Tuesday Is Recycling Day

It's been a while since I've done one of these under the old official name of the franchise, but given the recent influx of new readers I wanted to start bringing this feature back to DXM. A couple of nights ago, Aaron Sorkin's HBO show The Newsroom began with a well-written and impassioned mea culpa delivered on-air by the show's fictional news anchor, Will McAvoy. The soliloquy was everything you'd expect out of Sorkin; specifically it presented an important subject, in this case the American news media, not how it is but how intelligent people wish it would be.

Basically, McAvoy issued an "apology" to his audience for his complicity in bringing crap into its collective living room every night and for willingly contributing to the "dumbing down" of the American electorate. He copped to his own failures and promised to try to do better. It immediately reminded me of something I wrote for this site way back in February of 2007 in which I apologized for the TV news media's coverage of the death of Anna Nicole Smith. Admittedly, I was "in the closet" at the time -- working for CNN without divulging it here -- and I continued to be a part of the problem until being unceremoniously shown the door a year later. With that in mind, I can't get on too high a horse.

But what McAvoy alluded to during his fictional statement of purpose was correct in the real world: There are literally thousands of smart, dedicated, hard-working journalists in the news media who never signed up to cover garbage; who don't want to inflate every minor controversy or random event to the point where it explodes across the airwaves and pages day after day and night after night; who know that the truth is what journalists strive for and that it and it alone represents fairness, as opposed to some phony concept of forced objectivity; who understand that adding to the noise in the echo chamber in the name of the almighty ratings dollar demeans them and their chosen profession.

There are those who still remind us never to forget 9/11, as if such a thing were possible. I would, however, also remind everyone who takes an interest in being an informed populace that in the weeks just prior to 9/11 the mainstream news media as a whole was almost singularly fixated on trying to terrify every man, woman and child in this country into believing that he or she was about to be eaten by a shark.

And great white sharks have now been spotted off Cape Cod and the West Coast.

"And Now an Apology in the Form of an Open Letter To America" (Originally Published, 2.15.07)

Dear American Public,

I have no excuse. I have no defense.

I am a member of the American news media and have been for some time. This means that on more than one occasion I have -- willingly or unwillingly -- foisted upon you the trite, the inane and the monumentally ridiculous, and done so under the auspices of my supposed right to inform and educate you as to important events which affect your lives. I have been party to the beaming into your living room of seemingly endless video loops of JonBenet Ramsey dressed as a five-year-old prostitute. I have encouraged various interchangable Ken-and-Barbiesque meat-puppets, pompous and breathless, to sincerely attempt to convince you of the hidden threat lurking in your underwear drawer. I have conspired to make you believe that you were, at any given moment, in danger of being eaten by a shark. I have actually written the words "every parent's nightmare" -- more than once, in fact. I have dispatched correspondents to Aruba in search of Natalee Holloway. I have marveled at the ingenuity behind using an episode of Dateline NBC to promote The Apprentice. I've been good friends with Rick Sanchez for sixteen years.

In short, I have betrayed you. I have betrayed your trust.

I have let you down.

Yet I've never felt compelled to humbly ask for any sort of forgiveness for my offenses. I have never felt true shame, both for myself and my chosen profession. Until now.

I'm sorry for the coverage of the death of Anna Nicole Smith.

I'm sorry that so many supposedly venerable news organizations have elevated the all-but-inevitable self-destruction of a B-list former-stripper, Playmate, hack actress, gold-digger, tabloid queen, and all-around piece of human flotsam to the lofty heights of near-Shakespearian mythology. I'm sorry that we have treated an absolutely meaningless event as if it were somehow nothing short of a cultural earthquake, sure to send reverberations and tremors throughout society until they shake the very foundation -- the very soul -- of every man, woman and child in America. I'm sorry that we have devoted hour after hour to discussing and debating such asinine subjects as the paternity of this horrid woman's baby, even being willing to proclaim, with a straight face, that its father might be the husband of Zsa Zsa Gabor. I'm sorry that we've allowed Wolf Blitzer and Diane Sawyer to look no better than Pat O'Brien and Maria Menounos. I am truly sorry that we have, even for a moment, lent a shred of credibility to the opinions of Nancy Grace.

During the past week, those charged with the awesome responsibility of relaying to you the global, cultural, political, economic and medical news which you rightly expect and demand from us, have instead willingly allowed ourselves to be taken hostage by every permutation of loathsome, opportunistic degenerate -- each claiming to be able to add yet another spoonful of pabulum to the pot we're all too happy to stir. During the past week, hundreds of American soldiers and innocent civilians have been killed in Iraq -- as our focus shifted to one minor celebrity who died just off the Florida Turnpike.

We have failed you.

We have failed ourselves.

The only possible consolation is that many of us are well aware of our own ethical bankruptcy in the continued pursuit of this absurdity. I could explain at length my own feelings in the matter, but better I allow an anonymous colleague of mine to be the eloquent, impassioned and utterly frustrated voice for the thousands currently toiling away on this story at otherwise-reputable news operations across the country:

"I'm sorry, but I did not spend tens of thousands of dollars in school to cover this bullshit. She's a celebrity for fucking the unfuckable; that's not an accomplishment. I actually announced to the newsroom this morning that I didn't go to journalism school to cover a two-bit Texas whore and that, if this was the kind of news we were covering, I could use my diploma for toilet paper. It's unbelievable. BREAKING NEWS??? I'm really sorry that the drug addict OD-ed, but that's what happens when you're an overweight drug addict."

Couldn't have said it better myself.

With Contrition,

Chez

All Work and No Play Makes Arianna a Rich Woman*

You know, I tend to defend the Huffington Post, despite the fire it's drawn lately over its content and lack of willingness to pay a lot of the people who supply it. My decision to continue contributing to the site is one I've explained more than once so I'm not going to bother going down that road again. You want to write for the site? Great. You think Arianna's a tyrannical modern-day plantation owner? Again, great -- don't give her your time and effort.

All of that said, in the immortal words of Ian Malcolm, "HuffPost High School" is one of the worst ideas in the long, sad history of bad ideas:

"It will join an ever-expanding constellation of topic sites that already includes religion, tech, parenting and divorce. But it will be unique in that it will be the only site produced by minors: Its editor, wunderkind Myles Miller, is only 17, and it will feature the work of teenage bloggers.

Meanwhile, Patch, the network of more than 800 hyperlocal news sites also overseen by AOL editor in chief Arianna Huffington, is also soliciting adolescent contributors from high schools — and even middle schools — as it seeks to recruit thousands of community bloggers.

The practice raises new questions of privacy and ethics. People share overly personal information and make fools of themselves on the web every day, but the impulsiveness of teenagers plus the visibility of Huffpo could be a uniquely combustible mixture. Should teenagers who can’t legally vote, drink or have sex be allowed to decide for themselves what to publish in a place where it could potentially be read by millions of people? What if a 15-year-old wants to write confessionally about having an abortion... or joke about smoking marijuana...? And what if that 15-year-old’s parent wants to have that posting deleted? And what if that parent is divorced, and his ex-spouse who shares custody gives her permission?"

That's Jeff Bercovici, the damn good -- and surprisingly well-paid -- media writer for Forbes, and he's pretty much dead-on. Adults making the informed decision to contribute to HuffPo is one thing; enlisting a bunch of 14-year-olds to write for you for free is something completely different. The kind of audacious arrogance that would make a company think it can get away with something like that is the sort of thing that could -- at least in a just world -- spell its undoing.

Although Arianna's on to something if her aim is to use this program to teach kids about journalism in the modern age.

Lesson #1: Get ready to starve.

*Sorry, Arianna. My pathetic need to prove how clever I am generally trumps my desire not to burn bridges. Nothin' but love.

Quote of the Day

"I don’t fault any one host for throwing a party, or any journalist for attending... But the cumulative effect is icky. With the proliferation of A-list parties and the infusion of corporate and lobbyist cash, Washington journalists give Americans the impression we have shed our professional detachment and are aspiring to be like the celebrities and power players we cover."

-- The Washington Post's Dana Milbank on the annual White House Correspondent's Dinner being held this weekend

Donald Trump is just one of the celebrities who've been invited and who will be in attendance.

And that's just one of the problems with this now grotesque tradition.

It used to be known self-deprecatingly as "the nerd prom"; these days it's anything but.

Quote of the Day

"Identifying lies told by powerful political leaders -- and describing them as such -- is what good journalists do, by definition. It's the crux of adversarial journalism, of a 'watchdog' press. 'Objectivity' does not require refraining from pointing out the falsity of government claims. The opposite is true; objectivity requires that a journalist do exactly that: treat factually false statements as false. 'Objectivity' is breached not when a journalist calls a lie a 'lie,' but when they refuse to do so, when they treat lies told by powerful political officials as though they're viable, reasonable interpretations of subjective questions. The very idea that a journalist is engaged in 'opinion-making' or is 'taking sides' by calling a lie a 'lie' is ludicrous; the only 'side' such a journalist is taking is with facts, with the truth. It's when a journalist fails to identify a false statement as such that they are 'taking sides' -- they're siding with those in power by deceitfully depicting their demonstrably false statements as something other than lies."

-- Glenn Greenwald, attacking the almost comical hackery of James Rainey and Howie Kurtz, who seemed to mock Anderson Cooper for having the temerity to call out the Mubarak government for its lies

I'm certainly not Greenwald's biggest fan, but credit where credit is due -- he's absolutely right on this.

Quote of the Day

"I don’t even know if there was a deal, to be honest with you, before his show... I’ll forever be indebted to Jon because of what he did."

-- Kenny Specht, founder of the New York City Firefighter Brotherhood Foundation, on Jon Stewart's role in salvaging the 9/11 First Responders Bill

Quote of the Day

"Look, I went into journalism to do journalism, not advertising. My views are critical but that shouldn't be mistaken for hostile. I'm just not a stenographer. There is a body of work that shows how I view these issues but that was hard-earned through experience, not something I learned going to a cocktail party on fucking K Street. That's what reporters are supposed to do -- report the story."

-- Michael Hastings, author of the incendiary piece on General Stanley McChrystal in Rolling Stone