Did anyone besides me note the extreme irony in this item on NPR this morning?
Asked by anchor Renée Montagne about how the rest of the country was reacting to the anger of many Pakistani quake victims over "inadequate response" on the part of their government to their plight, Michael Sullivan said:
Renée, I think everyone here understands that what happened was absolutely terrible, and that the Kashmiris, who were most affected, have every right to be frustrated by the fact that they are not getting what they think is timely relief from this terrible tragedy. But at the same time, I think that many people here … all over the country are actually pulling together…
And then he said (and this is the really good part),
And oddly enough, the political opposition here which often, oftentimes uh, just will go after the General Musharraf at the slightest drop of a hat, they’re not really doing that this time around. The leader of the main opposition parties are, the leaders are saying that, you know, we do have to pull together, this is a difficult time; fingerpointing can come later; let’s just do what we can do right now to help the people on the ground.
How about that? Here we’ve got a military dictator who has people among his political opposition who would literally like to slit his throat, and opposition parties are sufficiently civilized to say, in essence, this is no time for a "blame game."
Kind of reminds me of something I said in a recent posting, back when Democrats were blaming the president, and Republicans were blaming the governor and the mayor, for the mess in New Orleans. But hey, you can’t expect a primitive, savage, shaky democracy such as ours to produce politicians who are able to rise above partisan interest in a moment of national crisis, can you?
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Yeah, I remember your earlier posting. You said this:
“Well, I can think of something better: Let’s march them out of their hearing rooms, take them to the Gulf Coast and put them to work filling sandbags. Or manning pumps. Or picking up bodies. Or, more urgently, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, housing the homeless and ministering to the sick.”
And I responded by saying this:
“Or you could do it.”
Did you?
No?
What a surprise.
Brad, I don’t recall any federal adminstration officials, including the President, criticizing the local city or state officials, DURING the crisis itself. However, I recall Sen. Landrieu and several other Louisiana hacks placing blame on the President while the rain was still falling. Predictable, yes. Surprising, not at all.
I think the dirty little secret with Pakistan is that the responsible opposition is pleased to remain the opposition as long as Musharraf is in charge. He can keep the military under control, has some influence over the ISI, and has developed the best relations with India that Pakistan has had in years, even if it cycles from lukewarm to rather chilly at the drop of a hat.
This article points out rather well what a remote and wild place the earthquake hit. Perhaps they all understand the horror that’s struck and the time it will take — months and months — to even assess all of the damage and tabulate the deaths. I would really hate to think that the folks in that primitive land have greater maturity and a firmer grasp of priorities than we do.
I really don’t want to think that. It can’t be true.
Can it?
Mike C. – A large part of the blame game has been facilitated and even promoted by the ever lower standards of the media. This media disease has infected both the far right media and the far left media to be fair. In today’s scenario, the media knows no shame that it cannot or will not spotlight. When JFK was president, many in the media knew he was having affairs, but deferred from outing him in deference to his family. Today, if one can discover something scandalous, you immediately get to launch a book and hit the talk show circuit. I could cite numerous examples but you get the picture. As a result, the American public now holds journalists in very low esteem, somewhere down in the rankings with used car salesmen and lawyers.
So now we have gotten to the point where the media has an agenda on natural disasters. So, even though Bush declared an emergency 2 days before Katrina hit, (while the local and state LA officials did not), the media searched high and low to find anyone they could who would rant and rave about not receiving help. The lowest of the low points was reached when the president of the NO parish sat in front of Tim Russert and told a complete absolute lie and cried his eyes out about the friend’s mother who was left to die. That friend later denied the whole story but the media did its damage, get Bush, in any way, shape, or form, no matter how classless or deceiptful.
But, in the end, the American people are not as stupid as the media would like to think, and that is why we have the GOP majority in the House, Senate, Governorships, and own the White House. So there is always hope.
David, let me tell you something about the media: Standards have sunk because of something that conservatives love — market forces.
First television, then magazines, then finally newspapers started buying into a bizarre new definition of news. The moment this new definition was born was represented brilliantly in “Broadcast News.” The Albert Brooks character walks into the newsroom and watches his co-workers all transfixed by a an interview with some teary-eyed average citizen, and reaches for the dial saying something like, “Anybody mind if I switch to the news?” then adding scornfully, “Oh, wait — that IS the news.”
That fictional, but excruciatingly true, film was made right at the beginning of this transformation. That was when TV decided that news was no longer significant events and perspective to help us understand those events, but personal pathos. The pivotal moment in any “successful” interview became the inevitable weeping of the subject.
And the public ate it up. Or most of the public did. And as the media became MORE humble and LESS arrogant, it started giving people what they wanted to see, instead of what they NEEDED to see.
You see a political agenda. I see media resonating with the zeitgeist. Neither is a good thing.
Damn, Brad. That was good… Reckon you could print it as your editorial piece tomorrow?
Brad, Your indictment of the free market in regard to the current state of affairs in the media is not supported by facts. If you look at several of the print media, you see that the WSJ, Business Week, Readers Digest and others are profitable and thriving. These do not serve up the infotainment type news I think you refer to. They stick to their themes. And they make money. In the TV media, CNN has lost tremendous market share while Fox News has grown dramatically. Why is that? Is it because the public really saw the liberal agenda of CNN and they see Fox as truly fair and balanced? I think the free market is voting with their eyeballs on Fox News. Other rags like People magazine, Sports Illustrated, and others survive in their niches. It could be that the day of the all purpose one stop shopping media source is gone.
C-Span is an anomaly in the free market but I would guess that this station would make it in the free market as a private entity.
Newspapers have had a tough time of it because much of their base has shifted to the electronic media. Technologically, the same thing is killing Kodak film as the public transitions to digital images instead of the hard copy. But then again, Ebay is like one gigantic worldwide classified ad, and The State has that to deal with also. The free market presents many, many opportunities to all of us but is very cruel to those entrenched in the old ways. Need I reference Luddites. By the way, I have always been a newspaper freak. In college, I usually bought one or two daily papers and read them front to back. I would sign up for free trial subscriptions and enjoy them till they ran out since I didn’t have the cash to subscribe.
How can you mention humble in the same context as the likes of Rather, Donaldson, Russert, Jennings (RIP), and even Walter “We lost Vietnam” Cronkite? Like most j-school graduates, these guys are or were decidedly liberal. When the internet opened up new and differing sources of information, that spelled the end of the big network news monopoly. I think we are all the better for it and we have the free market to thank for much of it. Personally I don’t think media with a political agenda can make it in the competitive environment. What people want are truth and facts. CBS gave us the Burkett fraud documents, NBC faked the car explosion, ABC and the anti-family Disney cabal speaks for itself. And these outfits wonder why they lose viewership.
The State is on the right track in a minimal way promoting the electronic aspects. You obviously know much more about the media than I do so how would you see the State functioning 5 years from now?
One: This newspaper is thriving. It’s very profitable. Most newspapers are. But most papers have a problem — the profits they make aren’t quite as mind-boggling as what they USED to make, and Wall Street doesn’t like that. So publicly traded newspaper companies (and by the way, that’s almost all newspapers, so don’t fool yourself into thinking those arrogant newspapers out there are somehow immune to market forces) are put in the position of having to cut costs to satisfy investors’ expectations.
Two: Yep, the Wall Street Journal is thriving. Just as we are. And the Wall Street Journal is cutting costs. Just as we are. (They’re about to follow the lead of us and most of the industry and reduce the width of the paper by a full column in order to save on newsprint cost — actually a rather shocking development, since part of the WSJ mystique is maintaining its classy, but anachronistic, look.) And the New York Times, just about the only major paper in the country to gain in circulation in the past year, just laid off hundreds of people. We haven’t had to do that yet, but two other Knight Ridder operations — San Jose and Philadelphia — have.
And all of us (except for maybe San Jose, what with the collapse of Silicon Valley) are doing from OK to very well. The market just demands more than that from us.
As for online, I have wanted ever since the early 1980s to deliver the paper to people electronically. But the paper product will still be delivered to many thousands of people for the rest of my career. Too many people still prefer it to online. So five years from now, online will be a bigger part of what we’re doing, just as today it’s a bigger part than it was five years ago. But it still won’t be the largest part of the business. Not that soon, I don’t think. It’ll be the fastest-growing, though.
I think The State has been creative in its outreach to the community, its attempts to expand readership by being responsive. I was one of the community columnists and I’m trying to do my part for the community and the principle of maintaining a local newspaper through my participation via Perfect World – The Columbia Record. You do realize that I am foregoing the opportunity to become a six-figure-blogger like this guy, but the Mike he must pursue the Perfect World, no? Yes!
I don’t quibble with your narrative above (your first comment) because it does seem that folks really do want to see folks cry, so crying is pervasive and featured in the “news.” Is there perspective, analysis, and context? Rarely, or so it seems. In the brave new world of narrowcasting, how does one reach and satisfy the masses profitably? Can one offer a potpourri that appeals to enough of the people enough of the time? That’s what you guys are trying to figure out. I prefer the baseball approach: no crying.
My particular problem in contributing more is not that little locally gets me riled up. I’m engaged and interested, but usually there are folks who know more about most of what’s happening around town. My interests are such that making a local connection, something that’s important for The Columbia Record, is often difficult. For example, I want to make a big deal about the Nobel Prize for Economics since I regularly use game theory as an analytic tool, but I’ve had trouble coming up with something that might appeal to folks around town. I am looking at the City of Columbia reorganization proposals, but am discombobulated by personalities, demographics, and attitudes because I come from the school where organizational structure is less important than organizational will and forthrightness. I’ve done organization analysis, and it’s not pretty. Then again, it occurs to me right now that because I have no vested interest, I should jump in. I’ll see what time I can devote to that.
But my interest tends toward analysis, particularly game theory, things like this.
As regards newspapers’ financing their activities through the Internet, I did come up with something that I thought was interesting, and Donald Luskin thought it had merit.
Finally, maybe it’s because I’m older (55), but I love the look and feel of newspapers. When I was growing up in Chicago, we had four dailies. Every Sunday after early mass my dad and whoever accompanied him to St. Lucy’s would stop off to purchase about eight inches of newsprint that opened up the world.
One of the main reasons I subscribe to the dead-tree (i.e., paper) version of The Wall Street Journal is that almost every night I make two cups of espresso and sit down with my 81-year-old mom to read it. I have the recently started Saturday edition delivered to her doorstep. Heck, she somehow raised nine kids (three of each) and so enjoys reading about the world and business and finance and leaders and jerks, how could I do otherwise?
I subscribe to The State too. In one very important respect, your paper is superior to The Wall Street Journal. On my website I’ve a picture that I’ve not yet explained. It’s a sirloin tip roast on a Weber kettle charcoal grill with a drip pan containing chopped onions, carrots, and celery that will later serve as the basis for the au jus. There’s a remote-thermometer in the roast that lets me monitor its internal temperature — I fabricated the cable access port for the thermometer cable using a modified ceramic fuse. But none of this would be possible without a current copy of The State for the simple reason that after repeated double-blind experiments, I have found no better newspaper to use to start the charcoal in my Wal-Mart charcoal starter thingy.
While I understand that your newspaper’s constant search for economies must continue, I ask only that you retain the pulp blend that serves me so well.
Brad, Maybe you should sponsor a contest for the most creative use of The State. Mike C. may win with the grill starter.
I found this, although dated 01-05 from Business Week.
***************
While the Times appears to be regaining its stride journalistically, it has not been rewarded
with circulation gains. In 2004, the paper posted an infinitesimal 0.2% increase in the
circulation of both the daily edition, which now stands at about 1.1 million, and the Sunday
paper, which is just under 1.7 million. Since the national expansion began in 1998, the Times
has added 150,000 daily subscribers outside New York but is thought to have lost about 96,000
subscribers in its home market. The net increase of 54,000 represents a 5.1% uptick, which
compares with the 3.5% decline in U.S. daily newspaper circulation over this period. What’s
more, the Times posted its gains despite boosting the price of a subscription by more than 25%
on average.
The Times web registrations are gaining ground at a nice clip which is a good sign for them and internet access. So your prediction of The State gaining electronically is likely on the mark.
I don’t recall any federal adminstration officials, including the President, criticizing the local city or state officials, DURING the crisis itself
I guess you missed Mike Brown on Ted Koppel. DURING the crisis itself.
kc, I did miss that. I think only about 3 people watch Koppel nightly so I hope you forgive me. Now, I ask you a straight up question – which side of the political aisle dominated the criticizing?