rrrojer.net

From Jay Rosen’s “Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right: On the Actual Ideology of the American Press“:

1. The Church of the Savvy. This is my name for the actual belief system that prevails in political journalism. I’ve been keeping a kind of public notebook on it via my Twitter feed.

Prohibited from joining in political struggles, dedicated to observing what is, regardless of whether it ought to be, the savvy believe that these disciplines afford them a special view of the arena, cured of excess sentiment, useless passon, ideological certitude and other defects of vision that players in the system routinely exhibit. As I wrote on Twitter the other day, “the savvy don’t say: I have a better argument than you… They say: I am closer to reality than you. And more mature.”

Now in order for this belief system to operate effectively, it has to continually position the journalist and his or her observations not as right where others are wrong, or virtuous where others are corrupt, or visionary where others are short-sighted, but as practical, hardheaded, unsentimental, and shrewd where others are didactic, ideological, and dreamy. This is part of what’s so insidious about press savviness: it tries to hog realism to itself.

2. The Quest for Innocence, which is the agenda (I say) the press must continually serve, even as it claims to serve no one’s agenda.

Innocence [is] a determination not to be implicated, enlisted, or seen by the public as involved… The quest for innocence in political journalism means the desire to be manifestly agenda-less and thus “prove” in the way you describe things that journalism is not an ideological trade.

3. Regression to a Phony Mean, an especially dubious practice that is principally about self-protection.

Journalists associate the middle with truth, when there may be no reason to… Writing the news so that it lands somewhere near the “halfway point between the best and the worst that might be said about someone” is not a truthtelling impulse at all, but a refuge-seeking one, and it’s possible that this ritual will distort a given story.

4. The View from Nowhere, the taking of which journalists associate with their claim to legitimacy.

Occupy the reasonable middle between two markers for “vocal critic,” and critics look ridiculous charging you with bias. Their symmetrical existence feels like proof of an underlying hysteria. Their mutually incompatible charges seem to cancel each other out. The minute evidence they marshall even shows a touch of fanaticism. It can’t be that simple, that beautiful, that symmetrical… can it? Temptation says yes.

When you have an obligation to remain outside the arena, it is also tempting to feel above the partisans who are struggling within that arena. (But then where else are they going to struggle?) You learn the attractions of a view from nowhere. The daily gift of detachment keeps giving, until you’re almost “above” anyone who tries to get too political with you, or at least in the middle with the microphone between warring factions. There’s power in that; and where there’s power, there’s attraction.

5. He said, she said journalism, a formation I have been trying to bust up by pushing for more fact checking.

“He said, she said” journalism means…

– There’s a public dispute.
– The dispute makes news.
– No real attempt is made to assess clashing truth claims in the story, even though they are in some sense the reason for the story. (Under the “conflict makes news” test.)
– The means for assessment do exist, so it’s possible to exert a factual check on some of the claims, but for whatever reason the report declines to make use of them.
– The symmetry of two sides making opposite claims puts the reporter in the middle between polarized extremes.

When these five conditions are met, the genre is in gear.

6. The sphere of deviance. The power to place certain people, causes and ideas within the deviant sphere is one of the most ideological things journalists ever do.

In the sphere of deviance we find “political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject as unworthy of being heard.” As in the sphere of consensus, neutrality isn’t the watchword here; journalists maintain order by either keeping the deviant out of the news entirely or identifying it within the news frame as unacceptable, radical, or just plain impossible…

Anyone whose views lie within the sphere of deviance—as defined by journalists—will experience the press as an opponent in the struggle for recognition. If you don’t think separation of church and state is such a good idea; if you do think a single payer system is the way to go; if you dissent from the “lockstep behavior of both major American political parties when it comes to Israel” (Glenn Greenwald) chances are you will never find your views reflected in the news. It’s not that there’s a one-sided debate; there’s no debate

skip ahead to around 1:12 if you are impatient.

[via InfectiousGreed]

The only income left for most of those who create is earned through self-promotion, but as Lanier points out this turns culture into nothing but advertising. It fosters a social ethic in which the capacity for crowd manipulation is more highly valued than truth, beauty or thought.

While the severing of intellectual property rights from their creators, whether journalists, photographers or musicians, means that those who create lose the capacity to make a living from their work, aggregators such as Google make money by collecting and distributing this work to lure advertisers. Original work on the Internet, as Lanier points out, is “copied, mashed up, anonymized, analyzed, and turned into bricks in someone else’s fortress to support an advertising scheme.” Lanier warns that if this trend is not halted it will create a “formula that leaves no way for our nation to earn a living in the long term.”

“Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one’s anus to one’s mouth,” Lanier says.

Chris Hedges: The Information Super-Sewer – Chris Hedges’ Columns – Truthdig

As a founding (now lapsed) member of Harvard Free Culture and a former employee of Creative Commons, these are some pretty hard truths, thoughts I’ve been harboring for over 3 years now but reluctant to state publicly. But perhaps as a result of working on my thesis film— by far my most substantial endeavor to date— combined with getting ready to graduate— meaning next year not only will I no longer have institutional/financial support for making art, but I will have to actually earn a living— that I feel like it’s time to come out about my growing ambivalence towards “free culture.”

»

He faulted the new video not for its failed attempt at Sontagian camp but for portraying the university as a kind of summer camp for élites. “It’s a variation on Marie Antoinette in the garden of Versailles,” he said. “I’m surprised they didn’t dress the girls as shepherdesses. In the ancien régime, this is the kind of thing that would have prompted the French Revolution. Are we supposed to send this to struggling youths in Asia and Africa?”

The New Yorker

(For those of you fortunate enough to have missed it, he’s speaking about these 17 minutes of institutionally-sanctioned musical theater hell.)

Web 2.0 Suicide Machine – Meet your Real Neighbours again! – Sign out forever!

web 2.0 suicide machine promotion from moddr_ on Vimeo.

[ironically via a. otto's facebook]

note the placement of the star.

“When people leave the theatre I want them to be talking about human beings, about their own lives and the lives of other people they know or could know. Rather than thinking ‘Oh, that was like Citizen Kane’, or ‘That was like Raiders of the Lost Ark.’”

– John Sayles

Bowl

I don’t often get too hot and bothered over pottery, but the designs from Chaco (circa 900-1150 AD!!!) really struck me this summer.

School has me very busy and hence not blogging much. But there’s been some little things I want to post, mostly creative endeavors by my pals and smidgens of youtube joy, and it seems wrong to do so without first addressing the election. Not so much cause I have anything new to say about the topic, but because as Guy put it, “insofar as this blog functions as some kind of archival document of my shit I thought it would be appropriate to note this (4 th3 future and @!!).” So two weeks late but better than never:

[CC-BY-NC-SA David Katz/Obama for America]

GO AMERICA!

Its clear at this point that the lefty wet dream of Obama being a closet radical who will dismantle capitalism from the inside is but a tantalizing fantasy. Luckily we have the financial crisis to accomplish that mission and Obama’s victory represents many other awesome things. For one, we’ve defeated the fascist elements in this country. Democracy finally pulled through and now I can stop being paranoid about prison camps and nuclear wars (hopefully). And maybe the Constitution will finally be rescued from the bathroom of the White House, where its been used as toilet paper for the past eight years. It will be nice to believe that I have rights because I am an American, not because I am a privileged white college student.

This is a definite win of intelligence over ignorance. I still can’t tell if our past few leaders (sans Clinton, maybe) were actually stupid or just pretending, but either way its fantastic that America elected someone who is not just crazy smart and competent but also graceful and stately. It almost makes me proud to be a Harvardian. Not so much because he went here but because he is a model of an elite (meaning those who are highly skilled and educated, not necessarily born rich) actually contributing to society, not just plundering it.

From a multicultural and racial perspective, this is huge and empowering, and not just as a welcome break from all those scowled white faces. I’m thinking about the difference in how the black students my sister goes to school with will view this country and their options for the future, compared to when I was in middle school. I doubt many students at MMS, black or white, would have believed you nine years ago if you told them a black man would be president less than a decade from now, however much they would have liked to. Now its real. Obama is inspiring to everyone, but for young minorities he opens up possibilities that may have previously seemed unattainable. I look forward to the next generation of leaders.

And the Obama family, what a joy to see such a power couple and their adorable children. Michelle and Barack are both intelligent, strong, and beautiful. They seem to sincerely love and respect one another, to treat each other as equals. They make matrimony seem both sexy and fulfilling.

Finally, how exciting to hear my peers say they feel patriotic for the first time in their lives. To cry with my friends and then cheer for hours in the streets with strangers. To have a couple weeks of feeling hopeful and optimistic, before settling back into pessimism. Which unfortunately is already trickling in, hence the need to dash this out for the archives.

Liberty and justice for all.