Moonies, Taxes and the Amoral Media Majority
I am saddened to report that Bill Clinton's Daily Diary is a sham. Worse, it is no longer going to be published. I am a little late in finding this out. After praising the site in my first post, I decided to do some due diligence. So I tappity tapped a quick Google search and the first article I found, from August of last year, exposed it as fraud. Even if it was some evil Republican operative writing in WJC's voice, that person was doing a damn good job. Herr Guitar and I were convinced that it had to be Clinton, because:
1. He's clearly insane
and
2. No one is as brilliant.
The daily diary reflected both aspects of the man's unique personality. Now it's fake and gone. Oh well.
I'm late on a lot of things these days. I'm regularly late to work. I'm always at least one day late meeting deadlines. I was late in getting my roof patched up before the next monsoon came along. And, as you can tell, I'm late in hopping on the blog bandwagon. I have yet to expose a scandal or bring down a top-level exec. I didn't even bring down the Bill Clinton diary guy - in fact, I propped him up for a few days before finding out that he had been brought down eons ago.
Don't get me wrong, I have it in me to expose something. I'm a total paranoid. No theory is too off-the-wall, no soul too dark. I do not believe in the inherent goodness of man - especially not of greedy, power-hungry men who prey on people's notions of their own inherent goodness. I read Harper's and buzzflash.com and Daily Kos. I know about the Reverend Sun Yung Moon's moneyed grip on the Republican party. I know how American business interests are destroying Iraqi corporations in order to buy them on the cheap. I know how Anna Wintour's assistant broke up the hot design team behind Proenza and Schouler. Ok, it's true that I know none of these things for a fact, but I believe them. They make sense.
I do not believe in a liberal media bias. Granted, I live in New York, work in the media, and am about as liberal as they come. But when I write about the filthy rich, I get inside the mind of a rich person and really try to tell them a story, to give them some tips. I get to know them, become one of them, and tell them what to do. I don't think about how their evasion (or "avoidance") of taxes is hurting me or the rest of the country, I help them find the best trust to in which to stash their zillions. That's my job. I write for a magazine that talks to those people, so I adopt the magazine's voice and I start chatting. I don't report on politics, but I believe other journalists are very similar. We may be liberal, conservative, independent or libertarian, but most of us know how to do our jobs. Even if most of us are liberal (though I do know quite a few libertarians in the media) I think that we overcompensate for our own views by writing too much in the other direction. That's why The New York Times and CBS both seem really pandering and conservative lately. Sure, they are extreme examples because both are scandal-bruised, but if similar scandals happened at the New York Post or on Fox News, would their reporters overcompensate in the other direction?
The problem with the media is it is afraid. Not of missing out on a hot story, but of losing readers and viewers. Magazines suck because a few years ago, some genius with a focus group discovered that people have shorter attention spans - we need "bitsy" "servicable" "takeaway" items rather than in-depth stories. Articles that used to run 2,000 words now run at 400. With the cute opener and the even cuter kicker, that leaves about 100 words to explain what the hell we are talking about. And don't forget to include plenty of statistics! You know those have to be accurate and relevant because they can be found swimming in the cesspool that is the Internet. This all started before W. took office. Now it's even worse. Television news programs are so afraid that their audience includes the "moral majority" that Katie Couric can't even say the word feminist without apologizing for it (or prefacing it with the term "bra burning" and making it very clear she is not one, which is the same thing). But don't get me started on Katie Couric.
The thing is, the media and the public are being fooled by the idea that people are felling more moral these days. It's bullshit. Frank Rich pointed out that while 22 percent of voters did cite moral or ethical values as a prime concern, the number of voters who did so in 2000 was 35 percent. In 1996 it was 40 percent. That means our country is less concerned about moral values than it was nine years ago - by almost half!
As for magazines, the great hoax there is we made everything shorter and bitsy-er, and now everyone is glued to the Web, reading long, overwritten blogs. Again, I say Oh Well.
Let's end things with a quote from the archives of our dear if insincere WJC, in our still-going-strong feature, WWWJCD:
The interview with Larry King, Mr. Live! was lousy. I don't like critisizing people, but the level of the chat was sub par. What kind of questions were those? Those are questions you ask some teenage pop tart. “What was your lowest moment in office, what was your highest moment in office, what's your favorite color.” I used to be president. I wrote a 957 page book. What do I get? Obligatory questions. I don't think he prepares his interviews. What did he ask me that viewers didn't know already? It just went from bad to worse and at the end, during the commercial breaks we weren't even talking anymore. Hey if somebody is too lazy to prepare himself and do a REAL interview, there is nothing much I can do. So if you saw the interview and decided not to buy the book, because I was boring, I ask you to give the book a chance. It wasn't my fault.
1. He's clearly insane
and
2. No one is as brilliant.
The daily diary reflected both aspects of the man's unique personality. Now it's fake and gone. Oh well.
I'm late on a lot of things these days. I'm regularly late to work. I'm always at least one day late meeting deadlines. I was late in getting my roof patched up before the next monsoon came along. And, as you can tell, I'm late in hopping on the blog bandwagon. I have yet to expose a scandal or bring down a top-level exec. I didn't even bring down the Bill Clinton diary guy - in fact, I propped him up for a few days before finding out that he had been brought down eons ago.
Don't get me wrong, I have it in me to expose something. I'm a total paranoid. No theory is too off-the-wall, no soul too dark. I do not believe in the inherent goodness of man - especially not of greedy, power-hungry men who prey on people's notions of their own inherent goodness. I read Harper's and buzzflash.com and Daily Kos. I know about the Reverend Sun Yung Moon's moneyed grip on the Republican party. I know how American business interests are destroying Iraqi corporations in order to buy them on the cheap. I know how Anna Wintour's assistant broke up the hot design team behind Proenza and Schouler. Ok, it's true that I know none of these things for a fact, but I believe them. They make sense.
I do not believe in a liberal media bias. Granted, I live in New York, work in the media, and am about as liberal as they come. But when I write about the filthy rich, I get inside the mind of a rich person and really try to tell them a story, to give them some tips. I get to know them, become one of them, and tell them what to do. I don't think about how their evasion (or "avoidance") of taxes is hurting me or the rest of the country, I help them find the best trust to in which to stash their zillions. That's my job. I write for a magazine that talks to those people, so I adopt the magazine's voice and I start chatting. I don't report on politics, but I believe other journalists are very similar. We may be liberal, conservative, independent or libertarian, but most of us know how to do our jobs. Even if most of us are liberal (though I do know quite a few libertarians in the media) I think that we overcompensate for our own views by writing too much in the other direction. That's why The New York Times and CBS both seem really pandering and conservative lately. Sure, they are extreme examples because both are scandal-bruised, but if similar scandals happened at the New York Post or on Fox News, would their reporters overcompensate in the other direction?
The problem with the media is it is afraid. Not of missing out on a hot story, but of losing readers and viewers. Magazines suck because a few years ago, some genius with a focus group discovered that people have shorter attention spans - we need "bitsy" "servicable" "takeaway" items rather than in-depth stories. Articles that used to run 2,000 words now run at 400. With the cute opener and the even cuter kicker, that leaves about 100 words to explain what the hell we are talking about. And don't forget to include plenty of statistics! You know those have to be accurate and relevant because they can be found swimming in the cesspool that is the Internet. This all started before W. took office. Now it's even worse. Television news programs are so afraid that their audience includes the "moral majority" that Katie Couric can't even say the word feminist without apologizing for it (or prefacing it with the term "bra burning" and making it very clear she is not one, which is the same thing). But don't get me started on Katie Couric.
The thing is, the media and the public are being fooled by the idea that people are felling more moral these days. It's bullshit. Frank Rich pointed out that while 22 percent of voters did cite moral or ethical values as a prime concern, the number of voters who did so in 2000 was 35 percent. In 1996 it was 40 percent. That means our country is less concerned about moral values than it was nine years ago - by almost half!
As for magazines, the great hoax there is we made everything shorter and bitsy-er, and now everyone is glued to the Web, reading long, overwritten blogs. Again, I say Oh Well.
Let's end things with a quote from the archives of our dear if insincere WJC, in our still-going-strong feature, WWWJCD:
The interview with Larry King, Mr. Live! was lousy. I don't like critisizing people, but the level of the chat was sub par. What kind of questions were those? Those are questions you ask some teenage pop tart. “What was your lowest moment in office, what was your highest moment in office, what's your favorite color.” I used to be president. I wrote a 957 page book. What do I get? Obligatory questions. I don't think he prepares his interviews. What did he ask me that viewers didn't know already? It just went from bad to worse and at the end, during the commercial breaks we weren't even talking anymore. Hey if somebody is too lazy to prepare himself and do a REAL interview, there is nothing much I can do. So if you saw the interview and decided not to buy the book, because I was boring, I ask you to give the book a chance. It wasn't my fault.
posted by j.m. at 4:56 PM
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