All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Could Kindle save the newspaper?

Some big brains in MediaLand are thinking ‘Yes.’

This brain of indeterminate size says ‘Are you kidding me?’

The Kindle, Amazon’s $400 “wireless reading device” being released to much hype in the marketplace – I mean, a Newsweek cover story? – is reinvigorating the old “future of reading” debate.

The future of reading is an interesting topic, with a couple different angles. There's books, for one, and then there's more temporary print news media.

As far as books are concerned, in an age of portable technology, the concept of somebody downloading a bunch of books into a small little box seems practical. It could do for literature what the iPod did for music. Who doesn’t love tucking away those bulky clanky CDs into the closet next to your vinyl? (Wait. Too autobiographical?) Imagine packing up for the beach or a vacation and – instead of packing a few dense books into a bag – just tossing a little box the size of a VHS cassette in, for all your reading needs.

That can work.

But replace or supplement the newspaper market?

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Has campaigning really gotten to the point where spit-polished laugh lines during debates are everything and stances are, well, stuff for the Factinistas to worry about?

It can’t be getting that bad, can it?


Can it? National Journal’s William Powers is worried. He thinks we’re rapidly approaching such a political Jump The Shark moment, where content is truly secondary. Here's an excerpt from his column:

Half a century ago, sociologist David Riesman noted that in a mass media age, journalists tend to be cheerleaders for political candidates who have the charisma of entertainers….

It's truer than ever today. Early on in this week's Republican debate, CNBC's Maria Bartiromo asked Mitt Romney about the economic woes in Michigan, where the debate took place. Romney saw his opening and got off a Reaganesque quip about the state's Democratic governor, Jennifer Granholm. "I was frankly a little nervous about being here tonight," he said in his eerily smooth game-show-host way. "I figured she was going to put a tax on the debate before we got finished."

The joke got a big laugh, and the camera shifted to Bartiromo … She was smiling warmly and throwing co-host Chris Matthews a look that seemed to say, "Ten points for Mitt, eh?"

Later, in the debate's so-called Lightning Round (hmm, maybe it really is all a game show) Romney scored again when he compared the debates to candidate Fred Thompson's former TV show, Law and Order. As the audience roared, the camera went to Thompson for his comeback: "And to think I thought I was going to be the best actor on the stage."

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You give a little love and it all comes back to you – whether you’re a bad Scott Baio flick or a soda commercial or here, at Public Eye.

Earlier this week, Slate gave a little love to “Whoop-Dee-Damn-Doo” – Public Eye’s examination of the coverage given to Clarence Thomas’ book interviews. So today we give back, to Jack Shafer who discussed Drew Curtis (of “Fark” fame) and his book “It’s Not News, It’s Fark,” featuring this passage:

For all its insight, Curtis' book has gotten scant attention from the mainstream press. Although Salon gave it decent exposure, the Tucson Citizen was the largest American newspaper to review it, and theirs was a mini-review.

Curtis did better on the broadcast side, with segments on NPR, Fox News Channel, and the nerd cable channel G4TV. Perhaps the book got overlooked because Curtis stuffed it with hilarious examples from his Web site, and Dave Barry blurbed it, making critics think it was a humor volume.

Since my predecessor Brian Montopoli is no longer here, I wanted to stick up a tad on behalf of this curious media outpost, which straddles the border of Blogistan and Mainstream Media. Montopoli had a great interview with Curtis earlier this year, where Curtis – one of the savvier tour guides of MediaLand – had this to say:

Most people treat the news media like the exercise bike they have in their basement. They're glad it's there but they never use it. This is obviously a ratings problem for the news outlets.

The number one question I get when I meet people who read my website is "Where can I go to get the real news?" The implication is the major news outlets aren't meeting this need. Most people I've talked to are convinced that they're not getting valuable information from news media anymore. I'm not talking about tinfoil-hatters either, these are intelligent people who believe their news media has failed them.

All that being said, however, two different people – from very different media outlets – suggest that the newsmedia’s not doing a half bad job.

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William Powers believes that news organizations should post personal information about their journalists online.

He wants these questions answered: "Who are they? Where did they grow up? What did they study in school? Why did they become journalists? Did they ever work in politics or volunteer for a cause? If so, when and where?"

To which I ask: Why stop there?

What about these: What is their pin number? Who did they last sleep with? Do they have any embarrassing rashes? I demand that all journalists post at least one shirtless camera-phone pic of themselves on MySpace. The people have a right to know!

All sarcasm aside, there is some value in what Powers is calling for here – transparency is, after all, our bread and butter. I'm just troubled by the notion that journalists should be forced to reveal information like this about themselves.

For one, you have to wonder where it stops: Should someone writing on pork production have to disclose if they were ever a vegetarian? Should someone writing about gay marriage have to reveal their sexuality to all interested parties? One could argue that those issues are more relevant, when it comes to these stories, than where someone grew up, after all. But are we really sure that we want to endorse the idea that choosing a career in journalism means forfeiting privacy rights? And do we really care if the beat writer for the local ballclub ran for the school board?

And then there's the fact that the information revealed will inevitably be used unfairly. Let's say, when a reporter was in college, he joined the Young Republicans. Or, in his 20s, gave money to the Sierra Club. Does that really mean that ten years later he can't cover politics or the environment fairly? Yet you can bet that the screamers on different sides of the aisle will cite these supposed biases to challenge every word the reporter types or utters. I don't think reporters should be contributing to political causes related to the issues they cover. But there is something McCarthyesque about the idea that everything a reporter has done over the course of his life should be fodder for discrediting his work.

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"Try transporting yourself back to the time of Imus. Hard, isn't it? It was just five or six days ago, but it might as well be five months."

--William Powers in the National Journal. He adds: "We really do care about these stories for a few days, sometimes a week. Then one morning you wake up to find that the most urgent topic on the planet (or at least in this intensely self-absorbed corner of it), the five-alarm narrative that everyone from Bush to Obama to Rosie was weighing in on, has vanished from the collective consciousness."

With about 20 months to go in the 2008 presidential campaign, candidates – and the news outlets that cover them – have a lot of space to fill. That's why, for example, candidates announces their candidacy a dozen times before making it "official" – and news outlets cover each announcement with equivalent gusto. Both the media and the candidates are vying for the audience's attention as often as they can – because they know it's going to be a long haul.

This long slog is part of the reason why, as National Journal's William Powers argues, the Obama-Clinton-Geffen saga spread like wildfire across the media spectrum – even though "there wasn't a lot to the spat -- David hates Hillary, Hillary hates Obama, nyah, nyah, nyah." Nonetheless, the story "was covered in hundreds of news stories and columns around the world."

Stories like this (and there will be more of them) are "the Twinkies of political news," says Powers – "light, synthetic, tasty, and strangely unfilling." But popular nonetheless.

What does Barack Obama need to give his presidential hopes a boost? A massive media disaster.

So says National Journal's William Powers, who brings a cynical eye to the press corps' treatment of presidential candidates. Here he outlines the stages a candidate must go through in order to become a success:

First the figure is introduced to us through scattered media appearances and "mentions." Next we get to know him on a deeper level through a moving personal story, such as the remembered loss of a loved one.

Then comes Validation, in which the subject is declared a big-leaguer in a Vanity Fair/cover-of-Newsweek sort of way. Our famous one then becomes the subject of "think pieces" interpreting his candidacy as an embodiment of our times. These are followed by "meta" stories that wonder in suitably contrarian fashion whether there's not something absurd in all of the hype.

The next stage is The Flop or Downturn. It happens to all major movie stars, either at the box office or the rehab center. And now it also happens to presidential candidates. John Edwards had his flop when he did Meet the Press in 2002 and was laid ignominiously low by Tim Russert.

Of course, Edwards eventually recovered. And that's the point. Ours is a culture of recovery. Ups are worthless without a few downs. Every candidate needs to have some kind of a very public downswing from which he or she can rebound. It's an ineluctable part of becoming a modern public figure. It gives the whole story texture and depth, qualities demanded by a culture accustomed to thinking of its idols in novelistic fashion. Hillary Rodham Clinton's ups and downs serve her well for this reason -- in the conventional wisdom, she's a survivor.

In other words, the public image of a presidential candidate should easily fit into the "Behind The Music" template.

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Each week we invite someone from outside PE to weigh in with their thoughts about CBS News and the media at large. This week, we turned to William Powers, a columnist for National Journal and a former reporter for The Washington Post. Below, Powers offers some suggestions about what he thinks the "Evening News" with Katie Couric should look like, come September. As always, the opinions expressed and factual assertions made in “Outside Voices” are those of the author, not ours, and we seek a wide variety of voices. Here's Bill:

Katie Couric's move to the anchor slot at the CBS "Evening News" has already generated a lot of noise. There will be much more as her September debut approaches.

Yet, for all the hoo-haa, I don't think it's become apparent why this is such a big moment for television news.

Couric is a rare bird, and I'm not talking about her gender. She's the first evening news anchor to arrive as a fully formed public figure with a true mass following. It's taken other anchors years to earn the respect and affection of their audiences, to reach the point where they were on a first-name basis with the culture: Dan, Tom and Peter. Katie is there already and she hasn't even begun. In the past, the anchor job has magnified those who held it. Couric will magnify the job, which has been shrinking in significance and influence for many years.

There is now a whole generation of media consumers who, when they think about network news at all, know it mainly as the butt of jokes, in particular a very funny joke called "The Daily Show." Connie Chung's recent torch-song travesty was a sensation partly because it crystallized what is now the popular view of TV news people: absurd, clueless, tone-deaf boobs.

Things are at such a low ebb, it's tempting say network news has nowhere to go but up. Alas, this is not true. Collectively the three evening network newscasts still pull in tens of millions of viewers, numbers that are the envy of cable news. The problem is the demographics of this audience, which run the gamut from old to ancient, as the ads make clear with their leitmotifs of incontinence and constipation. These core viewers are headed inexorably for the exits, and as they go, there's a real possibility nobody will be there to replace them. If the network news fails to recover the magnetism and influence it once had, it will die with the last Baby Boomer, if not before.

This is why Couric, with her unusual combination of Hollywood charisma and journalistic smarts, represents such a fantastic opportunity, not just for CBS but for TV news in general. If anyone can pull the nets out of the hole they're in, she can. My only hope is that CBS doesn't blow the chance.

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"Bush Pushes Gay Marriage Ban" reads the headline at the moment on CBSNews.com. Here's the subhead: "President Bush says he's 'proud to stand with' those who support a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. The Senate opened three days of debate on the amendment, which stands little chance of passing."

Notice that last part: "little chance of passing." Seemingly every media outlet is stressing the fact that the amendment is an election year political tactic more than a serious effort at getting a constitutional ban. Washington Post political columnist Howard Kurtz addressed the coverage in his online chat today: "…when it comes to a constitutional amendment -- which, by the way, Bush has barely mentioned from his reelection until this week -- the political reality is that it is not going to pass. So I think it's fair to examine the political motives of those who are pushing it as well as those who oppose it," he wrote.

There isn't a lot to say at this point about the actual amendment at this point, is there? We've been down this road before. I do think, as one of Kurtz' questioners pointed out, that the media has generally underplayed the fact that a slim majority of Americans oppose gay marriage. (That doesn't mean, of course, that they support a Constitutional amendment.) I suspect that on this issue many in the national media, who live in relatively gay-friendly cities like New York, side with gay marriage advocates. But one could also argue that they're not that far from typical Americans in the issue, as National Journal's William Powers did in February 2004:

…the coverage of gay marriage has a tentative, muted feeling. As filtered through the mainstream media, gay marriage seems not so much a righteous cause, inherently worthy of our attention and concern, as another strange, colorful chapter in the never-ending "culture war," a phrase that appears over and over in the mainstream coverage. The media, which are normally so good at creating heroes, have not yet given us a gay Rosa Parks or even a gay Gloria Steinem.

Why? Perhaps the story is still too young. But I think it's also about the journalists. A lot of straight mainstream media people, the sort of people who work at national newspapers and TV networks, would probably tell you they support gay marriage, but in a vague this-is-what-people-like-us-believe sort of way. Even in the age of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, gay marriage still makes a lot of heterosexuals, including liberal ones, a bit queasy. If the polls are accurate, I guess this is one way in which journalists actually resemble everyday Americans.

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