", and hence, presumably, had her pulse on the nation's political scene:

Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Web sites I had never heard of before: Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, Power Line. They were hard-core, politically angry, hyperconservative sites loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS. Our work was being compared to that of Jayson Blair, the discredited New York Times reporter who had fabricated and plagiarized stories.

And accurately so, of course.

But hey, from cat food eating pajama-wearing navel gazers to a journalistic "monster" in the space of seven years after 9/11 is a pretty amazing growth cycle--and something tells me that the starboard side of the Blogosphere isn't going away anytime soon, no matter how much Mary wishes it were so, and no matter what the outcome on November 4th.

Young'ins today (or younglings, for you Revenge of the Sith geeks) just don't know what it was like back in the old days, when we had to walk five miles in the snow just to snail-mail out our query letters hoping to impress an editor high atop a far off office tower to maybe--just maybe--publish our wares. Of course, "the old days" means as late as about 2002, so I can absolutely vouch for what Robert Stacy McCain writes here:

Politically, Andrew Sullivan is erratic, and his attacks on Sarah Palin have been wildly irresponsible, but in two sentences of his latest article for The Atlantic Monthly, Sullivan makes a huge point:

If you added up the time a writer once had to spend finding an outlet, impressing editors, sucking up to proprietors, and proofreading edits, you'd find another lifetime buried in the interstices. But with one click of the Publish Now button, all these troubles evaporated.

Younger people -- i.e., those under 35, who have started their careers since the online explosion of the mid-1990s -- have no appreciation for how instantaneous Internet communication has transformed the world of the professional writer, of which blogging is the ultimate example.

I'm 49 and Sullivan's 44, so we both began our careers when there were no Web sites, when the Internet was something known only to academics and technogeeks, when editorial "gatekeepers" stood squarely between the writer and the reader, and when the only way to gain access to mass readership was to present yourself and your work to these gatekeepers, in person or via mail (I would say "snail mail," but that term did not exist).

Of course, Sullivan started his career at a much higher level -- I used to read his articles in the New Republic when I was a staffer at the Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune -- but in recalling the limitations of journalism in the pre-Internet age, he echoes my own memory.

Applying for a staff position, you would "send clips and resume" or, if you were a freelancer, mail out manuscripts in hope of finding a publisher. It required the commitment of an enormous amount of time and energy, with a lot of time spent waiting for replies, if any. Mail out a clips-and-resume package on Monday, which might be delivered to the editor on Thursday or Friday, and if you were lucky you might get a phone call the next week.

On my desk is a book, The Proud Highway, a collection of Hunter S. Thompson's letters from 1955-67. Reading it, you get some sense of the difficulties a writer faced seeking assignments in the Bad Old Days. The young Thompson was a genius (and arrogantly aware of it), but had to spend an enormous amount of time pitching articles to editors, at a time when that meant typing letters on a manual typewriter, and most of the time getting rejected.

All this tended to limit a writer's career mobility. If you got a staff position, you tended to stay wherever you were and work your way up (rather than hop from job to job, as many young journalists do now) since the process of applying for jobs was so laborious. And once a freelancer found an editor who'd publish one of his articles, he would keep pitching that editor, trying to establish a regular outlet for his work. For example, Thompson regularly freelanced for the National Observer, and when he sold a feature to the national men's magazine Rogue in 1961, he kept pitching them for future assignments (without luck).

Though I'm not sure, as Robert writes above, that "blogging is the ultimate example"--or at least text blogging. Because the Internet has also opened up podcasting and video blogging, allowing anyone to do his own one-man radio or TV show, in addition to traditional text-based journalism. It goes without saying that not everyone will alchemically fill those vessels with brilliantly transcendent content (just poke around YouTube for 30 seconds or so)--but the platforms are readily available to virtually anyone. Which is why those with aspirations of becoming the next fill in the name of your favorite superstar pundit here are well advised to read the whole thing.

Viva Las Vegas, baby!

Nina and I are in town for Blog World, which kicks off on Friday. If the concentrated geekery of the event wasn't enough, we'll have this to contend with as well:

It's International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Sure, an' you'll be tellin' yar fav'rite piratical japes, now? Such as:

Which Texas politician is the pirate's favorite: Dick ARRRRRRRmey. Which Pixarrrrr movie is the pirate's choice? RRRRRratatouille. (Wrong! It's CARRRRRRrrrrs.) Some people find this day tiresome. I find it delightful.

To honor the occasion, it's too bad they're not holding the convention here, instead.

Glenn Reynolds links to this Wired item on a World of Warcraft terror plot.

Has anybody accounted for Leeroy Jenkins' whereabouts during this period?

In that Orwellian L.A. Times sense of the word, of course.

Last night, when I was wading through background material about John Edwards for my interview today with Mickey Kaus for this week's PJM Political on XM Satellite Radio, I noticed something odd about Edwards' Wikipedia profile--there's no mention of a rather high-profile scandal that's orbiting directly above him, which seems pretty odd; Wikipedia pages are rather notorious for often being the first to be updated when news or a scandal breaks. And they definitely have news of Bob Novak's health scare, which broke earlier today. And today, instead of silence, there's this at the top of Edwards' profile there.

So why the Edwards embargo?

(Oh--did I mention I'm interviewing Kaus on Edwards this week? Tune in here on Wednesday; it will be more informative than this interview, I assure you.)

Jeff Jarvis spots an interesting stat:

Pew said that in 2007, 53 million Americans “have used the Internet to publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files and otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online.”

Only 50 million Americans now buy daily newspapers.

The writers are starting to outnumber the readers.

And the readers are reading something else. Pew says that in 2006, 57 million Americans read blogs, more than read newspapers.

More signposts on the road to 2014.

This is a riot:

"Three guys in a garage create YouTube, and we've got 800 people in Chicago who don't know their ass from a hole in the ground!"

Sam Zell, owner of the Tribune Company, which publishes the Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, Newsday, The Baltimore Sun, and other Jurassic-era publications your grandmother still reads because the thought of turning on a computer makes her knees shake.

The NPR article on Zell also includes a subhead titled, "Journalists as 'Overhead'". Which illustrates that the author can't comprehend that unlike a government-subsidized operation, the owner can't force taxpayers to bail him out if readers aren't footing the bill:

"This is the first unit of Tribune that I've talked to that doesn't generate any revenue. So all of you are overhead," Zell said during the late February meeting with editors and reporters for the company's Washington bureau.

Most reporters and editors who cover the government don't consider themselves overhead — they describe themselves as fulfilling a key role newspapers play in a democratic society.

No, reporting the news is a key function in a democratic society. But the medium in which consumers receive that news is subject to change, as other dinosaur media conglomerates are discovering the hard way.

And as that YouTube allusion from Zell highlights, news isn't exclusively a top-down business anymore.

Related: "Will there always be print newspapers? The editor of The Washington Post said he thought so, though others might think he's in denial:

In November 2007, former “NBC Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw predicted the print edition of The Washington Post would “probably” be dead in 10 years. But Downie disagreed.

“I can’t see that,” Downie said. “Obviously I’m of an age where I can’t see so far out into the future, but I can’t see that.

Arthur C. Clarke could...41 years ago:

Newspapers will, I think, receive their final body blow from these new communications techniques. I take a dim view of staggering home every Sunday with five pounds of wood pulp on my arm, when what I really want is information, not wastepaper. How I look forward to the day when I can press a button and get any type of news, editorials, book and theater reviews, etc., merely by dialing the right channel.

Electronic “mail” delivery is another exciting prospect of the very near future. Letters, typed or written on special forms like wartime V—mail, will be automatically read and flashed from continent to continent and reproduced at receiving stations within a few minutes of transmission.

Meanwhile, this rather less exploratory prediction from Downie is definitely a two-edged sword:

Mid-size market newspapers may be in trouble, according to Downie. The small community newspapers and the newspaper titans – like the Post and The New York Times – will in some part be immune to the evolution of media, as it makes it way in a digital age.

Yes, it seems quite reasonable to assume that the Times will be immune to the evolution of news--that was one of the predictions made in this classic multimedia presentation beamed back from 2014.

"IDC said in 2007, the digital universe equaled 281 billion gigabytes of data, or about 45 gigabytes for every person on Earth."

45 gigs? Somebody's clearly not trying. Between DIY music, podcasts, radio shows and lately video, I've gotten to the point where this looks nigh-essential.

(Via the Bettie Page fans--and consequently, note presence of NSFW photo--at Liberty Peak Lodge.)

...At the thought that the Tex & Edna Boil of the DIY video world can put you--yes, you!--into an online video!

(Via The B-Cast. This has to be what the British euphemistically refer to as a piss-take, and one of the commenters at Gawker also picked up on the Tex & Edna vibe. Otherwise, something tells me that I won't be writing about these folks for Videomaker any time soon.)

(Bumped to top--Ed)

In between the audio work for the weekly XM show, here's a short video I shot on the joys of green screen and DIY video, and the groundwork that's being laid for the eventual successors to the stodgy old network news:

For some background, tips on getting started, and links to the individual clips embedded in the video, there's an accompanying Blogcritics article as well.

And if you missed our previous Silicon Graffiti video (focusing on Ezra Levant and the now infamous Alberta Human Rights Commission), just click here.

This Washington Post columnist pines for the Good Ole Days, as he mournfully writes, "Does the News Matter To Anyone Anymore?"

Isn't the news itself still valuable to anyone? In any format, through any medium -- isn't an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity? Or were we kidding ourselves? Was a newspaper a viable entity only so long as it had classifieds, comics and the latest sports scores?

It's hard to say that, even harder to think it. By that premise, what all of us pretended to regard as a viable commodity -- indeed, as the source of all that was purposeful and heroic -- was, in fact, an intellectual vanity.

Newsprint itself is an anachronism. But was there a moment before the deluge of the Internet when news organizations might have better protected themselves and their product? When they might have -- as one, industry-wide -- declared that their online advertising would be profitable, that their Web sites would, in fact, charge for providing a rare and worthy service?

And which, exactly, is the proper epitaph for the generation that entered newspapering at the very moment when the big-city dailies -- the fat morning papers, those that survived the shakeout of afternoon tabloids and other weak sisters -- seemed impervious, essential and ascendant? Were we the last craftsmen prepared for a horse-and-buggy world soon to prostrate itself before the god of internal combustion? Or were we assembly-line victims of the inert monopolists of early 1970s Detroit, who thought that Pacers and Gremlins and Chevy Vegas were response enough to Japanese and European automaking superiority?

Yes, to the last rhetorical question, of course.

The news matters to many people--but unlike the 1920s through the 1970s, the Washington Post and the New York Times alone aren't the news anymore. They're merely two aggregators of news, with a particular tone that appeals to establishment liberal sorts of readers. The angrier far left have the Daily Kos and other Netroots sites, and conservatives and libertarians, long badly served by the Post have Instapundit, Drudge, NRO, Townhall, Michelle Malkin, Little Green Footballs, Pajamas, etc. (And sports junkies have sites devoted exclusively to their interests, and the elderly still have television news, of course.)

For the most part, like the Post, all of these sites are packaging up AP, Reuters and UPI feeds, but like the Post, each group repackages that info with a tone and a slant that appeals to their particular demographic. The period in time that one big city newspaper was the source of news will be proven by history to have been a fairly brief one, roughly from the 1920s to about the early 1980s, when the first cable television news networks, and the first online news sources (such as CompuServe and The Source) arrived.

These days, to compete against an endlessly growing Long Tail of information, newspapers must be much leaner to survive than their monopoly period, as Alan D. Mutter writes:

The deteriorating economics of the industry were underscored for the third day in a row this week when publisher Brian Tierney told union representatives of the two Philadelphia dailies that their company will face “a dire situation” by summer if it he cannot cut operating costs by 10%, according to a Newspaper Guild press release.

The Philadelphia meeting was reported the day after Chris Harte, the publisher of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, issued a strikingly similar warning to his staff.

At each newspaper, the story was the same. Profits are being sapped to an unimaginable and alarming degree by rapidly declining advertising revenues and rising expenses for everything from newsprint to payroll.

Tightening cash flow is a particular problem for the Philadelphia, Minneapolis and Tribune Co. newspapers, because each company has been bought within the last two years with vast sums of borrowed money. As such, a great portion of the operating profit at each company is earmarked to pay interest and principal on the newly acquired debt.

Mutter writes, "Worst case, and no one is saying the worst case is upon us, some newspapers could go out of business. Then, where would we be?"

In terms of receiving global, political and sports news--and certainly opinion--no worse off, to be honest. And in terms of local news, hopefully leaner operations will rise up to replace the dinosaurs who never planned on the asteroid arriving.

Noel Sheppard of NewsBusters writes:

NewsBusters reported in December that Internet behemoth Google had a disclaimer cautioning readers that the website of conservative magazine the American Spectator "may harm your computer."

For some reason, this warning no longer exists.

This raises a couple of important questions:

Did the American Spectator do anything to its website that made it "safer?"

If not, did Google change its "harmful site" parameters, and, if so, why?

It raises another question--which Websites get stuck with this tag?

I noticed the same warning on the libertarian Tech Central Station Website (where I've been an off and on contributer since 2002), when I did a Google search to find Arnold Kling's "Folk Marxism" meme last May. Here's a screen capture from back then displaying that same "This site my harm your computer" warning above two separate TCS links.

After seeing that warning pop-up, I immediately sent the above screen capture to Nick Schulz, TCS's editor and publisher to let him know. The warning that Google slapped on TCS quickly went away, presumably after Nick or one of his associates got in touch with Google. And as Noel writes above, Google removed their warning on the American Spectator's site, again, presumably after a friendly email or twenty from the folks at AmSpec.

This could be something that one or two mischievous coders in the bowels of the Google cubicles are doing to goof off in-between World of Warcraft sessions. Or it could be some sort of virus or malware installed by someone not associated at all with Google, but designed to trigger Google's warning mechanisms, and thus steer traffic away from non-PC sites that might engender thoughtcrime. But the fact that it's hit at least two prominent libertarian, conservative, free-market, non-leftwing, whatever you want to call them sites is quite a remarkable coincidence, it seems.

Err, don't bet on it--at least in its current form:

IN 2006 EMI, the world's fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.

Meanwhile, over at Blogingheads.tv, Michael Hirschorn of VH-1 and Jon Fine of Business Week bemoan what they call "The last days of the rock star".

A fascinating subtext of their conversation is that both are unhappy over the media's continuing fragmentation, as the Long Tail grows longer. In Hirschorn's case, it's awfully ironic: In the decade before the World Wide Web began riding on top of the Internet in the early 1990s, cable television was the Long Tail of the 1980s, as narrowly-themed channels such as his own VH-1 began to demassify the Big Three television networks, ending their 35 year uncontested run.

Back in the mid-1970s, Jimmy Page told an interviewer that "I always thought the good thing about guitar was that they didn't teach it in school." In other words, for Page, and his fellow British guitarists growing up in the late 1950s, rock and roll and the blues were genres you had to be dedicated enough to learn on your own.

Found via Bloggingheads, David Brooks writes that "Miami" Steve Van Zandt, Bruce Springsteen's longtime rhythm guitarist (and eventually, owner of the Bada Bing Club) would like to see that changed:

It seems that whatever story I cover, people are anxious about fragmentation and longing for cohesion. This is the driving fear behind the inequality and immigration debates, behind worries of polarization and behind the entire Obama candidacy.

If you go to marketing conferences, you realize we really are in the era of the long tail. In any given industry, companies are dividing the marketplace into narrower and more segmented lifestyle niches.

Van Zandt has a way to counter all this, at least where music is concerned. He’s drawn up a high school music curriculum that tells American history through music. It would introduce students to Muddy Waters, the Mississippi Sheiks, Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers. [Gee, not Springsteen, as well?--Ed] He’s trying to use music to motivate and engage students, but most of all, he is trying to establish a canon, a common tradition that reminds students that they are inheritors of a long conversation.

And Van Zandt is doing something that is going to be increasingly necessary for foundations and civic groups. We live in an age in which the technological and commercial momentum drives fragmentation. It’s going to be necessary to set up countervailing forces — institutions that span social, class and ethnic lines.

Music used to do this. Not so much anymore.

Education used to do this as well. Not so much, anymore.

But back to the main point of Brooks and Miami Steve. Jazz was essentially frozen in amber as a creative force once Lincoln Center hired Wynton Marsalis to be its "Musical Director of Jazz." Miami Steve wants to do the same thing to rock. And it's not like education isn't already dominated by Present Tense Culture.

(Or, for another way to look at Brooks' column: this just into the New York Times: Pop culture is fractured and demassified, something that Alvin Toffler predicted 28 years ago.)

As Michelle Malkin writes:

The deterioration of journalism–from Janet Cooke to Stephen Glass to Scott Thomas Beauchamp to Staged News Galore to Rathergate to Reuters-gate to More Fake News Galore–isn’t the fault of individual MSM reporters, editors, or shoddy journalism schools.

Whose fault is it? The “dean of journalism” Helen Thomas blames bloggers. Damned bloggers!

Business and Media Institute quotes Thomas as saying:

“What I really worry about is that I think the bloggers and everyone, everyone with a laptop thinks they’re journalists,” Thomas said. “And, they certainly don’t have our standards. They don’t have our ethics, and so forth. There’s a deterioration,” she continued. “Reporters laid down on the job in the run up to this [the Iraq] war.”

* * *

“I think they did a lousy job and we’re making for it now because the questions that should have been asked were not asked and because of 9/11 and the fear of being called unpatriotic, un-American and so forth. We let the country down,” Thomas added.

So if it's all those darn bloggers that caused, as Helen put it, big journalism's "deterioration" back in 2002 and 2003, let's run the numbers and see how are bloggers are impacting its downhill slide today.

Back in early 2004, I estimated the number of bloggers in the US at around 7,300,000 for a Tech Central Station article. That's an impressive number, but less than four years later, my, how quickly the neighborhood has grown! These days, Technorati tracks--say it with me now in your best Dr. Evil voice--over one hundred million blogs. And with Blogospheric growth that exponentially powerful, just imagine how much more intense the suckage of old media is today, as opposed to just five years ago.

Actually, no need to imagine it. Just read their product.

Mickey Kaus has a must-read post that dovetails remarkably well with the Don Surber article I linked to earlier today. Don wrote that the Lewinsky scandal "turned journalism inside out"--and one of the eventual results has been the birth of two very divergent voter classes:

Room Eight's Jerry Skurnick has suggested that the electoarate is splitting into two diverging parts--people who follow politics and people who don't--with the people who follow politics much better informed than the were before (thanks to cable, web, etc.) and the people who don't follow politics less well informed (they used to get at least some information from Walter Cronkite). That certainly rings true to me. And it may, as Skurnick claims, explain some of the new volatility in polling--e.g., when the uninformed majority suddenly discovers, say, that Rudy Giuliani has been married three times.

But there's a second way to divide the electorate that asks how the voters inform themselves. Do they rely on the traditional Mainstream Media (MSM), or do they get their political information from the Web, from cable news, from the tabloids, etc. This division may have once seemed unimportant, but it doesn't anymore--its seriousness is suggested by the MSM's impressive resistance to stories bubbling up from the blogs and the tabs that don't meet MSM standards (putting aside whether you regard those standards as high or merely idiosyncratic). "Rielle Hunter"--the woman whom the National Enquirer alleges was John Edwards' mistress--was the top-searched name on the MSN site at one point Thursday, I'm told. Meanwhile, in the traditional mainstream press, 'Rielle Hunter" was mentioned only ... well, zero times.

Of the two ways to divide the electorate, the second is arguably more important. After all, even those who don't follow politics, will eventually inform themselves before the election.** But if the MSM/Web barrier remains as robust as it's been, those who inform themselves from the MSM will find out something different, when they finally tune in, than those who go to the Web and learn both the news and what might be called the "undernews." *** If you're thinking of voting as a Democrat in Iowa or New Hampshire, you might watch NBC and never know about this messy Rielle Hunter business. Or you might read DailyKos know the whole allegation plus the arguments against it plus seven theories about how it came to light. That knowledge might cause voters to vote against Edwards or to vote for him--but either way first they have to find out.

Likewise, TNR's Noam Scheiber suggests that the egghead sector ( "urban, college-educated liberals") of the Democratic party--which used to be less partisan and combative than the blue-collar/labor sector--is now more partisan and combative, because its eggy heads are wrapped up in Kos and other anti-Bush sites, where they absorb the latest undernews about the machinations of Karl Rove and Tom DeLay. Scheiber argues this is a good development for Obama, who surprisingly doesn't have to become more partisan then he actually is in order to win over non-egghead (labor) Dems.

As Mickey writes (and it's well worth reading the rest of his post), "The 2008 campaign will be a test of the relative strength of these various differently-informed electorates."

Last week, Jay Nordlinger wrote:

I was once at a Hillary press conference — this was when she was preparing to run for the Senate. As far as I know, I’m the only person who has asked her, “Do you stand by your assertion that the charges against your husband stemmed from a ‘vast, right-wing conspiracy’?”

She said, “I’m not going back, I’m going forward,” as she jabbed her finger at the next questioner. No journalist ever followed up, to my knowledge. And Hillary took very, very few questions during that 2000 campaign. Nor did reporters seem all that eager to ask them.

And you recall what George Stephanopoulos did in Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign. The Clintonites would duck tough or awkward questions, and, if reporters persisted, Stephanopoulos would say, “That has been asked and asked. We have dealt with that over and over. This is old, tired material. Do you want to embarrass yourself? Do you want to be a laughingstock?”

And the reporters would generally shut up. Stephanopoulos was right on one thing: The question — whatever it was — had been asked. It had just not been dealt with. I understand that George Stephanopoulos now works in journalism.

Consider 1998, 1999, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal was in bloom. President Clinton essentially decided not to meet the press. When he did meet with them — the very few times — he would have some other head of state alongside him. This would be a joint press conference, or photo-op, or what have you. The thinking was that reporters wouldn’t dare ask about a sex-and-perjury scandal in the presence of another head of state — especially a super-dignified one, such as Nelson Mandela.

And has Clinton ever been asked about his anti-terror policies? I recall that Chris Wallace did: and Clinton merely exploded at him, and pretended to be persecuted — pretended that Wallace was acting as a Republican tool. Also said something about Rupert Murdoch and global warming.

It was the most bizarre episode — but classically Clintonian.

Today, Jim Geraghty adds:

Before the blogosphere, Bill Clinton's "I opposed the Iraq war from the start" would have gotten limited coverage from a press corps not eager to point out his... well, lies. Today, with the Clintons taking flak from both the left and the right, his statement becomes a much bigger story. It ain't 1992 anymore, or even 2000; it's not clear Team Hillary understands that.

Read the rest of Jim's post.

Austin Bay writes shares his adventures in attempting to watch the Cowboys-Packers game, which was only available on the NFL Network, a channel many cable companies have yet to include in their line-ups:

Thursday around noon: Richard proposed we meet at a sports bar — Third Base, on Sixth Street near MoPac. Sounded fine to me, I’d never been there but I told him the place’ll be packed. We need an infiltration plan with a seize and hold objective. Richard said he’d get there at 6:30 pm. I said I could get there about 7:15 because I had to meet my wife downtown at a Rice University graduate get-together in our favorite Austin, Texas coffee shop, Halcyon. Cool deal.

Except Richard called me on my cell at 6:20 and said the line at Third Base already extended into the parking lot. Nix on Third Base (…a vague suggestion of Abbott and Costello…). My wife suggested I walk around the corner from Halcyon to a bar on Lavaca Street and see if that establishment had the NFL Channel. Indeed the bar did have the channel, but it also had a not-quite elbow to elbow crowd and no open seats or tables to seize and hold.

I phoned Richard and laid out a Yeats’ allusion: “This is no place for old men…who can’t stand up for three hours.”

Richard said to come by his house and we’d watch the game on his super Mac. I trundled in about 7:45 PM and we sat down to watch the game on the computer.

Internet stutter galore, occasionally interrupted by total freeze. Richard decided that NFL.com’s server was overloaded. We followed the game for a quarter-plus via the “game tracker” screen. For those who haven’t seen one, it’s a small football field where the line of scrimmage moves across the screen as the game progresses. You also get written commentary on the plays.

Well, you get what you pay for, or in this case don’t pay for.

Hopefully things will be easier when we move into a Web 50.0 world--rapidly becoming a necessity as total time spent online ratchets up exponentially. (Thus explaining the corresponding Red Queen's Race to the bottom that’s simultaneously occurring in several competing legacy media.)

Listening to his interview with Laura Ingraham and his fear of Rush Limbaugh, Tom Brokaw clearly has issues with the new media world:

This morning on Laura Ingraham's radio show, she talked to former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw. Brokaw's got a new book, and she says to him, "You mentioned Rush Limbaugh in the book, but you kind of throw away a line about Limbaugh, and it's in the drug section. And without a doubt, Rush Limbaugh's the most influential Boomer I think in the media today. There's no person who has had more of a profound impact on the way people think about politics than Limbaugh, and he gets a line, you know, the drug thing, which I just don't think that's right, Tom.

BROKAW: My problem with the whole spectrum is that there is not -- you know, you know what Rush is -- what his whole drill is, he doesn't want to hear another point of view, except his.

INGRAHAM: Oh, I disagree. He talks to all sorts of people. Well, he doesn't interview people like I do. I mean, I have guests on--

BROKAW: He doesn't -- he doesn't interview people, and he mocks people--

INGRAHAM: But he's not an objective -- he's not an objective person, he doesn't say he is, and that's the difference between him and anchors on some of our networks who have political agenda but then pretend that they're objective.

BROKAW: Well, Laura, we're never going to resolve this. You know, you have your point of view, and I have mine.

(Audio here.)

And Tom does have his point of view, as does the nightly news. Post-9/11, the more perceptive members of the legacy media have gone on the record to discuss their biases (even Tom inadvertently triangulated himself earlier this month); and numerous journalists have written articles explaining why a completely unbiased media is an impossibility, but an arguably necessary fiction to maintain in the early days of radio and TV, back when broadcast frequencies were scarce. (Humbly submitted for your approval...) Someone should alert Tom that that's no longer the case in the 21st century, as anybody who's glanced at the channel line-up of his DirecTV or XM satellite radio receiver has seen--or simply surfed a handful of the 100 million-plus blogs tracked by Technorati.

More: Tim Graham of Newsbusters adds:

This is rich talk coming from a man whose network hired Bill Moyers as his newscast’s only commentator in 1995, and a man who wrote a syrupy tribute to hot liberal mock-jock Jon Stewart for his "Athenian" ideals in Time magazine.

Not to mention someone who was upset in 2003 with Eason Jordan, then chief news executive of CNN. Brokaw had no beef with CNN broadcasting out of Iraq for years little more than propaganda approved by Saddam Hussein. No, he was angry that Jordan finally disclosed the sham after Iraq was liberated. As Brokaw said at the time:

On Tuesday's Late Show, Brokaw told David Letterman that CNN “should have worked harder at conveying” what Jordan knew, but that if you “decide to keep that as a secret for yourself to protect those people and to protect the interests of your company, then you probably ought to keep it secret for a long time because it opens them up now, wherever they go, wherever they're stationed, 'well what are they not telling us now?'”

And heaven forbid the public ask that.

Gratuitous Unrelated Ra^ther Bashing: "Dan Rather, Plus Three:"

While I was away at Blog World, books written by two of my favorite authors arrived in the mail, with topics as disparate as can possibly be imagined:

In Praise of Prejudice by Theodore Dalrymple

Gastroanomalies by James Lileks

Watch for more on these two books in the coming weeks.

Variety explores the prospect of "A dark latenight ahead" as "Writers strike reality sets in":

While the networks have been repeating the mantra that "screens will not go black," it won't take long for TV viewers to see the impact of a Writers Guild of America strike.

The canaries in TV's creative coal mine are latenight hosts such as David Letterman and Jay Leno, whose monologues and sketches are dependent on union writers. If history is any guide, both shows will almost instantly go dark, as would "Saturday Night Live." Comedy Central's latenight stalwarts "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report" would also likely switch to repeats in the immediate aftermath of a strike.

"Boom -- our show just shuts down," said "SNL" vet Amy Poehler. "It's just done. There is no backlog of scripts." (For more on latenight and the strike, log on to Variety.com)

Primetime comedy and drama series will feel the pinch immediately, though the on-air effect will be delayed at least a few weeks for most shows as they air completed segs. Cruelest blows will hit the frosh crop of shows that are just starting to get a toehold with viewers, including ABC's "Private Practice," "Pushing Daisies" and "Samantha Who" and CBS' "The Big Bang Theory."

The repercussions of scribes going out will surely be felt at Hollywood's major talent agencies. It's widely expected that a prolonged strike would result in serious layoffs; some agencies have already sketched out strike contingency plans involving salary deferments and other cost-cutting moves.

Fight it out hammer and tongs fellas; take as long as you need. You'll only be speeding up the migration to here.

Err, "except those plastic discs", writes Chris Anderson of Wired and The Long Tail in a good follow-up to our earlier post here.

Libertas's "Dirty Harry" writes that the format war between competing high definition DVD formats has slowed the acceptance of the successor to the DVD, which is now in its tenth year of existence. And the film studios are shooting themselves in the foot, since the money isn't in the player, but the back catalog.

A format war merely slows--or stops--Hollywood's efforts to resell its back catalog yet again, which is where the real long term money is, anway. When I go high-def DVD, I'll be on my fourth or fith copies of some movies, having gone from VHS to 12-inch laser disc (remember those?!), to DVD. And along the way, having bought pan & scan and letterboxed LDs, and original issue and remastered DVDs of some of the titles I was more obsessive about.

Meanwhile, I just downloaded my first MP3-only only album off Amazon.com. It's a complete win-win for both consumer and Amazon: there's no physical product to be inventoried, packaged and shipped, and it downloads so quickly over broadband that it's near-instantaneous consumer gratification. The individual tunes are MP3s so there's complete portability amongst the PC and iPod-style player. It's been licensed by the record company, so there are no Napster legal issues. And the MP3s are rendered in 256 kbps format, which is, I believe the second highest quality format available via MP3. (Per XM's request, we do PJM Political as a 320 kbps MP3, which is the highest quality MP3 format.)

There's little doubt that as broadband speeds increase--and they will--video will be soon be added to the download mix, and not just teeny YouTube clips. Eventually DVD collections such as these will be a download away. I don't think bricks and morter stores will fade away anytime soon, but the Long Tail is becoming increasingly easier for savvy online retailers to implement.

Oh, what album did I buy? This.

No, really! Fooling around with Roland's new VG-99 guitar modeling system and its built-in recreation of their classic original GR-300 guitar synthesizer got me in the mood to hear 1984's version of "The Future of Guitar." (Would that that future came true, as compared to what passes for pop music on the radio today.) And speaking of the VG-99, if you're a guitar aficionado, you may enjoy my review of Roland's latest guitar modeling system, which I knocked out for Blogcritics over the weekend.

You certainly didn't--I liked this video much better in its first iteration:

(Via Jonathan Garthwaite.)

When I reviewed Chris Anderson's The Long Tail for Tech Central Station in 2005, I picked a musical genre with an enormous catalog but less than blockbuster front-end sales as an example to demonstrate how the Internet is changing retailing:

Back in October of last year, Chris Anderson of Wired magazine created a powerful meme -- the concept of "The long tail". His article discussed how e-tailers such as Amazon and Netflix are changing how we think about inventories of books, DVDs and CDs; and how pop culture is transformed by making available not only obscure titles that would otherwise consume valuable space in a physical store, but also all of an artist's back catalog.

For example, your local Borders is likely to have, say, Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, Porgy and Bess, and a few of his other titles available on CD. Amazon has virtually every CD that he's played on that's currently in print (or available used) as well as almost every disc released by his myriad sidemen. (And if some of their albums aren't available on CD, they're likely to pop up in LP form on eBay from time to time.)

La Shawn Barber writes that even more than jazz, classical music is benefitting from this development:

You may not find a wide selection of classical music at the local Tower Records (do they still operate brick-and-mortar stores?), but in the digital world, the pickings are plentiful, as are online discussions about classical music. The Internet fuels the long tail of retail, which in turn favors niche industries and products, independent artists (filmmakers, musicians), classical music labels, etc...And anyone using a computer has immediate access to at least 30-second samples of music in that thousand-year back catalogue.

The forces driving the long tail are the “democratization” of the tools of production and distribution, and better filters (search engines, recommendations, rating systems, etc.). The long tail itself has “democratized” classical music, making it more accessible and less intimidating for us regular folks.

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds examines another online trend: "There are now more World of Warcraft players in America than farmers."

Leroy Jenkins could not be reached for comment.

To follow-up on my post yesterday about the divergent paths of old and new media, Reason magazine is producing their own videos, which feature high quality production values, and a pretty good anchorman to boot:

The appropriately named RightyBlogs is your one-stop shopping source for hot conservative bloggedy goodness. Stop by today!

Why yes, that is a Blog World Expo button on our sidebar, and thank you for noticing! See you in Vegas in less than a month!

Jeff Jarvis explores "The real media consolidation: Google":

Bottom line: Google controls nearly 40 percent of online advertising.

Now pair that news with the folding of TimesSelect. Consumers, as we used to be called, won’t support media and journalism with their money. Advertising will. We will become entirely dependent on advertising. And what happens when Google controls the majority of online ad revenue in this country? They’re headed there, for as a TechCrunch commenter points out, Google’s online ad revenue and share of revenue are growing faster than online advertising as a whole.

On the one hand, we should be grateful to Google for enabling the support of much new media. On the other hand, we should fear teh vice in which Google holds our privates. That’s where media power is consolidating — not in old conglomerates (some of which now depend for a good bit of revenue on who? — on Google.)

And yet, for a company involved in as many diverse projects as Google, Zombie notes that it's definition of "diversity" is awfully skewed in one direction:

Google is completely infected by the multicultural bug, and that means they’ll honor anything that isn’t part of the “traditional” culture or power structure: American, Christian, conservative, and so on. I’m neither Christian nor do I consider myself a conservative, but even I bristle at Google’s hubris.

Read the whole thing.

AP sports headline: “Jason, John Garrett coach against brother Judd when Cowboys meet Rams”

Wow, this could be one interesting game! To be fair, the Brothers Judd run a helluva Website, but I'm not sure how we'll they'll stand up against the Cowboys' high-powered offense on Sunday...

Robert McHenry, a former editor-in-chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica, makes a terrific observation:

Rod Dreher, an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, has posed an interesting question in this blog post on Beliefnet. He begins by offering a passage from a book about local communities in Chicago in the 1950s in which the author, Alan Ehrenhalt, writes about how history is written. It is a commonplace, and therefore a suspect notion, that “history is written by the winners.” Ehrenhalt suggests that, more often than not, it is written by the dissenters.

This is a much more useful insight and one that fits with other things we know or intuit. By “history,” I take Ehrenhalt to be referring not just to academic tomes or schoolbooks but to the public memories and attitudes that evolve with respect to past times and events. For example, we have all learned to think of the 1950s as a time of materialism and conformity and cultural blandness. This has become our shared historical viewpoint. But who told us that? Wasn’t it precisely those who weren’t, or worked very hard not to seem to be, like that?

We also tend to think that there is only One Version of History. As 20th century-style mass media and the overculture it created continues to fracture (which I touched upon in "Atlas Mugged"), expect--for both good and bad--an increasing number of niche groups to have their own take on history as well.

(Via Kathy Shaidle.)

With the return of Dan Rather, an article I wrote for the September issue of the New Individualist magazine seems especially timely. It's titled "Atlas Mugged: How a Gang of Scrappy, Individual Bloggers Broke the Stranglehold of the Mainstream Media" , and I certainly hope you'll stop by and give it a read. It features quotes from interviews conducted especially for the piece with Glenn Reynolds, James Lileks, and also Shannon Love of the Chicago Boyz Website, who provided loads of great material on the birth of mass media.

For better or worse, it was also a chance to shoot some video, obviously inspired by the look and feel of Hot Air's "Vent" series:

Unfortunately, the Google Gap is real, writes Mark Hemingway, who notes that "In the arms race between Republicans and Democrats to exploit the Internet as political tool, Democrats are winning."

The New York Times' ombudsman has some thoughts on what we once dubbed (ala the Feiler Faster Principle) the Internet Immortality Thesis.

That was fast--as a follow-up to my post late last night, the Technorati "About Us" page now reads:

Currently tracking 100 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.

Sometime in the last hour, the 100,000,000 blog arrived. Whatever its topic (and I wonder if Technorati can track which blog it is), congrats, and welcome to the Blogosphere!

Update: It's a digital quagmire, as the "grim milestone" watch begins!

The Technorati "About Us" page contains the following line:

Currently tracking 99.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.

100 million is right around the corner. Remember three years ago (a millennia in Internet time, I know) when six or seven million blogs seemed like a lot?

(And yes, heeding Theodore Sturgeon's best-known aphorism is particularly key here.)

Like Ziggy Stardust, Mickey Kaus goes in search of the Spiders From Mars:

Top kausfiles executives have come up with a comprehensive, future-oriented business plan at their annual summer strategy session. Our new organization goal is simple: It is to beat "how many spiders does a person swallow in their sleep" in the News & Media rankings of search terms. ... Harder than you might think! Pinch isn't doing it either.

People don't plan to fail, they merely fail to plan for the importance of "how many spiders does a person swallow in their sleep" in their news coverage!

Reuters: "Study finds kids justify illegal downloads".

As Jonah Goldberg wrote a few years ago, "I need a study to tell me this?"

Patrick Ruffini writes that conservatives established a very healthy foothold on the Web in the late 1990s, but technologically, some of those sites are starting to get a bit long in the tooth, if you'll pardon the mix of anatomical metaphors:

When covering the netroots vs. the rightroots, reporters look at things through a particular frame that by definition excludes the vast majority of grassroots activity on the right. For something to be newsworthy in this space, it must be blog-based, it must have emerged in the last five years, and it must be focused on elections over legislative or policy outcomes.

The problem with this angle is that most of the conservative institutions online emerged in the late Clinton Administration or immediately after 9/11. At their peak, they were larger than Daily Kos, and arguably some still are. And they rarely receive any scrutiny because they don’t fit the frame. From a macro movement-building perspective, the left catching us to us is being covered as a need for us to catch up with something the left has invented anew.

And despite how unfair that narrative is, there’s something to it. The conservative analog to YearlyKos is 30 years old. The 800lb. gorillas of the conservative Web initially went online in the 1995-97 timeframe. And many have failed to innovate. They are still Web 1.0, where the Left jumped directly into Web 2.0 in the Bush years.

Read the rest for Patrick's examples.

Lyndon Johnson in 1968: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

Middle America's relationship with its anchormen today? “Video-sharing sites like YouTube are ensuring that every TV anchor mishap is preserved and distributed. No, the onset of online video has not been kind to television personalities”, AP notes, with more than a little flopsweat visible themselves.

I'd call it the “Internet Immortality Thesis” myself--and actually did, late last year.

See also this exceptional comment by Steven Den Beste, recently picked up by another legacy institution that's been humbled quite a bit itself by the online community, no longer merely the silent void beyond the Hudson River.

David Harsanyi of the Denver Post, who has a new book due out this fall called Nanny State, writes:

Nanny State recently received a short review from the trade publication Publishers Weekly. It was unfriendly. I came away with the feeling that the reviewer hadn’t actually read the book. (I won’t bore you with the specifics.) But then again, who knows, perhaps the review was deserved.

As this is my first book, though, I decided to investigate other Publisher Weekly reviews on Amazon.com. Did a negative review effect sales? Did the reviewer typically betray a ideological position as this one had? This curiosity led to non-scientific stroll around Amazon.com and a discovery. One that Tammy Bruce had already noted. (Update: And Dr. Helen.) I work in mainstream media. Though I’m not someone who buys into the widespread liberal media meme, the one-sidedness of the PW reviews was inescapable. After all, a provocative or combative political book can be well written and worth reading even if you disagree with the central thesis. I’ve reviewed books for almost a decade. I know this can happen.

Yet…

Read on.

(Via Dr. Helen.)

Having not yet seen the new Simpsons movie, Jonah Goldberg has some thoughts on the TV series in general. Here's a sample:

I’ve been meaning to write a long essay on the death of “youth culture.” The Simpsons would be a good example of what I’m getting at. I started watching the show when I was in college. It was denounced as an example of cultural rot amongst the young — particularly when Bart, not Homer, was the star of the show. While I’m sure that its viewership skews youngish, it’s not really a show for young people anymore. In much the same way that South Park’s most public fans seem to be middle-aged and Family Guy is aimed at an even older demographic. The Simpsons, on the air for nearly two decades, demonstrates how the once hard-and-fast line between the young and edgy and the conventional and staid has been if not completely erased than largely redrawn.

That's actually a topic that Jonah touched upon a few years ago, to very good effect. He noted back in 2003 that The Simpsons and numerous other TV shows which date back to the 1990s are still on the air:

But the networks can't let go, because every time they cancel an established show, the viewers, particularly the younger ones, vanish. No one thinks it's worth investing in a new show. The rise in reality shows has been cited by many as a sign of creative exhaustion on the part of Hollywood. But I think a better sign is the absolute explosion in sexuality. I think by now most readers understand I'm not particularly Comstockish about sex, so I hope this won't be taken simply as the lament of a typical culture vulture. But the reliance on sex jokes on TV is really astounding. Because there's still an ever-thinning veneer of taboo to sex, jokes about it still have a chance at working. But the desperation of writers comes across in how deep, i.e. low, they have to dig. It reminds me of a Simpsons episode that takes place in the near future; Marge says to Homer, "Fox turned into a hardcore porn channel so gradually I didn't even notice."

Anyway, my last bit of evidence is purely anecdotal. I speak to college kids on occasion. And whenever I do, I tend to make references to TV shows and movies because, well, I'm me and that's what I do. At this point you would think that my references would be lost on many of them — and theirs on me. But that doesn't seem to be the case. What's also interesting is that these kids are quoting the same movies that my buddies and I quote, which might be a function of the fact that young men today would rather re-watch, say, Stripes or Roadhouse, than invest time in My Wife and Kids or some other drek. In effect, kids today are living off the entertainment capital of the previous generation.

That's even more true in music, as Live Earth, the celebrity encomium to America's former vice president demonstrated:

Andy Williams didn’t play at Woodstock. He was 41 that summer.

Ray Charles, then 38, wasn’t invited either.

And at age 52, Dean Martin certainly wasn’t.

So what were and Jon Bon Jovi at 45, Madonna at 48, and ex-Pink Floyd Roger Waters, 63, doing headlining a rock concert? None of their top hits were within a decade of the “Live Earth” concert. Williams, Charles and Martin each had released his signature recording within a few years of Woodstock.

In fact, Pink Floyd’s hit — “The Wall” — is as contemporary today as “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” was in 1969.

One reason “Live Earth” was dead last in the TV ratings is the music was irrelevant to the target audience. In fact, music itself is rather irrelevant. what with Video games and You Tube getting more action. There is a reason MTV shows so few videos: Nobody watches them.

The other reason is that Woodstock was not organized by Hubert Humphrey, the immediate past vice president of the United States at the time.

Live Earth? Well …

These trends demonstrate the enormous transition our media is undergoing. Relics of the days of Mass Media linger on, simply because of the name recognition they built up prior to the Internet's fracturing of the overculture. And examples such as the Simpsons movie and even older chestnuts being endlessly recycled will be occurring for quite sometime, as dinosaur media hope to stave off extinction for another day.

Billboard and Reuters report that "The global recorded music market fell for the seventh consecutive year in 2006, and the slide is accelerating in 2007":

Sales fell 5% year-over-year to $19.6 billion, said the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), a London-based group that represents the major record labels.

Against a backdrop of shrinking CD sales and piracy, the value of physical music shipments tumbled 11% to $17.5 billion last year, the IFPI reported in its Recording Industry in Numbers 2007 study. Digital shipments through mobile services and the 500-plus recognized online music services jumped 85% to $2.1 billion.

The results "reflect an industry in transition," IFPI chairman and CEO John Kennedy said.

"We hoped that the decline in physical sales would be offset by the increase in digital sales, giving us the 'holy grail.' But while digital sales have grown as expected, physical sales have fallen by more than expected," he said.

"Unfortunately, this trend has continued in 2007," he added. "Physical sales continue to drop at a faster pace than we had hoped for, particularly in the U.S. (down 7.3%) and now also in the U.K. (off 6.7%) -- a market that had shown incredible resilience."

The lion's share of blame, Kennedy said, should be leveled at piracy, which he described as the biggest problem the industry faces.

Actually, the biggest problem the recording industry faces, much like Detroit in the 1970s, is that its new product by and large--to borrow one of James Lileks' favorite words--is krrrepp.

Related: "Hollywood's Big Summer Turns Ho-Hum", though Transformers could still save the day. But just as last year's Pirates of the Caribbean sequel salvaged another forgettable year, isn't betting much of the summer's success on just one or two pontential mega-blockbusters quite a risky way to do business?

And for the Old Media trifecta: "NBC Chief Tries To Halt The Exodus".

Glenn Reynolds has a fascinating take on how the rise of identity politics on the left has caused politicians such as John Edwards to appear increasingly phony--even to a fellow lefty like Paul Krugman:

In his latest column -- link here for Times $elect subscribers -- Paul Krugman complains about the cult of "authenticity" in politics, and how it makes people like John Edwards come across as phonies. FDR was a rich guy who cared about the poor, he says, so why can't John Edwards be?

Well, John Edwards is no FDR. But the answer to Krugman's complaint is found in the post 1960s political zeitgeist. Back before identity politics, and the notion that "the personal is political," the idea of a rich guy representing poor people was entirely plausible. He could be rich, but still have ideas about poverty, and care about them. But now that we have identity politics and the like, that's impossible: If only a woman can represent women, only a black person can represent blacks, etc. -- Barbara Boxer even suggested that Condi Rice couldn't understand mothers because she was childless -- then obviously only a poor person can represent poor people. And since there are no poor people in American political office, poor people perforce go unrepresented. Thus, the "progressive" causes of identity politics and personalization mean that the progressives' key clients can't get "authentic" representation. This is probably bad for the country, but it's certainly a bed that the progressives have made for themselves.

Of course, maybe Krugman's column on how Really Rich People can authentically Care About The Poor is just a stealth defense of the New York Times' advertisers:

Did anyone else read the NYT magazine this weekend? It was all about poverty and income inequality. Some articles were better than others, and I didn't read them all, but the hilarious part wasn't in the articles. It was in the ads. On page after page, the magazine hawked luxury condos starting in the 8 figures. Pictures of these glorious $10 million-plus pied-à-terres with 24-hour doormen, room service and Master of the Universe views of Manhattan were punctuated with ads for financial advisers and garish jewelry — and, oh yeah, essays on what to do about the poor. There was an almost Edwardian irony to the whole thing; a magazine for the New Aristocrats discussing the poor and how they live with a mixture of dispassionate, almost academic, bemusement and charity ball passion.

It's all making sense, now . . . .

And yet, something that Patrick Ruffini wrote during the time of the Oscar Awards still holds very much true, I think:

Liberals get all pissy when conservatives decide to tune out institutions that don't represent them and create new ones -- just look at the sneering at "Faux News" and Rush and homeschooling and values voters. In Hollywood as in mainstream media, there is a price to be paid when an institution decides to leverage its prestige to push a political position where none is warranted; it's a price that is paid in viewership, influence, and profit -- in this case, a 30% falloff in viewers.

That was only two years ago, and it's safe to say that liberals still continue to "get all pissy when conservatives decide to tune out institutions that don't represent them and create new ones". But given the near universality of identity politics and related "absolute moral authority" claims amongst the left, should they really be that surprised when a group of voters seek media (whether it's news or entertainment) that they feel best represents their own identity?

One of the themes of Virginia Postrel's terrific The Future And Its Enemies is that for many, top-down control of markets can seem awfully reassuring. There are still lots of people who preferred the simplicity of the days when AT&T was synonymous with telephone, because of how simple and universal it made things. But never mind that rates for a long-distance call were much, much more expensive before AT&T was broken up. Similarly, many people long for the days when men wore suits when flying, even though an airlines ticket cost a heckuva lot more before the industry was deregulated to the casual masses.

As Glenn Reynolds writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Andrew Keen, the author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture (and at least for a time, a frequent contributor to Pajamas Media, ironically enough) waxes nostalgic for the days of mass media:

Keen's thesis is that talent is rare and that worthwhile products - whether we're talking about news reporting, music composition or filmmaking - can be produced only if that talent is nurtured at great length and filtered to a great extent. Only a long and expensive process of refinement can dispose of the common dross and produce the pure gold of quality work.

This argument would be more impressive if the "quality work" from the big media organizations he describes were, well, golden. Keen references Bach and the Beatles as examples of quality music, but when he complains about the music industry's current travails he doesn't note that today's record industry isn't giving us Bach and the Beatles - it's giving us Britney. Likewise, he blames Internet piracy for declining movie attendance when the cause appears to be elsewhere: a recent Zogby poll found that people are going to the movies less often because they think the films stink and, in a more literal way, so do the theaters.

Likewise, Keen decries the decline of the news business, invoking Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, without mentioning that today's top newscasters include Dan "Forged Documents" Rather, Katie Couric and Geraldo Rivera. A lesser breed, by any standard. Keen even complains about declining radio listenership leading to financial problems for Clear Channel broadcasting - a chain many people regard as having ruined radio in America through its imposition of rigid formatting and too many commercials. What Keen sees as a tragedy, many will see as just desserts.

And that's the story of Keen's elites overall. The Golden Age of mass culture didn't end just because the Internet let people do their own thing. It ended because people looked at the low - and steadily declining - quality of mass-marketed television, radio, news, films, and music and concluded that they could do better. And they are often right, not necessarily because the amateur productions are so terrific (though sometimes they are), but because the big media productions are so often dreadful.

Like U.S. car companies in the 1970s, the television networks, movie and record studios, newspapers, and radio stations grew comfortable in their protected positions, and forgot how (or just didn't bother) to make good products. Now their market shares are declining, as people find substitutes. And while people in the 1970s had to look to Japan or Germany for substitute cars, they have only to look to the Internet for substitute sources of news and entertainment - sources that are often, Keen's assertions notwithstanding, just as good as their traditional versions. (Amateur embedded bloggers such as Michael Yon, Michael Totten, Bill Roggio or Bill Ardolino, for example, are producing some of the very best reporting from Iraq, supported by ads on their blogs and donations from their readers, not by big media organizations.)

Remember when films like Rollerball and Network hyped the dangers of a world controlled by a handful of big corporations? That's exactly the mid-20th century mass media model that Keen prefers.

Sturgeon's Law is an absolute in the sense that if, as Theodore Sturgeon quipped, "Ninety percent of everything is crud", then today's explosion of information and entertainment on the 'Net produces an exponentially greater amount of crud then the mid-20th century, when there were only three television networks, a handful of movie and TV studios and record labels, and only one or two newspapers per big city. So it is that much more difficult to mine the gold from the dross. But I'd rather have many more news and entertainment choices to pick from then less, (plus the option of creating in these genres myself) particularly when today's legacy medias, despite more competition than ever before, continue to underperform.

Bill Quick, who gave the Blogosphere its name, believes that its starboard side was crucial in sinking--for now at least--the near-universally reviled immigration bill:

And I have to say that the right blogosphere as a whole did an excellent job of revealing and mobilizing this sentiment. First, we exposed the crudely hacked polls that claimed amnesty was overwhelmingly favored by those they polled. Second, we publicized the polls that showed the true state of affairs - that Americans hated this travesty - and thus gave folks who thought they were alone in their opposition the comfort of knowing that, far from being a lonely minority, they were part of a whopping majority. Third, we turned up the heat on congress, and kept it on flambe until the bill was toast. Fourth, we exposed the bill itself to public scrutiny, so that voters understood what was being attempted supposedly in their name. Fifth, we acted as instant response teams to the lies being told about the bill by the hacks, flacks, and whores desperate to pass it on behalf of the special interests they fronted for.

Ten years ago, this bill would have been passed and signed by the president before most Americans were even aware that it existed. Those days are over.

The right blogosphere has put many notches in its belt - Dan Rather, Trent Lott, Ports Dubai, Harriet Miers, Alberto Gonzales (for SCOTUS), the destruction of the GOP congressional majorities, and now the Bush/Kennedy/McCain amnesty plan. This one was the biggest yet.

Pat yourselves on the back, folks. And welcome to the big leagues.

On the other hand, Politico writes that it's not over yet.

Fred Thompson is entering the presidential race, according to USA Today. Of course, in a sense, he's been in for several weeks at least via the Web, which "has allowed me to be in the hunt, so to speak, without spending a dime", Thompson says.

Is July 4th the date?

Not that there are a whole lot of other blogging parodies out there of course. But this is exactly what my day looks like--including the moment when the scale model of stonehenge.blogspot.com descends on wires.

Run at 78 RPMs, and it would be exactly what the Professor's day looks like.

(Via Katie Favazza and Outside The Beltway.)

Read the whole thing.

There are a lot of moving parts under the surface of the brief clip above. Bob Krumm writes:

I don’t know what’s the best part of this video response to Michael Moore’s publicity stunt: the cigar, the appropriate disdain, the lecture, the humor, or the quickness of the response, but what I do know is that Fred Thompson is the first politician anywhere to understand how the speed of the internet can change politics.

This is something that should alarm Fred’s opponents–both Republican and Democrat. In certain military circles there’s this concept known as the “OODA Loop.” OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. The late Colonel John Boyd, a Korean War pilot, came up with the concept to try to explain why American pilots were so much better than their opponents in dogfights. He determined that through a combination of training, aerodynamics, and cockpit design, American pilots and their aircraft could more quickly observe a stimulus and respond. It allowed them to react and act again and again so quickly, that at some point, the American fliers were an entire decision cycle ahead of their opponents. It’s called “getting inside your opponent’s OODA loop.”

Somewhere I recall reading that one of the (many) things that sunk George Allen's reelection campaign after his "Macaca" gaffe was the in-fighting amongst his staff for the proper response of a potential presidential candidate (ahh, hubris) such as Allen to being hammered endlessly by the Washington Post. Similarly, I can't imagine Hillary knocking off a quickie YouTube clip such as Fred's without having to go through at least a dozen different handlers, advisors, and speech writers.

And note the timing of it:

By the way, Thompson’s response to Moore will have a much greater impact on the presidential campaign than anything said at this little shindig tonight. It’ll be seen by many more people too.

Plus a soundbite such as the above clip is infinitely more digestible than having to wade through 90 minutes or so of debate, particularly this early in the race.

As Mickey Kaus adds:

More important, I think: quite apart from its advantages as a campaign tool, the video is itself evidence of Thompson's actual presidential qualifications. You can't make a quickie spot like this unless a) you know what you think (or have a really fast pollster) b) you can react to new situations quickly, and c) you have some sense of theater. Those are all extremely important things for a president to have.

George Bush was reelected in part due to New Media, which discovered CBS's Ra^therGate scam and acted as a force multiplier to the Swift Boat Vets' ad budget. But I'm not sure how much the Bush team fully understood the dynamics of the Blogosphere. (Remember, prior to both parties' 2004 conventions and Ra^therGate itself, blogs were far from a household world--and note that a certain former CBS producer later said that she hadn't heard of any of the big players on the right until after the fact. Thanks again, Dan!)

It's too soon to fully gauge the impact, but we may just be witnessing the first Republican presidential candidate who actually knows what he's doing in the world of New Media.

Update: Welcome Bob Krumm readers; Krumm notes that Moore brought a knife to a gunfight: "While Michael Moore wrote a letter, it was Thompson who bested the 'film maker' on film"--even better: digital video, on the brand new Breitbart.TV.

More: "This stuff matters. And Thompson's damn good at it."

It isn't even Saturday on the West Coast yet, but thanks to the difference in time zones, the Anchoress already has tomorrow's links today!

Dovetailing on my response earlier this morning to Mark Tapscott, Glenn Reynolds asks, "Is there any role for the FCC in the 21st century?":

No.

Oops, that's not going to get me to my assigned 500 words, or even close. And it's not quite true anyway. There's a role for the FCC, in terms of setting technical standards and assigning spectrum—though that could probably be undertaken just as well by private bodies and auctions—but that's about all.

But there's not much of a role for the FCC in doing what the FCC mostly does: Policing who is allowed to use the airwaves, and trying to regulate the content of broadcasts. In the 21st Century, the twin arguments for an FCC role, limited broadcast spectrum and public ownership of the airwaves, have become obsolete. Broadcast spectrum isn't limited—most towns have room for more TV and radio broadcasters than they can economically support anyway. (Your real information-industry monopolist in most towns is the local newspaper, which the FCC won't touch.) And the public "ownership" of the airwaves—why? The public didn't discover them. Neither did the government.

Happily, the FCC's role is getting smaller, as more and more "broadcast" material reaches people through other channels: cable TV, satellite radio, the Internet, etc. Unhappily, the FCC—like any business in a declining market—has shown some signs of wanting to expand its regulatory authority to these new channels of communications so that, presumably, if Janet Jackson's nipple is exposed anywhere, anytime, the FCC can punish someone.

It's no accident, I think, that the most vibrant and fast-growing communications media are in the areas that are the least regulated. Bureaucratic mission creep may explain why the FCC wants to bring these new areas under its dominion, but a more sensible policy would cut back on the FCC's current authority.

Arguably, the FCC had a role when broadcast media were scarce, and businesses had to prove that they were serving "the Public Good" to maintain access to the airwaves. Fortunately, access to content--and access to the methods of generating it--has never been more abundant.

Mark Tapscott has some kind words about my piece in Tech Central Station yesterday on 18 Doughty Street:

As if it's not bad enough that executives and shareholders at ABC, CBS and NBC have to deal with continuing decline in their audience numbers, Tech Central Station goes and publishes a glowing piece on the old broadcast model's executioner.

Tapscott writes:

It's much the same set of factors that are driving traditional newspapers to move from dead-tree-only products to internet-based news and related content products and services. The internet-based news entity can dispense with the printing press, the circulation department, the costly staffs that man both, as well as lots of other traditional positions throughout the organization.

Similarly, the internet-based entertainment and news network has no need of broadcast towers and associated equipment, nor the expensive lobbying staff in Washington to keep the FCC from getting troublesome.

In short, the economic model is fundamentally changed and the price of entry is dramatically lowered. And when the price of providing a service or product drops, the number of providers of that service or product increases, as does the spectrum of consumer choice. Competition is the consumer's best friend. Government-sanctioned monopolies granted to myopic big businesses are the consumers' biggest enemy.

Competition also makes it more difficult for peddlers of ideological bias to disguise it as legitimate news. In short, 18 Doughty Street and the technologies that make it possible is among the best developments in years for advocates of informed public policy discussion.

I disagree with only one element of that--whereas Mark writes, "Competition also makes it more difficult for peddlers of ideological bias to disguise it as legitimate news", I'd argue that increased competition allows consumers to get their news with a worldview that matches their own. That doesn't mean the end of liberal bias, as, I believe, Mark is inferring. In fact, as the favorite "COD-piece" of the Strib's Jim Boyd told Hugh Hewitt yesterday:

Jonah Goldberg: I think there is a certain irony here. I have argued for a long time that I think a lot of newspapers need to move in the European direction, where they just are honest about their biases, because one of the things that drives normal readers nuts is when these newspapers pretend to be objective when they’re not.

HH: Right.

JG: And at least in the British press, the press says hey look, this is our perspective, this is where we’re coming from. The irony here is that I think a liberal paper could actually do well if it were honest about it. But because a lot of these papers, they’re dishonest about it, and they pretend in this sort of arrogance that they’re speaking from the voice of God about how the world really is, it drives a lot of people nuts, and that’s what I sense is part of the problem with them.

As I think I wrote in the Doughty Street piece, because (partially due to governmental regulation) airwaves were originally so scarce on both sides of the pond, radio, and then television, had to maintain a veneer of objectivity simply to get a license to get on the air.

The Doughty Street model proves that the Internet can recreate all of the broadcasting that traditional local television station does--everything else (the content of the shows, where and how they're videotaped) is a matter of scale. And thus any group can build the Internet-equivalent of a TV station that fits their worldview perfectly. So that could very well be the Internet video equivalent of Town Hall--and the Internet video equivalent of Air America.

Web 2.0 in just under 5 minutes:

(Via PJ HQ)

Building on an essay by Jonathan Chait in The New Republic, Hugh Hewitt has a fascinating timeline of when, as he puts it, "the Democratic Party of Prescription Drugs finally died". Chait believes it began in Florida in November of 2000; Hugh believes "the vitriol on the Left in 2001 was nowhere near where it was in 2003". (Hugh's post is also an interesting discussion of how information media and its tone can impact politics.)

I think Chait's timing is correct, but there was a crucial extended timeout during that period caused by 9/11, which dramatically transformed the left, and ultimately, the Democrats as whole, as Hugh notes. It's something that's best explained by an essay Charles Krauthammer wrote for the Washington Post in August of 2004, during that tumultuous election year:

With apologies to Dr. Freud, I propose the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release.

The hostility, resentment, envy and disdain, all superheated in Florida, were not permitted their natural discharge. Came Sept. 11 and a lid was forced down. How can you seek revenge for a stolen election by a nitwit usurper when all of a sudden we are at war and the people, bless them, are rallying around the flag and hailing the commander in chief? With Bush riding high in the polls, with flags flying from pickup trucks (many of the flags, according to Howard Dean, Confederate), the president was untouchable.

The Democrats fell unnaturally silent. For two long, agonizing years, they had to stifle and suppress. It was the most serious case of repression since Freud's Anna O. went limp. The forced deference nearly killed them. And then, providentially, they were saved. The clouds parted and bad news rained down like manna: WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joe Wilson and, most important, continued fighting in Iraq.

With the president stripped of his halo, his ratings went down. The spell was broken. He was finally, once again, human and vulnerable. With immense relief, the critics let loose.

The result has been volcanic. The subject of one prominent new novel is whether George W. Bush should be assassinated. This is all quite unhinged. Good God. What if Bush is reelected? If they lose to him again, Democrats will need more than just consolation. They'll need therapy.

(That last sentence by the good Dr. K helps to explain a poll result such as this.)

Did I call 2004 tumultuous? With the chance for the left to control the White House and both houses of Congress, next year will make 2004's campaign season look positively civilized in comparison.

Roger L. Simon explains to PBS that everything is biased in one form or another:

It's well known by now that PBS has excluded the documentary Islam vs. Islamists: Voices From the Muslim Center from its American Crossroads series from reasons of "bias."

As an American citizen and as a filmmaker, I find this despicable censorship. It is also based on an absurdly obvious lie:

All movies are biased. The form itself is biased. The camera is a pen, as the French auteur theorists correctly told us decades ago. Movie-making, documentary or not, is done through selection via script, camera and editing and those selections are made by wholly biased human beings. There has never been an unbiased film ever, not even Andy Warhol's experiments, because the Warhol himself picked who he put in front of the camera and where he put them before setting his actors free.

And the biased nature of film has been known practically since the medium's inception when early Soviet filmmakers like Dovzhenko demonstrated editing by visual association. In fact, it is arguable that films that appear to be less biased are more biased through the pretense of even-handedness - although perhaps this is over the heads of the bourgeois middlebrows at Public Broadcasting.

Nevertheless, one thing is clear: what the nabobs of PBS are objecting to is not bias at all, it is a bias they don't like. They are censoring an opinion - that's it. This makes them reactionaries - and cowards. Shame.

It's not entirely surprising that PBS is being reactionary, as the network was one of the last creations of the era of mass media. And obviously, their executives still cling to beliefs that existed when it was birthed by the Johnson administration 40 years ago. A lot's changed in the now demassified information world since then--including this: a review of the documentary that the Great Society's network doesn't want you to see.

Matthew Sheffield has a great capsule summary of "The Battle for Obama's Space":

For the past two and a half years, the page has been run by an Obama supporter from Los Angeles named Joe Anthony. At first, that arrangement was fine with the Obama team, which worked with Anthony on the content and even had the password to make changes themselves.

But as the site exploded in popularity in recent months, the campaign became concerned about an outsider having control of the content and responses going out under Obama's name and told Anthony they wanted him to turn it over.

In this new frontier of online campaigning, it's hard to determine the value of 160,000 MySpace friends—about four times what any other official campaign MySpace page has amassed. But the Obama campaign decided they wouldn't pay $39,000, which is what Anthony said he proposed for his extensive work on the site, plus some additional fees up to $10,000.

MySpace reluctantly stepped in to settle the dispute and decided that Obama should have the rights to control http://www.myspace.com/barackobama as of Monday night, while Anthony had the right to take the contact information for all the friends who signed up while he was in control. That includes the right to tell them exactly how he feels about the Obama campaign.

$39,000 is probably less than the cost of a single network television commercial, so it's got to be walking around money for the Obama campaign. It seems like a rather low price to pay for the ill-will and bad press this is causing Obama amongst his core supporters. As The Professor writes, "I still think it's small potatoes, but it was an unforced error".

As Chris Anderson of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail explains, there's sad news out of Cincinnati: station manager Arthur "Big Guy" Carlson of AM radio's WKRP has finally lost his long-running feud with his mother, the station's owner. After nearly 30 years of the Carlsons' station in the Top 40 rock & roll format, WKRP is reverting back to generic Muzak.

If it's not on there already, Stephen Spruiell notes that Cho's video will be all over YouTube in the coming hours, thanks to NBC's rush to broadcast it.

Dan Gilmour has some thoughts on what the coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre in both the Blogosphere and the legacy media says about the current states of each media:

The democratization of media is not just about creation, though that has been the most notable aspect so far. Putting the tools into everyone’s hands has produced an explosion of media creation, as blogs and sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr show us.

Traditional media think of distribution: making journalism or movies or programs and sending them out to consumers. This is inverted in a democratized media world, where we all have access to what we want, as well as when and where.

I didn’t turn on my TV yesterday except in the evening, to watch a national network’s news report. I wanted to see a summary of what a serious journalism organization had to say about what it knew so far.

Instead, during the day, I used the online media — including the major news sites — to get the latest information, sifting it, making judgments about credibility and reliability as I read and watched and listened. That, too, is the future in many cases.

It’s also worth noting that the citizen media component of this terrible event is not a new to the digital era. When President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas back in 1963, Abraham Zapruder caught the gruesome killing on a home movie camera — footage that became an essential part of the historical record. But the difference between then and tomorrow is this:

In 1963, one man with a camera captured the event on film. In a very few years, a similar situation would be captured by thousands of people — all holding high-resolution video cameras — and all of those cameras would be connected to high-speed digital networks.

That is different.

Remember, too, that the passengers aboard the airplanes on Sept. 11, 2001, were making voice calls to loved ones and colleagues with mobile phones. What if they’d been sending videos to the world of what was happening inside those doomed aircraft?

We will still need journalists to help sort things out. But the “burning city” words from 2001 revealed something.

We used to say that journalists write the first draft of history. Not so, not any longer. The people on the ground at these events write the first draft. This is not a worrisome change, not if we are appropriately skeptical and to find sources we trust. We will need to retool media literacy for the new age, too.

Related thoughts here.

(Via Pajamas Media, which has been providing extensive coverage of the VT massacre.)

In the latest edition of City Journal, Adam Thierer writes that this is "America’s Golden Age of Media"--and it could all be over soon:

Throughout most of history, humans lived in a state of extreme information poverty. News traveled slowly, field to field, village to village. Even with the printing press’s advent, information spread at a snail’s pace. Few knew how to find printed materials, assuming that they even knew how to read. Today, by contrast, we live in a world of unprecedented media abundance that once would have been the stuff of science-fiction novels. We can increasingly obtain and consume whatever media we want, wherever and whenever we want: television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the bewildering variety of material available on the Internet.

This media cornucopia is a wonderful development for a free society—or so you’d think. But today’s media universe has fierce detractors, and nowhere more vehemently than on the left. Their criticisms seem contradictory. Some, such as Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich, contend that real media choices, information sources included, remain scarce, hindering citizens from fully participating in a deliberative democracy. Others argue that we have too many media choices, making it hard to share common thoughts or feelings; democracy, community itself, again loses out. Both liberal views get the story disastrously wrong. If either prevails, what’s shaping up to be America’s Golden Age of media could be over soon.

While the far left seems bent on knocking out talk radio because they can't otherwise establish a foothold there, it's worth noting that Democrats didn't need the medium to retake Congress in November.

Beyond radio, call me a Pollyanna, but I can't help but think it's going to be awfully difficult putting the genie back in the bottle. There are now RSS feeds to shape content and blogs and podcasts to publish it. (Technorati was tracking 60 million blogs last time I checked, a mammoth growth from about seven million blogs when I wrote this piece in 2004 for TCS.)

As I wrote last week:

In one sense, the current hyperventilating by Imus, Rosie, Sharpton, et al represent the death rumbles of an eighty year old mass electronic media in an era when everyone will eventually have his own blog--and heck, if they want it bad enough, their own TV station.

Napster in its original form was killed by the recording industry at the start of the 21st century, but the concept of file sharing and downloading individual tracks of music is the law of the land. Similarly, YouTube has demonstrated how millions want to get their TV.

It's certainly a far cry from the days when mass media meant three TV networks and one or two monolithic (usually institutionally liberal--and arguably worse, deadly dull) newspapers per city.

One downside to today's media cornucopia though: is our readers learning?

Not surprisingly, Don Imus loses his CBS radio gig in addition to his MSNBC cable TV simulcast; veteran magazine editor Myrna Blyth has a piece in NRO today on the power to bully the legacy media grants to those it gives airtime:

I have never listened to Imus, and the only times I’ve seen him have been when I was flicking through channels in a hotel room, trying to find the morning news. But what struck me the few times I did watch him was his amazing arrogance. And, while I know we’re not supposed to criticize people for their appearance, this funny-looking guy in a funny-looking cowboy hat sure does get a lot of power when he’s sitting behind a microphone. David Frum in his Diary gives an example of Imus’s arrogance. For years, right up to this current fracas, he has been able to freely use his power to sneer at others and get the audience to laugh along. Imus, quite simply, is a bully, and he’s made that pay big. And like a bully about to lose a fight, he has started sniveling and proclaiming what a good and generous guy he really is.

The other great bully on TV right now is Rosie, who has her daily soapbox on The View. It’s her schoolyard bullying tactics, which she so effectively employs on that girlie show, much more than her crackpot conspiracy theories, that I find most objectionable. Day after day, like a true grade-school tyrant, she shouts down anyone who disagrees with her, steps on any applause another opinion might elicit, and, like Imus with his sidekicks, gets the other women on The View to agree with and support her.

Rosie is also an expert at playing the victim and making excuses for herself. As she constantly explains, she suffers from depression and her mother died when she was young — and she is very generous, too. Of course, Rosie, in true bully fashion, is afraid to have anyone on the show who might have the power to say, “Hey, Rosie, put up your dukes,” and then, through argument, win a fair fight with her.

Maybe the next media tempest will be when Rosie goes too far. Although she is very well protected, it probably will happen, and the pundits will once again have the chance to talk about the one thing they all agree upon — the enormous power those in media now have.

A couple of weeks ago, Libertas had a great post on A Face In The Crowd, Elia Kazan’s's seminal late 1950s movie about a populist figure given a national platform by television who quickly becomes a demagogue. When I saw the movie for the first time on TMC or AMC in the late 1990s, Andy Griffith's performance in the lead role (which instantly put him on the map in Hollywood) reminded me instantly of James Carville; some might instead see Rush or O'Reilly in it. But it really is a dramatic foreshadowing of how today's media both invents public figures, lets them run fast, loud, and out of control, usually until its too late, and then quickly pulls the plug on them, and is well worth your time on DVD or next time it's on cable.

In one sense, the current hyperventilating by Imus, Rosie, Sharpton, et al represent the death rumbles of an eighty year old mass electronic media in an era when everyone will eventually have his own blog--and heck, if they want it bad enough, their own TV station. But considering how well a fifty year old movie still depicts today's events, the medium may change, but not the urge to demagogue it.

This flowchart looks about right to me.

(Via Dr. Helen.)

Clive Davis writes:

Until I dropped into Jackie Danicki's, I wasn't even aware that Web pioneer Dave Winer had just celebrated his tenth anniversary. This is what "the longest continuing running weblog on the Internet" looked like, more or less, in April 1997.

It's sort of along the lines of James Lileks' early Bleats in terms of first generation home-rolled HTML craftsmanship, though much more link-oriented than longform prose.

And incidentally, we celebrated five years worth of blatherifics ourselves last month. Here are some overly exuberant thoughts on the subject a few anniversaries ago.

Update: "The site sure was ugly back then. I think we've grown up a lot in ten years". Courtesy of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, here's what TownHall.com looked like a decade ago in version 1.0 mode.

Moby would surely approve, right?

The truth is out there--somewhere at the bottom of the North Atlantic or a Sears Kenmore freezer's icemaker:

Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow Of Death, I will fear no evil. For I am the baddest Muppet in the valley.

(And for additional silliness in a similar vein, don't miss Kermit Reznor as well in the same post.)

The parent companies of Fox and NBC are teaming up to battle YouTube.

Good question from Betsy Newmark, who concludes:

When campaign finance reform was being debated, critics said that it was futile to try to keep money out of politics and that it would find a way to influence campaigns. Now, massive infusions of money are not even necessary for someone unconnected to campaigns to have an impact.

The money in politics got infinitely more massive after World War II, when it became increasingly neccessary to buy national television advertising, in quantity. In 2004, the Internet gave the Swift Vets much more reach and exposure than their relatively meager ad budget would have allowed via television alone. When they were able to extend their reach dramatically via a Web-based viral campaign, we got a clear preview of the future--and a huge warning to television networks. While those networks aren't going away, their power to shape events from a handful of office buildings in Manhattan has weakened dramatically.

(Though far from entirely, of course.)

Update: "Nothing terrifies Democratic politicians like the prospect of democratic political campaigns".

Hugh Hewitt is promising "$1,000 to the best YouTube-posted ad promoting A Mormon In The White House".

Details here; meanwhile, Jonathan Garthwaite asks, "Will a YouTube Video Decide the Next President?"

Just click:

More details here; for our interview last year with Even Coyne Maloney on DIY video, click here.

Back when most people we're still figuring out how to connect their 14.4 kbps modems to AOL, Matt Drudge arrived on the Internet and became the 'Net's first household-name journalist, much to the chagrin of every journalist dining in the Grill Room of the Four Seasons whose last name wasn't Ailes. Drudge got to the 'Net first, established a mighty beachhead, and was the source of breaking news (and a fair amount of gossip) before the Blogosphere began.

Drudge of course is famously prickly when called a blogger. And while it's fair to say that Drudge himself is not a blogger based on his site's format, in the past he's a bit more open-minded about those who followed in his wake, telling an interviewer in 2005:

They tried calling it “Me-Zine” before, that was the word they were going to do, which also was offensive, as if the editors of the papers don’t make their own decisions and it’s their own version of a Me-Zine, as if Bill Keller doesn’t make the decision what is on the front page - that’s HIS Me-Zine.

I just don’t like these negative terms. They’re individuals on the internet, living out their dreams.

But if their dreams also include video, apparently that's a technology too far for Drudge:

Maybe we’ll do, uh, uh, a commentary on the Internet like Michelle Malkin. Maybe I’ll stand in front of like a blue screen and hold a banana and start talking into the Internets. (Sneering tone) ‘This is Matt Drudge reporting on Hot Air.’ Agggh. You know. It’s ridiculous. Looks like, you know, Captain Kangaroo time, Michelle. Get real.

That seems an incredibly cheap shot to me. As Libertas writes about indy filmmaking, "If you’re going to make a no-budget film anything that has nothing to do with budget must be executed perfectly...What doesn’t cost money, you must excel at". And the videos produced by Michelle's small Hot Air team do just that.

Don't believe me? If you're new to the technology, try making one yourself with the same production values: this isn't someone borrowing his family camcorder for a blurry unedited spittle-flecked rant to upload to YouTube. Michelle's videos, even setting aside their often well-written content, are extremely slickly produced, and could easily be cut into a nightly news program with no loss of quality, and that speaks volumes about how technology has leveled the playing field between billion dollar networks and (comparatively speaking), a shoestring operation.

There's no doubt that Drudge deserves an enormous amount of credit from being both a prominent early adopter, and an even more visible target for elites fearful of their status. And yet, faced with an ever-increasing new media environment, Drudge certainly seems to spend a lot of time looking over his shoulder, and risks turning into a new media version of the very same dinosaurs whose hermetically-sealed media world he up-ended.

Compare Drudge's quotes to those of the man who helped put another Internet news format--the Blogosphere--on the map, and has not only linked to those who've been inspired by him, but to whole lists of them. Since increasing competition is inevitable, that seems to be a much healthier attitude.

Update: Welcome Drudge Podcast readers! Umm, listeners...err, readers...Let's try that again: Welcome Drudge fans!

"There's only one thing in the world I want and that is Ed Driscoll!"--Did these discerning readers say that? Err, not that we're aware of.

But The Sloganizer did. It's full of a bazillion clichéd slogans that taste good, like an old advertising slogan should. You simply plug your name or product into the site, producing results such as this:

Nobody Doesn't Like Ed Driscoll!

Ed Driscoll, Love It Or Leave It!

The Ed Driscoll Universe!

Ed Driscoll: Impossible Is Nothing!

I'd Do Anything For Ed Driscoll!

(As found by “Jules Crittenden Is Our Middle Name!”)

Good to see that Hollywood is finally raiding the Blogosphere for new talent:

And it's astonishing that YouTube selected the apex moment of the trailer for its random screen grab!

(For the real thing, click here.)

In Opinion Journal, Paul Kedrosky has some thoughts on "Dr. Evil (a k a Sumner Redstone) and his one billion dollar lawsuit" against YouTube (or more specfically, its parent company, Google):

Consumers have spoken, and they don't like the way that electronic media--whether music, television or movies--is being packaged and sold to them. A decade ago they rebelled against being forced to buy entire CDs when they only wanted the few good tracks, and thus spawned Napster. Today, using YouTube, they are rebelling against being forced to watch entire programs when they only really want the 20-second part of American Idol last night where the contestant forgot the song lyrics and broke down in tears. Or a hockey fight. Or whatever.

Seeing that digital media can be sold to them in the equivalent of six-packs, sips and pint bottles, consumers no longer want to buy it by the truckload. And they resent being told by companies like Viacom that they can't have it, or that if they want it they have to go a different site for every clip owner. Consumers don't mind specialty stores, but they also want online Wal-Marts of media, mega-stores where they can buy whatever they want, without having to go to Viacom for this, ESPN for that, CNN for the next thing, and so on.

That is why, to be blunt, YouTube doesn't matter. Because if Viacom wins this suit and busts YouTube--and there is a very good chance it will win; it is, after all, uncontested that this is Viacom's media property we are talking about--that won't change what consumers want one whit. They are demanding unbundled media, sold everywhere and in myriad assortments. Period. And if Viacom won't provide it then some new media entrepreneurs will.

Yet another case of the ongoing civil war between North and South--California that is: Hollywood versus Silicon Valley.

Steve Frank of California Political News And Views asks, "Is The Mainstream Media In The Midst Of Its Demise?"

Readership of newspapers is down 3% in a year. Viewing of ABC, NBC and CBS is down, in total. Do you know anyone that watches Katie Couric?

Cable TV, blogs and online newsletters and web sites are believed more than CNN could hope for.

Apologists for the Left are down to blackmailing Democrats NOT to debate, because the debate is sponsored by Fox News. This type of action is what you would expect in Cuba, not a free society.

The Age of Cronkite is over. People talk back to Wolf Blitzer, challenge The NY Times and cancel the Washington Post.

As Bob Dylan would say, "the times, they are a’changin". When Hillary claims to be anti-war, her votes are brought up. When she claims she supports the troops, her votes are brought up. Obama claims to be a moderate and his bill in 2003-4 to impeach President Bush, as a State Senator, is brought up. These are never written about in the SF Chronicle or talked about by Brian Williams, it is the new media that reminds us of the truth, not the press release fantasy of these Leftists.

No thanks to the mainstream media, but the facts are getting out and they are inconvenient to the Left.

It looks to me, by words and deeds, the mainstream media is causing its own demise.

You're not the only one, Steve. But as I wrote at the start of last month, the sheer vested power of the legacy media means that they're not very likely to go away soon. I do wonder though, where all of their recent credibility meltdowns will lead them, while simultaneously, their power becomes increasingly diluted by the growing Long Tail of the 'Net and the Blogosphere since 9/11.

"Well, this is an interesting twist. YouTube, known in these parts for banning those who insult Islam, is now being banned for carrying videos that insult Turkey".

Michelle Malkin links to a BBC article on the latest in a series of accuracy-related scandals involving Wikipedia:

Internet site Wikipedia has been hit by controversy after the disclosure that a prominent editor had assumed a false identity complete with fake PhD. The editor, known as Essjay, had described himself as a professor of religion at a private university.

But he was in fact Ryan Jordan, 24, a college student from Kentucky who used texts such as Catholicism for Dummies. He has now retired from the site. Under the name Essjay, Mr Jordan edited articles and also had the authority to arbitrate disputes between authors and remove site vandalism.

In his user profile, he said he taught both undergraduate and graduate theology, and in an interview with the New Yorker in July 2006, was described as a "tenured professor of religion".

The response of WIkipedia's founder?

Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikia and of Wikipedia, said of Essjay’s invented persona, “I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it.”

And sadly, that's not entirely surprising.

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?

A month ago, I linked to the Newark Star Ledger's nascent video blog site devoted to all things New Jersey (designed by Sekimori, who previously overhauled this site's graphics), and wrote:

Hopefully TV Jersey will have plenty of South Jersey video coverage in addition to Newark and the rest of northern New Jersey.

While the project is being launched by a large metropolitan newspaper that's seeding the site's early video clips, there's no special sauce here. Anybody with a camcorder and editing software, along with a broadband connection for access to YouTube and Blogger.com could put something like this together for their region as well.

David Corrigan wrote me yesterday about his own video blog, a well-produced site whose name says it all: South Jersey Video Magazine.

Here's a recent sample, with footage of an impressive snowbound tiger and other critters "enjoying" a typically harsh New Jersey winter. Sadly, no sloths involved, but I can't tell you how representative the interviewed veterinarian’s accent is of the region I grew up in.

As of the time of this post--and it could change at any moment--here's what's currently at the top of Wikipedia's profile of Beach Boys' lead singer Mike Love:

Michael Edward Love (born March 15, 1941 in Los Angeles, California) is an American singer and songwriter who was one of the lead singers and lyric writers of The Beach Boys. He formed the band along with Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, and a school friend Al Jardine. He is an asshole.

He may or may not be, but it is amazing what slips through the cracks at "the open-sourced encyclopedia"; John Seigenthaler Sr. could not be reached for comment.

Update: Blink and you miss it! It appears to be gone now, but I did manage a screen capture before it vanished down the Memory Wikihole.

Glenn Reynolds recently wrote:

I find [Wikipedia] a decent place for casual reference when the subjects aren't politically charged, but much less useful when they are.

But even with something as innocuous and non-political a topic as this, it's a reminder that the Wiki page you're reading--and citing--on a particular topic can change literally from minute to minute.

Or, Miami Vice meets YouTube: "Mexican drug cartels taunt each other with YouTube videos".

Just to complete the already strained analogies, would the Corleone family have taunted Moe Green and Sollozzo with this in the 1940s if the technology existed back then...er, and if they weren't all fictitious characters, of course?

Infoworld reports:

Yahoo Inc. has launched a service called Pipes designed to let regular users mix different RSS and Atom feeds and create data "mashups," a process that so far has required programming knowledge.

Pipes features a drag-and-drop interface that the company hopes non-technical users will find simple and intuitive as they manipulate content syndication feeds to combine data in new and useful ways.

An example of a Pipe is this one , which meshes listings from Craigslist with data from Yahoo's local search engine to display apartments for rent near any business, Yahoo said.

Another one collates news about topics chosen by the user from a variety of sources.

"Pipes' initial set of modules lets you assemble personalized information sources out of existing Web services and data feeds. Pipes outputs standard RSS 2.0, so you can subscribe to and read your pipes in your favorite aggregator. You can also create pipes that accept user input and run them on our servers as a kind of miniature Web application," reads Yahoo's description of the service , posted Wednesday night.

While Pipes today lets users mix data from RSS and Atom feeds, Yahoo hopes to extend the service to support other data formats, Web services, processing modules and output renderings, Yahoo said. For example, Yahoo will open up access to the Pipes engine to programmers and add support for the KML data source, which is used to display geographic data in Google Inc.'s popular Google Earth mapping application and Google Maps Web site.

As if they didn't need it, this is yet another reason for Pinch & crew to be scared: it's now a breeze to build your own newspaper out of the best bits of information sources from around the world.

Arnold Kling writes, "how would history have been different had television been available in the 18th century but not in the 21st century, rather than vice-versa? Second, where does the Internet fit in?":

In the eighteenth century, the newly-independent United States held a Convention in order to bring its Articles of Confederation up to date. This contentious, deliberative process resulted in one of the most significant documents in human history -- our Constitution.

In our century, we have seen attempts at historic Constitutions in the European Union and Iraq that so far have failed. The EU produced a bloated document filled with politically correct phrases embodying an unworkable vision, mercifully not yet ratified due to an outbreak of rebellion by voters in the Netherlands and France. The Iraqi Constitution failed to pacify key interest groups, and as a result it has been shattered by insurgents and armed militias.

What if the Constitutional Convention of the 18th century had been held in the media environment of today? My guess is that the outcome would have been somewhere in between what we have seen in Europe and what we saw in Iraq.

By the same token, had the European Constitution been written in a media environment dominated by the written word, perhaps it would have been a humbler, simpler, more pragmatic document. Perhaps if Iraq were not under the glare of television, the suicide bombers and terrorists would not have nearly as much impact on the public mind, there or in the United States, and the forces of peace could prevail.

The Internet has dramatically accelerated the balkanization of mass culture, a trend which was already beginning in the 1970s. Television and print news are increasingly a medium for the elderly--"newspapers are for people who remember newspapers", as Vanity Fair's Michael Wolff recently wrote. And with Hollywood doing everything it can to diminish its power as the last mass medium, oddly enough, politics, and the shared interest in what comes out of Washington, is one of the last unifying elements of popular culture.

I lived in New Jersey for over 30 years, so I'm happy to see Newark's Star-Ledger launch TV Jersey:

New Jersey needs a television station to call its own. Programmed by New Jerseyans, for New Jerseyans. TVJersey has no broadcast towers, no satellites. It doesn’t even have a studio. But it has you. And what you produce, we’ll promote. Just tag your videos on youtube with tvjersey, and we’ll find them. (We’re going to start using some other services soon.) We might find them even if you don’t. And you can always send us ideas and links at video [at] tvjersey dot com. Together, we’ll build the TV station we deserve.

And there's no reason why other sites can't join them, if Jersey-centric Websurfers detect a bias or tone they're uncomfortable with, or aren't happy with the site's amount of coverage. And speaking of which, hopefully TV Jersey will have plenty of South Jersey video coverage in addition to Newark and the rest of northern New Jersey.

While the project is being launched by a large metropolitan newspaper that's seeding the site's early video clips, there's no special sauce here. Anybody with a camcorder and editing software, along with a broadband connection for access to YouTube and Blogger.com could put something like this together for their region as well.

Update: Further thoughts from Jeff Jarvis; interesting comments as well, immediately below them.

The Technorati search engine currently tracks over 63 million blogs, which means there are lots of new blogs starting every day. Technorati's in-house slogan is that with that many weblogs, "some of them have to be good". But alas, many of their owners will also do very stupid things from time to time. Take a hint from a couple of guys (both coincidentally named Ed) who've been in the Blogosphere for a while. it's basic career advice, actually:

Work in a retail store? Don't post about famous customers walking in, no matter how much you despise them or their politics.

Update: Or the appearance of their spouses.

For years, scientists have pondered a crucial epistemological question: what consequences would result if the DNA of Howdy Dowdy and Charles Bronson were combined.

[Caine places sunglasses on face]

Now. We. Know.

[Cue Theme Song]

Read More »

Katie Couric offers a silver bullet to critics of her editorializing the news (at CBS? Perish the thought!):

One of Ms. Couric’s innovations—or corruptions—of the form is that she occasionally offers up her own reaction to the stories that appear on her broadcast. A vestige of her chattier Today Show days, these frequent interjections are the subject of much deep thought and close analysis in the halls of CBS—and the subject of sniggering elsewhere in television news.

* * *

“I think that, probably it may be off-putting at times to some people who are used to a very, very buttoned-up newscast that doesn’t have much leeway for an occasional glimpse of personality, but you know, I try. I’ve always had the ‘less is more’ philosophy, believe it or not, but there are times when I think it’s personally fine. If people feel discomfort, maybe they should consider a suppository.”

Thus describing, with unintended irony, 75 percent of the advertising on the show, due to its increasingly elderly demographic.

Vanity Fair's Michael Wolff recently described the newspaper as "a medium for old people (newspapers are for people who remember newspapers)". Its putative would-be video successor is already in similar territory, even if it doesn't know it yet.

Update: Neo-Neocon has some thoughts on the print media's own repeated editorializing within otherwise straightforward news stories. Of course, as Michael Kinsley noted last year, for the legacy media, this is the "Twilight of Objectivity". Though I'd argue that they're already in the era of post-objectivity.

John Podhoretz corrects Matt Drudge.

Matt Drudge writes, "Threatened By The Internet, Time Magazine Slims Down":

TIME magazine, which has been coming out every Monday for over 36 years, hit the streets last Friday instead.

"I believe that getting the magazine on newsstands on Friday helps us set the news agenda," explained Richard Stengel, the managing editor.

NEW YORK TIMES media columnist David Carr takes the opportunity to rain on TIME's first weekend parade:

"At the end of the month, there will be significant layoffs at the magazine division... In the last six months, the huge rate base of Time magazine has been cut by almost 20 percent, the street date has been moved, and at the end of the month, the standard editorial model -- a centralized, well-paid cadre processing every bit of copy that comes in the door -- will be kaput..."

Carr explains: 'A tremendous amount of effort has been expended on TIME's new Web site, which makes its debut Monday."

Carr knocks the print magazine: "In its current state, a thin weekly on increasingly thin paper, TIME magazine is not much of a thing to behold."

Not that the New York Times is the picture of health of course, either financially or in terms of flawless journalistic credibility. The Feiler Faster Principle and the Long Tail of the Internet have both radically reshaped the media environment that both of these two old liberal warhorses compete in.

James Lileks once described how that world used to work:

The News was a venerable symbol of childhood’s World of Authority, like Life magazine and those boring but somehow important “White Paper” documentaries on TV. The news was handed down, not passed around. The news was bestowed, not shared.

The news wasn’t out there 24-7, swirling around, waiting for you to open a window; it came in predictable intervals in varying portions. The radio news in the morning came at eight, brought to us by Northwest Orient (gonnngggg) Airlines; nothing happened in the world for the rest of the day. Paul Harvey summed up the general pith of the global gist at noon, but he rarely broke news. (He will, nevertheless, outlast them all. Because he's radio.) The paper came at four. It was a careful, measured thing, having had all day to think about matters. Then came the evening news: black and white, bare sets, Authority Men in grey suits with black glasses and the sober look of judges who had left the robe at home for a day. Nothing happened for the rest of the night; the ten o’clock news managed to squeeze the entire world through the tiny aperture of All Things Fargo. The world, in general, kept its distance – thanks to Cronkite and the AP wire.

In this context, a Special Bulletin would make you soil your drawers. They didn’t break in for anything. When you heard the words “We interrupt this program,” the best you could hope for was an assassination.

The news was like oil – pumped from select locations, refined by a few big companies.

Unless you're in the demographic that's utterly frightened by the Internet (and you're not, since you're reading this), that's not at all how you get your news these days, is it?

Of course, it's not like these trends haven't been continuously predicted since about forty years ago. But as I've noted before, the mass media seems utterly resistant at times to new trends. But in the 1990s, as the rate of media change began to dramatically accelerate, the legacy media seemed to think that attacking newcomers to the information sphere was a better plan than actually preparing for the current environment.

Update: Related thoughts from Mickey Kaus:

Page C5: The NYT sells moneymaking TV stations to refocus on "synergies" between its struggling newspapers and "digitial businesses." .... "Synergies." Where' did I hear that word recently, in a media context? ... Now I remember. ... P.S.: Stock down 14%. Sell off of profitable assets. We're only just beginning to glimpse Pinch's visionary plan for victory! ...

In the meantime...

Speaking of the Long Tail and pop culture, accompanying the buyer's guide for DVD production and editing hardware and software in the latest "dead tree" edition of Videomaker magazine is my introduction to the topic.

And for those feeling really ambitious, don't miss the ongoing guide to shooting your own production that's been running at Libertas. Just keep scrolling through their "Put Up Or Shut Up" category.

(Previous thoughts on the topic here.)

Britain's Independent dubs 2007 "The Year of the Comeback", with Indiana Jones and Stallone's Rocky reappearing at your local multiplex, and inside your nearest hockey arena, The Police, and the best-selling Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks line-up of Genesis. While it will be fun to see some of the old boys back in action, it's also a reminder of how the Long Tail has radically impacted mass culture. As Jonah Goldberg wrote a few years ago about American network TV and the proliferation of seemingly innumerable spin-offs of Law & Order, CSI, and other sclerotic video franchises:

The networks can't let go, because every time they cancel an established show, the viewers, particularly the younger ones, vanish. No one thinks it's worth investing in a new show. The rise in reality shows has been cited by many as a sign of creative exhaustion on the part of Hollywood

In an era where mass culture in toto has been fractured into dozens and dozens of niche markets, the same holds true for the movie and music world as well.

Or as Tammy Bruce writes, "This is your spider. This is your spider on drugs":

Any questions?

Brent Bozell makes an interesting observation about the timing of Michael Richards' meltdown that I hadn't caught:

On the very day that Fox announced it was withdrawing both the O.J. book and the TV show, news emerged that another Hollywood has-been, comedian Michael Richards, went on a screaming frenzy at the Laugh Factory, using the N-word against two black men heckling from the audience.

It's also worth noting that Richards (just last week, though it seems like it was ages ago, doesn't it?), and now this week, Danny DeVito, were both caught by something I dubbed the Internet Immortality Thesis at the start of the month.

(Which seems like a lifetime ago, after the election, Thanksgiving, OJ, Richards, DeVito, the new Bond movie that was actually pretty good for a change...wow, what a long strange month it's been!)

At dinner tonight, I overhead the couple at the table next to ours discussing Danny DeVito's drunken appearance on The View, with the husband telling his wife, "Hey, just download it off YouTube--that's where I saw it". In the past, a celebrity could drink himself blotto in Johnny Carson's green room, stumble through an appearance, and be pretty much assured that unless he really said something divisive, it was on the air and done. (This really worked if you were a liberal politician and said something idiotic, drunk or sober.) And even in the era of VCRs, so what if a handful of people taped it?

Today, YouTube and the Blogosphere have changed all that, and in an era of demassified individual publishing, the safety net that the liberal mass media provided its favorite sons no longer exists. That doesn't mean that entertainers such as Richards and DeVito won't still make fools of themselves from time to time--that's pretty much the main role that celebrities play in today's culture these days. But it should make them pause for thought.

Just ask Senator Kerry--and former Senator Allen.

Update: Related thoughts from Carol Platt Liebau; Hugh Hewitt observes that the Boston Globe is still protecting Kerry, after all these years.

In Opinion Journal, Om Malick explores the importance of software platforms:

A couple of years ago, in the days before YouTube, a short video clip spread like wildfire on the Internet. It showed the fourth richest man on the planet, Steve Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, doing a crazy jig onstage at a conference, screaming "developers, developers, developers." Truer words have never been spoken--or repeated. Without "developers," Microsoft would not possess its desktop monopoly or billions of dollars in profits.

Those developers are the little platoons of software programmers and product-inventors who turn operating systems (like Microsoft's Windows), Internet browsers (Firefox), game devices (PlayStation) and much else into something more than themselves--into "platforms" upon which a whole economic ecosystem rests. It is impossible to imagine Dell Computer's success, or that of Intuit Corp. or even Electronic Arts (the videogame company) without the platform that Windows constructed with the help, so to speak, of Microsoft. Windows is but one example of many software engines that have propelled mega-billion-dollar industries and created wealth beyond compare. Just as the internal combustion engine led to the formation of the modern automobile industry and ended up driving so much else in the economy (think only of steel and gasoline), invisible engines are now powering the vast postindustrial economies in which we live and work.

Such is the persuasive thesis of "Invisible Engines," by David S. Evans, Andrei Hagiu and Richard Schmalensee. The authors document the rise of platforms, outline the strategies by which they are developed and marketed, and offer little-known details about popular devices--Sony's PlayStation, Apple's iPod, Palm Treo--that have become essential aspects of our modern lives.

No wonder the American left and the EU want/wanted to topple Microsoft and long for the 1950s--or at least the 1970s, when things were so much simpler at the tail end of the industrial revolution rather than its information-based demassified successor.

As Glenn Reynolds writes, "If you're in London, Jackie Danicki could use your help with a photo identification".

...by totally ignoring it on their splash page. And once again, as with Memorial Day, the Dogpile seach engine does commemorate it. As I wrote back in May:

Dogpile's illustration looks like it was knocked off by a Web artist in a couple of hours at most and looks perfectly appropriate to me; why couldn't Google do the same? (And yes, I know the answer.)

Yesterday, Go Daddy, the Internet registraton Website celebrated the Marines' 231st birthday with a tribute so patriotic it would have caused tubercular blue state veins to pop throughout Google's boardroom if an employee there had proposed it.

For Pajamas' Veterans' Day round-up, click here.

(On the hand, Google's silence is far more admirable than this quote from the Australian Age's Terry Lane.)

Update: Found via the Corner, the Canadian version of Google celebrates Remembrance Day. But I guess that would have been far too jingoistic for the boys in Mountain View.

The New York Times reports:

On a recent trip to New York City, Russell Crowe was asked by reporters why he had dropped out of negotiations to star in a new movie being directed by Baz Luhrmann and produced by 20th Century Fox.

A rally in September sought benefits for TV writers. The squeeze is also affecting actors and producers.
The Academy Award winner, never one to mince words, suggested it was, in part, the money. “I do charity work, but I don’t do charity work for major studios,” Mr. Crowe said.

It seems the needy are not the only ones in Hollywood with their hands out. Movie and television studios, facing escalating budgets, rampant piracy and the uncertain future of new media, are demanding concessions from talent. But as actors, directors and writers feel the squeeze, many are not happy about it.

Worse, the tension is not likely to ease soon. As studios are set to begin contract negotiations with talent in January, all sides are girding for battle.

Hollywood is in the midst of a strategic shift. The average cost to make and market a movie has skyrocketed — to $96.2 million last year, from $54.1 million in 1995 — while lucrative DVD sales have flattened. Major film studios are fending off illegal piracy, which industry executives say accounted for $1.3 billion in lost revenue in the United States last year.

The growth of new media threatens to undermine traditional businesses, while studios are flummoxed about how to take advantage of the new opportunities they represent. And movies and TV also face tough new competition from video games and online social networking sites. Even cellphones have become a favorite diversion among the young.

Why, it's like The Era of Big Cinema Is Over, or something!

Back in August of 2004, I wrote that Senator Kerry was "Built For A 1972 Media".

Austin Bay updates the meme: "John Kerry’s simply not ready for the YouTube world."

Read the rest.

Mickey Kaus frequently refers to the Feiler Faster Thesis, which describes the impact that the high speed of the Internet has on conventional wisdom.

I'm very much in agreement with this Reuters piece on its corollary, a piece titled, "Politicians beware--Internet prolongs blunders". While the article mentions both Kerry's and George Allen's gaffes for balance, I think the subject of the piece has more impact on the left than the right. For some background on why this is, here's something I wrote in 2004:

Kerry's massively invented narrative ("swashbuckling Swift Boat lieutenant"--as Steyn describes him--turned brave defender of soldiers' rights) was built to survive the glancing scrutiny (if you can call it that) of a 1972-era media that consisted of three TV networks with half hour evening news shows, and a few liberal big city newspapers, all of which were staffed with journalists more or less largely sympathetic to Kerry's leftist anti-American beliefs.

But between the Swift Boat Vets and the Blogosphere, there are far too many people examining Kerry's story, and his "reporting for duty" edifice has crumbled.

Is that fair? We'll, we're deciding if we want the man to have the key to the most powerful arsenal ever assembled. If he can't survive the scrutiny of the Blogosphere, who James Lileks recently described as an "obsessive sort with lots of time on their hands", is he someone who should be trusted with this power?

And as I just mentioned in the previous post, it's a lot easier to shift your opinions on matters such as Iraq when you're dealing in a dead tree medium, rather than one with hyperlinks and search engines. Or as Hugh Hewitt recently posited to ABC's Mark Halperin:

HH: I think my giant unified field theory here is that liberal media has destroyed the necessity of the left having to debate, having to reach a message across, because you guys have always papered over the weakness of their arguments. And so, in essence, by creating an echo chamber, and by allowing them to get away with saying silly things, you’ve destroyed the incentive to be smart and facile.

MH: I agree.

Curiously though, there's one "blunder" that's been prolonged by the Internet; that--oddly enough!--the Reuters article omits.

Can't imagine why.

This article in the Denver Post (H/T: OJ) sounds much like the piece I wrote for TCS Daily last week, except that the screen size is quite a bit smaller. But, then, just like the movie industry, so is the content, these days:

They're not firing, they're "rightsizing." They're not cost-cutting, they're inventing fabulous user-generated programming.

In the euphemistic world of network TV, executives make cutbacks sound like boldly progressive new ventures. The fact is, nobody knows whether today's cutback will yield tomorrow's creative, fantastically successful breakthrough program.

Last week NBC slashed jobs and put an end to expensive early-evening dramas, alerting viewers that, in the future, we should expect "Deal or No Deal" rather than "Friday Night Lights" in the 7 p.m. time slot. Cheaper to produce and more reliable in the ratings, quiz shows are one economical answer to NBC's current woes.

Wait - it gets cheaper.

The networks are launching do-it-yourself video sites, inviting amateur filmmakers to contribute content. They hail these new ventures as the wave of the techno-future.

Fox's "On the Lot," due early next year from Mark Burnett and Steven Spielberg (online at thelot.com), offers would-be filmmakers the chance to work with the master. NBC-bound "It's Your Show," backed by Carson Daly (itsyourshowtv.com), offers cash prizes for the best homemade videos.

CBS is inviting user submissions to its "channel" on YouTube, hoping that partnership will strike gold. Eventually this may go beyond audition tapes for the next "Amazing Race."

Late-night host Daly recently talked about his online experiment, which eventually will be reshaped into a primetime show for NBC. Cashing in on the popularity of YouTube, Daly's "It's Your Show" is the viral video equivalent of "America's Funniest Home Videos," intended to entice amateur videomakers. Complete with a helpful production tool kit, it picks up where lonelygirl15 and lip-synching videos leave off.

"It's a sharing portal, but it does come with some structure," Daly said on a telephone conference call. The network provides a laugh track, for instance, sound effects, cartoon footage, music and a production framework. The tool kit can be applied to whatever mini-masterpiece contributors choose -from "Operation Grandma," where contenders teach a senior how to use new technology, to faux magic tricks pulled off with video editing.

Most appealing to the NBC brass is the fact that the content is practically free (not counting the weekly $1,000 award and a $100,000 challenge), because it's user-generated. The most expensive part of the whole enterprise must be the lawyers' fees for vetting copyright and clearance issues.

Fox's outlay is steeper: The winner gets a $1 million development deal at DreamWorks. Sixteen contestants will be split into teams and given resources to produce a short film. Each week they'll focus on a different genre (comedy, drama, romance, sci-fi) with a studio executive and a film critic among the judges, "American Idol"- style. The result could be a TV show rather than a movie, in which case 20th Century Fox TV has the rights.

Daly's gig is more modest. "The content will define the nature of the TV show," he said. Judging by the submissions online, that means a range from dumb to dumber.

The most popular challenge Daly's site has offered so far is called, "We shut up and you show us how it's done." Industry experts are convinced that air of turning over control to users is crucial. If you believe the hype, entertainment won't flow from a top-down hierarchy anymore; in the future, it will be up for grabs. Let a thousand stu- pid-pet-tricks bloom.

Just wait until audiences figure out that it takes more than a cellphone and a cute idea to create entertainment that can be sustained beyond two minutes.

Previously in this vein, NBC staged a contest for promotional spots for "The Office." The results were "genius," Daly said. In the same way, "It's Your Show" pushes tie-ins to various NBC Universal properties, to keep the corporate business in the forefront.

"Soon everybody's going to be videomaking," Daly predicted. He thinks viral video production will be a teenage rite of passage, like driving a car.

At least until Hollywood says, "You f***ed up--you trusted us", as Universal's lawyers recently said to viral fans of the cult series-turned-cult movie, Firefly.

But then that's far from the first time that the software producers in Southern California have been at war with the products created via the hardware and software producers in Northern California, of course.

Ian Schwartz on the Dixie Chicks:

They insult their audience, insult the President, blame Free Republic, and still wonder why people don’t like them. Emily Robison chimed in and blamed–*gasp*–corporate America for ordering local music stations to stop playing their music. When will these dolts understand that they caused their own downfall? Not Christian “fundamentalist” Christians, not Free Republic, not corporate America.

So they want to consider themselves "transgressive", and attack the same targets that everyone else in Hollywood and the rest of show biz have attacked since Calvin Coolidge was president, and yet whine when they face a backlash?

This is an interesting new trend though: when entertainers were attacking President Reagan back in the 1980s, I don't remember them slagging their audiences as well. Maybe because it's not exactly the best way to build sympathy for your cause. And maybe because audiences didn't have the tools to fight back then.

Just ask Mary Mapes.

Update: Mary Katharine Ham adds, "They're so oppressed that they're getting segments on primetime cable news shows! Man, it's rough being silenced".

Heh, indeed^TM.

Via a couple of recent quotes from George Lucas, I toll the funeral bell for the movie industry as we know it, in an article over at TCS Daily.

(Yes, an old school-style article from yours truly with words and everything at TCS, not one of them new-fangled podcasts that I've been specializing in over there as of late)

Google...what's that?

The Canadian edition of TV Guide's circulation has dwindled from a million copies a week in the 1980s to 243,695, today, as the magazine finally decides to jetison its dead tree edition to go all-Internet.

As for the future of television itself? Well, here's a report that speculates that broadband speeds will hit multiple gigabits per second within a couple of decades. No wonder some guy in a Robb Report magazine said this month that "TV is merging with the Internet", as IPTV slowly begins to roll out.

Update: "The main problem with the legacy media is they’ve yet to adjust to 21st century or even late 20th century economic realities", Dean Barnett writes. And technology is increasingly running further ahead of them.

Ever wonder what would happen if Hal 9000, the Terminator, the Borg, or the desktop computer you're currently staring into decided to finally go behind the cameras, and make movies geared towards their fellow members of the Cybernetic-American community? The results would look pretty much like this:

Hey, the Japanese dating industry is halfway to this point already--this video just takes things to their natural conclusion. By the way, if the filmmakers want to do a musical as a sequel, here are some casting tips they might want to take heed of.

Michael Combs dubs Senator Kerry a Pre-Googleian Liar.

Well, it's not like the Senator has ever demonstrated that he gets the rest of the Internet, of course.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

Orrin Judd, who's hosting the Love of Reading Online Bookfair today, sent me this recent interview on the Barnes & Noble Website with Alvin Toffler. It makes a nice follow-up to my podcast interview with Toffler at TCS Daily earlier this year, and my interview with an emphasis on his War And Anti-War book, from late September of 2001.

On August 28th, 2004 I contrasted how Kerry and the Swift Vets viewed the modern demassified media enviroment. First up, a look at the ol' Winter Soldier:

Kerry's massively invented narrative ("swashbuckling Swift Boat lieutenant"--as Steyn describes him--turned brave defender of soldiers' rights) was built to survive the glancing scrutiny (if you can call it that) of a 1972-era media that consisted of three TV networks with half hour evening news shows, and a few liberal big city newspapers, all of which were staffed with journalists more or less largely sympathetic to Kerry's leftist anti-American beliefs.

But between the Swift Boat Vets and the Blogosphere, there are far too many people examining Kerry's story, and his "reporting for duty" edifice has crumbled.

Is that fair? We'll, we're deciding if we want the man to have the key to the most powerful arsenal ever assembled. If he can't survive the scrutiny of the Blogosphere, who James Lileks recently described as an "obsessive sort with lots of time on their hands", is he someone who should be trusted with this power?

In contrast, while they were refighting the 1972-era Kerry's battles against America, the Swift Vets had an infinitely better command of the modern media world than the Senator's campaign team:

Ironically though, while the Swift Boat Vets have been fighting Kerry over the events of Vietnam and immediately afterwards, they've demonstrated that they understand how the new media works far better than his campaign does. The anonymous staffer that Charles quotes above is quite right: initially, the dino-media didn't have the nerve to go after their man with these charges. But they've lost their role as information gatekeepers. And the Swift Boat Vets seem to understand that intuitively.

"The Fix", The Washington Post's politics blog agrees that the Kerry Camp simply didn't understand today's decentralized media world:

While Kerry's foibles have been well-documented, Harris and Halperin propose that the man most responsible for the Massachusetts senator's defeat was not the candidate but rather Matt Drudge -- founder of the widely read Drudge Report.

Harris and Halperin call Drudge the "single most influential purveyor of information about American politics" and go on to add: "Drudge, with his droll Dickensian name, was not the only media or political agent whose actions led to John Kerry's defeat. But his role placed him at the center of the game -- a New Media World Order in which Drudge was the most potent player in the process and a personifications of the dynamic that did Kerry in."

How was Drudge so influential? By serving as the online platform for carefully planned leaks of damaging information -- some of it personal, some of it professional -- that effectively defined Kerry negatively in the eyes of the voting public.

Example: Kerry got his haircut at a pricey Washington salon? First reported by Drudge.

One more: Negative comments by Kerry about the city of Dubuque? First reported by Drudge two days before Kerry made his first visit to Iowa as a presidential candidate.

Harris and Halperin write: "Presidential campaigns are about storytelling. A winning presidential campaign presents the candidate's life story to voters. A losing campaign allows someone else to frame that story."

Wise words for any candidate considering the 2008 race.

While Drudge's role as a media hub shouldn't be undersold, Harris and Halperin themselves don't seem to grasp the Long Tail of the Blogosphere: between hundreds of bloggers, and the Swift Vets' ability to use the Internet to end-run the legacy media, Kerry suffered a death by a thousand cuts, because he was severely damaged goods long before he won the nomation. As I wrote earlier in August of 2004:

This isn't Bill Clinton's shadowy Whitewater dealings and other murkiness from his salad days as an Arkansas governor. Then-Naval lieutenant Kerry led a remarkably well documented--and even audio and videotaped life in the early 1970s. Didn't he think this material would surface if he chose to run for the presidency? And if so, why did he choose to run so much on his four months in Vietnam, and only spend 26 seconds(!) on his 20 years in the Senate in his acceptance speech at the DNC?

As Glenn Reynolds wrote yesterday about the swift boat vets' ad, "Kerry played right into this with all the stuff about Vietnam and medals".

To have been as high profile, inflamatory, and as well documented as Kerry was in the early 1970s, and not expect it to be used against you if you ran for the presidency seems like an astonishing lack of understanding of the New, New Journalism, to coin a phrase.

Update: Of course, it isn't just presidential candidates and their aides who don't get the Internet. Stephen Spriuell, who runs National Review Online's Media Blog, patiently explains to befuddled journalists assigned to cover the Foley scandal how the Internet works, a subject they haven't understood since, well, the early days of The Drudge Report. Spruiell writes:

I sympathize with reporters who have to explain complicated stories in a small amount of space or time. But seriously: How hard is it to explain the difference between an e-mail and an IM?

Ask Mary Mapes: she didn't even know who the players were on the Internet during the 2004 presidential election, let alone the difference between emails and IMs. And as Spruiell has witnessed firsthand, she's far from the only cyber-clueless member of the legacy media.

Putting the P.C. back into PC video! Hey, remember all the talk from starry-eyed pundits who predicted Internet video would be free from the same deadly-dull uniformity that has crippled the television networks? Dream on, dream on...

(Incidentally, I wonder how many people in YouTube's management had to scramble for a dictionary or Google to figure out what the heck the word "dhimmi" means, after watching this video.)

Update: More video-dhimmitudery spotted here.

The last sentence of this is a classic:

Ten years after he created Fox News Channel, Roger Ailes says he still avoids mentioning his place of employment in certain circles.

"It's just not worth going through the hassle at an elite party," he says. And: "The only reason I know we're doing the right thing is that we're widely criticized." And: "I've never felt out of the mainstream in America. I've felt out of the mainstream at Le Cirque."

Via Stephen Spruiell, who has more thoughts on Fox's tenth anniversary, as does Betsy Newmark.

And incidentally, I think Jonah Goldberg had a great take on Fox a couple of years ago, when he wrote, "at least one of the things that has made Fox News successful isn't that it's right-wing, it is that it's populist." The channel openly roots for the U.S., which, frankly, is more than you can say about the other television news networks.

(At least at the moment.)

Reason unwittingly manages to combine the central theses of two of the more important books on the Internet and technology this year. Their Website features an essay that mashes together the recurring "small breweries empowered by modern technology" subtext of Glenn Reynolds' An Army Of Davids, along with the Long Tail of the Internet meme of Chris Anderson.

Just promise you'll drink something other than Bud when you read it. Unless you're Jonah Goldberg, of course--but that's a whole 'nother meme.

(Via Pajamas HQ.)

Great cartoon illustrating the meme of the Long Tail in action.

Incidentally, the week before last, in Pajamas' "Blog Week In Review" podcast, Glenn Reynolds, Austin Bay and David Corn discussed MySpace and its acquisition by Rupert Murdoch for $580 big ones. Over at Blogcritics, I explore how MySpace is vulnerable to the Long Tail as well, as a competitor called Nextcat sets up shop.

In the latest dead tree issue of National Review (also available online, but subscription required), Jonah Goldberg observes Katie Couric's CBS debut with a yawn and a shrug:

The Big Three anchor system is a nostalgic cargo cult in a profession which can’t bring itself to accept that the era when these broadcasters were “the voice of God” (in the words of one CBS exec) is long gone. All this chatter about how Couric is a “pioneer” fails to grasp that the frontier is closed. It’s like hailing the first woman steamship captain long after the rise of the locomotive and the automobile. Yeah, it’s an accomplishment. But it’s an accomplishment on a sharply sliding scale — something like holding the best Oktoberfest in Orlando.

First of all, being an anchor just isn’t that hard. Broadcast journalism is one of the few fields in American life where the work gets demonstrably easier the higher you go. Or, to be fairer, the parts of the job that have to do with what everyone thinks of as “journalism” get easier and easier, and in some cases the journalism simply vanishes altogether. Andrew Tyndall, the respected TV analyst, defines the job of news anchor as being able to read the news and “sitting behind the desk when there’s a crisis.”

Second, and more to the point, nobody’s watching. The average viewer of a Big Three broadcast is 60 years old. Only about 10 percent of viewers are under 35. The dream is that by having Katie on the air, CBS will attract an audience slightly less interested in Viagra, Flomax, Depends, and other products aimed at the geriatric set. But the truth is that younger people will never return to the Big Three networks, for the simple reason that they don’t have to. News-anchor festishists forget that Cronkite & Co. commanded so much authority mainly because they had no competition. CBS is betting that, by trading avuncular for peppy, it will be able to turn back the clock. It’s just not going to happen.

Katie is at least an extremely youthful-looking (dare I say, perky?) 49. Found via Maggie's Farm, Alex Beam writes that NPR has, if anything, an even worse aging issue with both its audience and its anchors:

The once-incisive Daniel Schorr, now 90, triggers a Pavlovian station-changing reflex. One of NPR's top talk show hosts is the ancient, politically connected, unlistenable Diane Rehm , who has been suffering from a speech disorder for years. (She's on in New Hampshire.) It's the retirement community of the air!

So, if you pumped $225 million into the public radio system -- the Kroc endowment spins off about $10 million a year -- listenership would go up, right? Um, no. At a big NPR confab in Philadelphia last week, programmers learned that ``the public radio audience is starting to decline after long, steady growth," according to Lydon's blog. NPR executive Stern prefers to characterize the decline as ``drift, flatness or maybe a plateau after a period of unstoppable growth . . . We're facing the same challenges everyone is," he explains, primarily from the Internet.

Here is the problem. What was once an insurgent radio movement now sounds like Chet Huntley reading the evening news. Call it NPR Classic. But NPR management won't put the old warhorses like Cokie and Linda out to pasture for fear of alienating the loyal listeners who answer the bell during pledge drives.

And for reasons that combine technology and demographics, it's an extremely safe bet that both networks' audiences will only get grayer--and smaller--moving forward.

Update: Rand Simberg has a succinct capsule summary of Katie Couric...blogger.

As with Memorial Day, there's nothing at all commemorating 9/11 on Google's splash page. Meanwhile, the Dogpile search engine does have an illustration, as Jonah Goldberg spotted.

As I wrote this past May:

Dogpile's illustration looks like it was knocked off by a Web artist in a couple of hours at most and looks perfectly appropriate to me; why couldn't Google do the same? (And yes, I know the answer.)

Update: Even the liberal, multiculti Internet Movie Database had the daily quote on their homepage from this movie today. Kudos to them for doing so.

Life really does imitate South Park:

Voiceover: Coming, this summer! It's the digitally enhanced re-release of the very first pilot episode of South Park! Yes, the classic, rough, hand-made first episode is getting a make-over for 2002! The simple, funny aliens are now super badass and cool! Flying saucer? No longer cheap construction paper, but a 4.0 megapixel constructed through a masterpiece of technology! Everything's new! New is better!

Trey Parker: When we first made South Park, we didn't wanna use construction paper. We just had to because it was cheap.

Matt Stone: And now with new technology we can finally remaster South Park, make it look sharp, clean and focused.

Trey Parker: Expensive.

Voiceover: Yes, all the charm of a simple little cartoon will melt before your eyes as it is replaced by newer and more standardized animation!

Trey Parker: For instance, in the scene at the bus stop, we always meant to have Imperial walkers and giant dewback lizards in the background, but simply couldn't afford it.

Voiceover: Get this special enhanced version quick, because another enhanced version will likely be coming out for 2003!

Paramount has decided to jump into what is sure to become an endless George Lucas-style retrofitting of their own sci-fi mega-franchise:

CBS has just informed TV Guide's Insider that all 79 episodes of Gene Roddenberry's classic Star Trek: The Original Series are being given a special effects upgrade with new CG effects. Longtime Trek veterans Michael Okuda, Denise Okuda and David Rossi are apparently involved in the process to ensure that this is a class effort, as opposed to some kind of 'Where's Jar-Jar' operation. Says Mike in the Insider report: "We're taking great pains to respect the integrity and style of the original. Our goal is to always ask ourselves: What would Roddenberry have done with today's technology?" The ships will now have more detail, backgrounds will be more lively with people and activity, landscapes will now feature moving clouds, etc. The show's opening will be overhauled too, and the theme music has been re-recorded with a larger orchestra. What's more, technical goofs in the original production will apparently be fixed.

I realize that a prime way that studios make money these days is by churning their archives as much as possible, but how often do you go back to the same well? I'm afraid that we're witnessing the birth of a Hollywood equivalent of Andy & Bill's Law. Every time new chips and software are designed that allow more powerful special effects, both Lucas and Paramount will now feel obligated to airbrush their franchises. Sadly, the dilution of mass culture seems to compel Hollywood to mine its best-known commodities as frequently as possible, as no equivalent cash cows are on the immediate horizon.

Chris Anderson puts up a fun YouTube clip starring Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert and writes:

The Colbert Report last week had a great riff on the fragmentation of media and culture. Starting with a scrapbook of 1970s advertisements that once lodged in our collective consciousness ("plop, plop, fizz, fizz.."), Colbert laments the end of the water-cooler era.

"It's not just advertising where the center cannot hold. It's all across our pop cultural landscape. There's no one band we all love. There's no one newsman we can all trust/believe is a subversive....Where is America's cultural cohesiveness? Where is the common experience? "

So he decides to anoint a commercial to once again unify us: Kraft's "Crumbelieveable"

"That's not just a commercial for cheese, it's also a perfect metaphor for the state of our pop culture: crumbled into little pieces."

And then he launches into a Colbert Special Report that could have been a chapter in my book.

In his clip, Colbert asks where is the shared cultural experience that unifies us the same way that previous generations shared a collective culture. And sadly, 9/11 is one of the few events large enough to reach all corners of a increasingly demassified society.

Allah looks at the downside of the Long Tail--a glut of DIY "We Had It Coming/ It's All Bush's Fault" conspiracy/ appeasement/ equivalence videos that will be popping up on YouTube between now and a week from now. As Allah writes, "They’ve been itching for a new terror attack to blame on Bush, but no dice. With the fifth anniversary approaching, they might as well empty out the inventory."

Libertas on Paramount's firing of Tom Cruise:

Stars of Cruise’s caliber - whatever you may think of them personally - do not fall off trees, and are not easily replaced. I’m reminded (painfully) of what happened to the Lakers after they traded Shaquille - who was also expensive to keep around. Shaquille is now wearing championship bling in south Florida while the LA Kobes (previously known as the ‘Lakers’) hope to reach the 2nd round of next year’s playoffs. So Redstone and his shareholders may feel like Big Men on Campus right now, but they may be asking themselves later why they traded their cash cow away while he was still young enough to do action films. Harrison Ford can’t, Arnold can’t, Willis usually won’t, and Mel Gibson’s mostly a director these days. Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington can kick ass when they feel like it, but neither can open a film like Cruise, and neither of them have shown Cruise’s good judgement (for the most part) in picking projects. Basically there are very few action stars of Cruise’s caliber left, and the new generation isn’t producing very many.

Back in 2002, Howard Kurtz looked at a different kind of script reader:

As the 70-year-old Rather, 64-year-old Jennings and 62-year-old Brokaw head into their sunset years, the programs will no longer be shielded by their prestige.

"When Brokaw, Jennings and Rather retire, it is a perfect time for these corporations to decide their newscasts are no longer worth it," said Ken Bode, a former NBC correspondent who teaches at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. "Unless something dramatic happens, inevitably, the network newscasts are gone."

If that happens, it would be the biggest change in news consumption in the half-century history of television, an erosion caused in part by the striking failure of these programs to attract viewers younger than 50. Thus, they have the same problem plaguing "Nightline" -- an aging audience that is gradually dying off.

This is prediction is off only slightly--the network news isn't going away: it's simply remaining as legacy programming for an aging generation that doesn't understand the Internet--but, like the superstar-driven era of Hollywood, its impact is being rapidly diluted by a Long Tail of options.

Mary Katharine Ham has some thoughts on the latest writings and retouchings from Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell:

The mainstream media’s response to the allegations from blogs has been more along the lines of Greg Mitchell’s, editor of Editor & Publisher, a trade magazine whose mission it is to cover “all aspects of the North American newspaper industry, including business, newsroom, advertising, circulation, marketing, technology, online and syndicates.”

Mitchell’s response to accusations from bloggers—instead of answering the charges and refuting evidence—was to get very defensive, claim that “rightwing bloggers” were only attempting to smear photojournalists as a group, and then proceed to smear rightwing bloggers as a group for daring to point out the dishonesty of some photojournalists, and raise questions about how business is conducted in the Middle East.

The subtext of Mitchell's rantings about the starboard side of the Blogosphere isn't just that he loathes the bloggers on the right analyzing his work--it's that he's not too crazy about journalism itself about being accountable to rightwing readers in general.

Each blog that analyzes Big Media's faults has hundreds to a few thousand readers, and for the biggest blogs, tens of thousands--to hundreds of thousands--of readers, for the simple reason that although we joke that eventually, everyone will have his or her blog, for now, there are far more consumers than authors. And every one of those readers, and the people in their circles of influence, whether they're posting within Internet forums, or simply chatting while hanging around the proverbial office water cooler, is finding out just how smug the elite media feels, especially when it's asked to be accountable.

There was more than a hint of that same attitude in the response of the L.A. Times' Michael Hiltzik (he of the sock puppetry) to Hugh Hewitt last year:

HH: If you think the L.A. Times is healthy, and you don't know why it isn't, I can't help you. I really can't. You cannot heal what you cannot get...

MH: Well, luckily, I don't think we're not turning to you for our help.

HH: What was that?

MH: I said luckily, we're not turning to you for our help.

HH: Or to people who listen to me for subscriptions, right?

MH: Well, I guess not.

HH: All right. That's what I thought.

MH: All right.

HH: Michael, thank you for that last, late-arriving, but nevertheless much welcome burst of candor. If you're listening, the L.A. Times does not want you to subscribe.

Peggy Noonan reached a similar conclusion about CBS's decision to hire Katie Couric:

Is the appointment of Katie an acknowledgement by CBS that it doesn't feel it has to care anymore about political preferences, that the existence of Fox News Channel has in effect freed up the network broadcasts to be what you and I might call more politically tendentious and they might call edgy? In a fractured media environment where everyone can have a voice, why wouldn't the broadcast networks take the new freedom as new license? After all, if America is one big niche market, liberals make up a big niche.

I'm wondering how the network news divisions are viewing the lay of the land. The answer will tell us something about the future American media environment.

Does the tone of the editor of a major house organ of the American media also tell us about how news editors in general view the lay of the land?

If so, as I've said before, welcome to the Post-Objective Media.

Just finished listening to the really interesting Pajamas Politics Central podcast with Andrew Keen interviewing Marshall Poe, the author of a recent Atlantic article on Wikipedia:

“Wikipedia is really not an encyclopedia. It’s more like a dictionary. It has the definition, a kind of rough description, of the way we talk about everything. It’s not expert knowledge, it’s common knowledge.”

A while back, Robert McHenry of TCS reached a similar conclusion on "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia" that's also worth revisiting as you listen.

Update: "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence".

The next ten years of Internet-based journalism are laid out in this incredibly well done museum exhibit-style piece beamed back in time from 2014.

Reality won't be nearly as clean, but I suspect this site gets more right than wrong. And as The Professor notes, "the news wars of 2010 were notable for the fact that no actual news organization was involved."

Update: I had completely forgotten about this throwaway post from June of 2002, when I wrote that Seagate had announced a 120-gigabyte hard drive. I found it just now, after searching my site for something else I had written.

Two years ago, a 120-gig drive was big enough news that I felt compelled to blog about it.

The Friday before last, I installed double that--a 240-gigabyte hard drive--as a second drive in my PC, to hold all my music software (including both prerecorded loops that I've purchased, and new material that I've recorded). And that was only because my local computer store was out of 300-gig drives.

So I could easily see the technology that leads to the news wars of 2010 coming to pass.

Alex Beam's essay is indeed out, and the InstaPundit links to it, and a variety of comments (including mine--thanks!) here and here. The best comment may be Glenn's own: "when you parachute in and try to do a story about something you don't understand overnight, you're going to look stupid. And you do."

I had started an article on the backlash by reporters using traditional media against Web logs on Friday (when I had a few minutes to kill and the laptop was handy), but I didn’t have an ending. Fortunately, James Lileks has given me an ending, an introductory framing device, as well as great essay in and of itself (go read it, we’ll wait for you).

Back? OK, as you just read, Lileks has gotten a wonderfully tactful email from from Alex Beam of the Boston Globe:

James, weren't you once a talented humor writer? Why are you churning out this web dreck? I can't tell if these bleats about Rod Serling or the Palestinians are diluting your humor work, because I can't claim to know it well enough, but I certainly have my suspicions.

Feel free to respond: I am writing a column (deadline: Monday 11 am) on bloggers who might benefit from a less arduous writing schedule.

Alex Beam, Boston Globe

It’s been fascinating watching the backlash of reporters used to traditional media against Web logs. Part of it, of course, is their reaction to self-publishing, the same way that investment advisors were terrified by do-it-yourself investing, from Charles Schwab discount brokerages in the 1980s to E*Trade in 1998. But another part of it is simply knee-jerk cynicism. When Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Truman Capote and Norman Mailer invented the New Journalism of the 1960s, the reaction by traditional reporters and media critics was one of cynicism and disdain. Capote called In Cold Blood a “non-fiction novel”, because novels had class, and he didn’t want to get his new book lumped in with this bastard form that non-fiction journalists had invented.

It doesn’t help that much of the most successful existing online journalism has been slanted (in varying degrees) towards the right—Matt Drudge, Andrew Sullivan, and Jonah Goldberg all immediately come to mind. But almost anytime that something new comes along, such as Web logs in general, and this Instapundit guy specifically, reporters are by their very nature cynical. The irony of Web logs is that they allow people to build a following by bypassing the traditional avenues of publishing. So, as I said in my Spintech article, anybody can have a blog, and the more offbeat the topic or slant, the better. The very journalists, who claim they’re for “the little guy”, the individual over big business, are slanted against letting those individuals have a way to communicate their own viewpoints!

(And incidentally, Beam is bitching about a guy’s writing which damn near brought tears to my eyes (his piece comparing Israelis getting slaughtered by a Palastenian suicide bomber with day to day life in the US). If my wife wasn’t sitting next to me, while I was reading it, I would easily have started blubbering—it was that powerful. When the last time an old school newspaper columnist could generate that level of emotion?)

Speaking of losing it, where was I? Oh yeah, journalists, who claim they’re for “the little guy”, but slanted against individuals having a way to communicate their own viewpoints. Yes, it’s wonderful irony. But of course, it could just be that traditional newspaper reporters know that perhaps, just perhaps, the old ways of doing business are numbered. When I interviewed Kerry Northrup, an American who is the Executive Director for the German-based Ifra Centre for Advanced News Operations, he and his employer had a number of revolutionary ways for newspapers and reporters to do business, based on available, advanced technologies. But too many editors worship at the 1970s Watergate-era school of Ben Bradlee and Lou Grant, instead of Matt Drudge and other 21st century reporters. And yet, you can slow down progress and change, but you can't stop it--you simply go with it, or eventually get run over.

Unlike Woodward and Bernstein, Lileks says:

people on the web are not paid to be important. They usually aren’t paid at all, of course, but the point of putting up a blog isn’t to be Influential, or to Redefine the Dialogue, or any other of the hoary old clichés. People put up blogs because they have something to say. If they post six times a day and three posts blow chunks, so what? Better that than a columnist whose every piece is stooped with the awful weight of its author’s ego. (I’m not referring to any columnist in particular; choose your favorite.) In any case, the number of “amateurs” who warrant repeat business is amazing. Just found, via InstantMan, an Israeli blog. It’s on my list of daily visits. Took one click to put him in the bookmarks. For a newspaper to do this, several things would have to happen…

So what do newspapers have going for them? Physicality. Presence. Persistence. Raise your hands: who saved a newspaper from Sept. 12? And who printed off an archive of website from that day? Reading a website will never have the same solid satisfaction as reading a paper, which is the old medium’s great advantage. If only they didn’t feel as if their heft and institutional weight conferred credibility or ingenuity, because it doesn’t.