Don't Taze me Bro

I find it more and more the case that there are no texts--I mean whole texts, like Huck Finn or Gone with the Wind--that I can expect that a random US American will be familiar with. But there are fragments that everyone seems to know. Of course I base this wisdom on experience in the undergraduate classroom, which is as close as I come to sampling public opinion. (I joke.) In the undergrad classroom, I can usually get 100% recognition on "You can't HANDLE the truth," though 0% will have seen the actual movie ("A Few Good Men."). Likewise, 100% familiarity, from people who have never seen Star Trek, which is no longer cool even for geeks, for "Beam me up Scotty."

This year's primo fragment is "Don't taze me bro." All the undergrads know it. Alas, it has not penetrated my own age cohort. Oddly, I drew a blank from a younger colleague who specializes in new media and owns a Wii. What does this say about our culture?

I read the other day that the newest Christmas song among the top fifty most popular was written in 1971, which makes it older than my friend with the Wii. It does, however, make it newer than any jazz standard. Perhaps we could write a Christmas song called "Don't taze me bro." Suggestions, anyone?

Muckraking Pays

says David Carr in today's NYT. But let's connect the dots.

Carr's piece tells the story of a Chicago reporter, one of four laid off by the Reader after it was bought by Creative Loafing. The moral of his story is that media companies are cutting back on investigative reporting, and that they should rethink that--that short-term cost-cutting might not be the best business strategy, and that newspapers of all sorts should remember that they're in the news business.

I read the article carefully, waiting for some attention to the market situation the Reader has found itself in. No luck, there, although there was an interesting story on Sam Zell and the Chicago Tribune in the same section of the paper. Here's the nut: the Tribune decided to invade the Reader's turf with its Red Eye, a free circulation daily featuring lifestyle content for the younger generation. It said at the time that its strategy was to cultivate the next generation of readers for the grownup newspaper, but in fact it was a simple attempt to capture the readers and the advertising of the Reader. The industry knows, after all, that the only growth segment in print newspapers in the US over the past twenty years or so has been free circulation weeklies. The Red Eye has no commitment to enterprise journalism. Most of its content I could pull out of my ass. And, although it distributes 250-300,000 copies a day, I don't think anyone really reads it like a newspaper. So its main effect to date has been to erode the profitability of the Reader, which has changed owners, changed format, and dumped staff in response. Carr's heart is in the right place in today's story--don't get me wrong on that. And he does call attention to the way newspapers across the board are cutting reporting staff. But he could go deeper, and point the finger at the appropriate corporate boardrooms.

The Red Eye, the Tribune's youth newspaper, was the brainchild of Jack Fuller, whose book News Values contains an intelligent argument for the virtues of corporate ownership for the news business. When he wrote that book, in the late 1990s, his argument might have made a certain amount of sense. At that time, the daily newspaper was still a license to print money, and big city dailies were being bought up by the national chains for obscene prices. In the process, of course, they acquired huge debts which now must be serviced, as well as acquiring leadership that is increasingly attuned to a public of investors and therefore to quarterly reports. Perhaps the corporate form improved journalism in the years before the late 1990s, though many reporters would give you a good argument on that. But in the years since, the pressure to cut costs and please advertisers has become intense to the point where good journalism is increasingly hard to come by. This does not mean that journalism has tangibly diminished across the board, but it does mean that newspapers have fewer journalists working on investigative reports, the typical journalist has shorter deadlines and more tasks to perform, and the beat system has begun to disappear--this all on the local level. On the national and international levels, the picture is a bit different. Only a few major news organizations
continue to maintain overseas bureaus, and international reporting has suffered both in terms of what's available for newspapers to print and the newshole that newspapers give to the rest of the world. In national news, the size of the White House press corps has grown, but the amount of DC reporting that truly addresses local and regional concerns has dropped. Television has accentuated these trends. In the age of the 24/7 news channel and multiple C-SPANs one would have expected the number of voices in national politics to have increased; instead, it's declined.

I don't know that this means that "information" no longer flows to the public. You'd have to put on the other side of the ledger all the new sources of information in the world. And so it is easier for me to get international news from other sources, and to get national news from the blogosphere, and to get local news from my local government or my neighborhood association. It's not so much the information that matters, even in the spectacular case that Carr writes about today, which involves the torture of suspects by the Chicago police. Would we have known about that without the investigative work of a Reader reporter? Yes, if we'd've cared. That's the problem. Without the reporters, we won't care. We don't need the reporters to give us information; we need them to give voice to the information. We need them so that the police or the politicians or the bureaucrats or the rich will believe that the Public knows what's going on. Without institutionalized reporting, it's harder for the idea of the public to work as a regulative fiction.