Robert David Sullivan

The inside enemy of Sunday newspapers

On Sunday morning, a chain drugstore charged me only $2 for the New York Times. This kind of mistake happens a lot, as clerks assume I'm buying the Boston Globe (not many Times readers in Malden, it seems). It was especially odd this time because $2 was too cheap for the Sunday Globe as well. But the sales clerk had scanned the Times, and then I saw "$2.00" printed in the top right corner, along with "New England Edition."

Hours later, at home, I couldn't find the Week in Review section, and the mystery was solved. Someone at the drugstore had stuck the Sunday magazine and book review section into a copy of Friday's Times. I always look for the magazine, since I discovered it missing after I got the paper home more than once, and now I'll have to doublecheck the date as well.

The Sunday Times is supposed to be $6, and more than one clerk in my blue-collar suburb has expressed astonishment at the price to me. ("You pay $6 for this?!") I used to buy it at an independent convenience store, but a clerk there got annoyed at my interrupting the steady line of Lottery ticket buyers to purchase newspapers (even $6 ones), and he finally told me that my supply had been cut off. ("We don't carry that anymore!")

In yet another convenience store, I attempted to buy the last copy of the Globe but discovered the magazine and other pieces missing before I got to the counter. When I pointed this out, the woman who co-owned the store cheerfully said she would give me a double helping of store circulars and coupons to make up for it. When I said this didn't solve the problem, she just stared at me perplexedly. I'm sure she thought I was rude to leave the newspaper on the counter and walk out. Why didn't I put it back on the rack, as she undoubtedly did after I left?

Don't tell me I should have the papers delivered. I'm out of town several Sundays a year, and I like to get the papers wherever I am at the moment. (The crossword cannot wait.)

I would be willing to give up the news sections, though. I'm on the Times and Globe websites all the time, so I already know all the breaking stories. Just give me a weekly magazine with all the feature and opinion pieces that doesn't have to be assembled by people who don't seem to know what a newspaper is.

Public broadcasting threatened only where it's the voice of the opposition

Cross-posted on Extra Criticum.

James Poniewozik makes an excellent point about how the Republican Party's incessant attacks on public broadcasting is really targeted at Middle America:

There's the irony: so much of this culture clash is premised on the idea that heartland America is supporting liberal programming for contemptuous coastal elites. But if you took away every dime of public-broadcasting money, East coast elites like me would be just fine. We'd still have our well-funded local public outlets, which we support with the piles of money we get when our banks, media corporations, &c. suck the lifeblood of decent average Americans like you.

It's the heartland that would be screwed—places, if you look at an electoral map, that vote Republican. Conservatives are right: Sesame Street will be fine. And my kids will still be able to watch it.

On the other hand, if you live in, say, South Dakota, or some other rural region with a sparse population base within range of the broadcast signal, you likely won't have a public-TV station anymore to watch it on, public TV being far more expensive to run than public radio.

It's true. Boston's public radio outlets and TV stations (note the plurals) are going to be fine. They get a lot of support from affluent listeners, corporations, and academic/arts/science institutions that enjoy coverage of their activities by WGBH and WBUR. I can even imagine the state of Massachusetts kicking in some dough to keep public broadcasting going. It would be politically popular, and there would be some justification for taxpayers' dollars going to investigative journalism that roots out political corruption, corporate wrongdoing, and the like. In some ways, local journalism has many of the same objectives that a tough attorney general's office has. (I don't imagine that pesky reporters or a meddlesome attorney general would have the same popular support in, say, Texas.)

But public broadcasting in "red states" could be in real trouble without federal support. These are places without strong newspapers like the New York Times and Boston Globe. (I complain about those papers, too, but a lot of cities have little more than shopper's circulars padded with obituaries and a few right-wing syndicated columnists.) And these are places where a lot of political battles take place without the notice of the national media, at least until something extreme like the union-busting in Wisconsin happens. I'm sure that Republicans in those states don't care what people in Boston and New York listen to, as long as it doesn't reach their own constituents.

 

Andy Griffith saw Fox News coming 50 years ago

A reader reminds me that ideal Keith Olbermann replacement Andy Griffith has already done a screen test for a cable news show, though it's not much of an alternative to Fox:

Then again, the climax of the movie (see it here) suggests that the best strategy would be to sneak a mole onto the Fox staff.

Between A Face in the Crowd (1957) and Network (1976), Fox News is in the odd position of being satirized decades before it existed.

But maybe Fox had to wait until this kind of social-commentary film fell out of favor in Hollywood.

Keith Olbermann's logical successor: Andy Griffith

Keith Olbermann's departure from MSNBC has revived the argument over whether it's possible — and desirable — to have a liberal equivalent to Fox News. Conor Friedersdorf says "no" on both counts:

Do you still want your own Fox News, your own Rush Limbaugh? If the left resembled the right in that way, what would become of your next generation of young thinkers? Someone high up at MSNBC once told me that Ezra Klein was blacklisted from the network for a time because he criticized Keith Olbermann. Would it be better if that sort of thing happened more often? If there were more talking heads liberals never criticized for fear of losing TV spots and book deals?

Jonathan Chait pushes back by saying one must fight fire with fire:

A world in which there was a powerful medium to spread Democratic party propaganda — a la Fox News and talk radio — would be less pleasant in many respects. And it's certainly not a project I'd like to be part of. But it would almost certainly be a world in which public policy tilted further left than the current one. ...

Basically, the optimal number of Fox News-like propaganda outlets is zero. But I suspect the next most optimal number is two, not one.

I agree more with Friedersdorf because of something Chait points out in his own post: "Fox News has the oldest audience of any news network — the average Fox News viewer is 65 years old!" Chait also links to a viral post at Frum Forum titled "Fox Geezer Syndrome," which depicts Fox viewers as housebound seniors who fall under the sway of the network after watching it for hours on end.

Can a liberal news network have the same effect? We already have a news source that liberal-leaning demographic groups (young, urban, well-educated) can't get enough of, and that's NPR. We coastal elites have NPR radio stations on while we drive, cook, exercise, and even while we have oral sex. Not many of us are going put ourselves within earshot of a liberal equivalent to the Fox network for five hours a day.

And I don't think a liberal news channel can duplicate Fox's success among elderly viewers by simply providing mirror images of Beck, Hannity, etc. Fox inspires loyalty by pounding home two themes that resonate with older viewers.

First, it's dangerous to leave your house. Crime is up (even though statistics say otherwise), society is getting increasingly coarse and belligerent (someone might spit on you for saying "Merry Christmas!"), and there are sinister foreign influences on restaurants even in small-town America.

Second, things were better when you were young. Everyone says that they want the next generation to have better lives than they did, but everyone is also jealous of younger people who "have it easier." The simplest way to reconcile these two feelings is to decide that any change in society is some kind of a trap (gay marriage will lead to bestiality, universal health insurance will bankrupt America, etc.). Fox encourages the idea that it's courageous and forward-thinking to try and turn the clock back to the days of your childhood.

I don't see how an explicitly liberal network can do much with those themes. And at this point, any attack on the Republican Party is an attack on the judgment of the elderly voters who form its base, and that kind of thing won't bring in a lot of Viagra commericals. 

The better use of money, if some liberal philathropist wants to dump a couple hundred million into an anti-Fox project, would be to start a TV network for older viewers that avoids controversy. (Maybe going back to the LOP theory of programming.) It could focus on self-help and nostalgia programming, the latter subtly reinforcing the idea that liberalism wasn't such a dirty word when FDR and JFK were in office. Maybe the network's hosts could occasionally remind viewers of a time when it was considered impolite to accuse the president of being a Kenyan communist, and when gullible belief in every conspiracy theory that comes down the pike was a sign of losing one's grip on sanity.

Along these lines, the ideal counterprogramming to Bill O'Reilly would not be Keith Olbermann or Alec Baldwin or Howard Dean. It would be someone like good ol' Matlock himself, Andy Griffith, who happens to be a lifelong Democrat. Add Angela Lansbury and Dick Van Dyke, and you can have a whole prime-time lineup of nonthreatening former TV sleuths who can reassure their viewers that, yes, we've lost some nice things in America, but we're not falling apart because Obama is in the White House. The new network might not beat Fox in the ratings, but some of our older relatives might appreciate getting a break from the fear-mongering. And they might become easier to talk to at Thankgiving.

 

 

Globe's Ideas section proves itself irrelevant

This week's Ideas section in the Boston Globe has a provocative piece by Drake Bennett on evidence that it's more effective to just give poor people money than to develop complicated programs to improve economic conditions in poor countries or neighborhoods:

the success of these ["free cash"] programs has shown development economists something they didn’t necessarily expect: that very poor people are, by and large, careful shepherds of money, and giving them more of it is not a recipe for indolence, debauchery, and waste.

Bennett notes that iconic conservative economist Milton Friedman favored this approach back in 1962, when he proposed a "negative income tax" that would provide cash for families below a certain income level.

Still, proposals like this aren't going anywhere in the United States, no matter how much evidence that they would work. All you have to do is look at Joe Keohane's piece in last week's Ideas section:

In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

I think the Ideas section needs a piece debunking the Keohane essay so that we can go back to thinking that counterintuitive Ideas section stories might actually get some traction in the real world. The rebuttal piece doesn't need to include any facts, of course. We can just make a group decision to believe it, like Tinker Bell or the Tax Fairy.

Attack of the Light Drizzle!

I have an essay in this week's Ideas section of the Boston Globe on sensationalistic weather reporting. An excerpt:

If you’ve started to feel that anticlimaxes have become the norm in Boston, you’re right. But it’s not because something has changed about the weather. It’s that something has changed about its packaging. Weather, especially on TV, has exited the realm of straight news, and even of entertainment, and entered the realm of marketing.

Increasingly, weather is being pre-sold as a kind of public drama, one with a distinctive language and set of conventions — the military-like music, the urgent graphics, the rhetoric of promise and veiled threat. We’ve come to take all this for granted in a modern storm forecast. The roots of this approach though, don’t lie in meteorology. They come from the hype of Hollywood and big-event television — a business in which overselling isn’t a sin, as long as you draw an audience.

The Boston Herald's hack obsession

Today's Boston Herald has a follow-up to yesterday's story by Jay Fitzgerald that implied that the lion's share of federal stimulus funds were hijacked by the Patrick administration to pay for "hack" government jobs. Yesterday's front-page story, headlined "GOV'S STIM FLAM" on the front and "Stimulus saves hacks" on the inside, made it seem like the Patrick administration had chosen to steer stimulus funds toward public-sector jobs.

Today's story, buried deep in the paper and the website (and without any link to the previous story), gives more than a passing notice to the fact that much of the stimulus funding in question was specifically earmarked by the feds for hiring or retaining public-sector employees. (It's not quite a correction, more of a grudging acknowledgment that maybe Patrick isn't lying on this score.)

Putting aside the specifics of this particular story, my question for the Herald is, when did they start using "hack" to describe every single person in the public sector, no matter what their qualifications, salaries, duties, and competence in performing their jobs?

Here's the lead to yesterday's story: "Gov. Deval Patrick's economic-stimulus program is looking more like a Save-A-Hack telethon with a federal cash infusion going mostly to save jobs on the government payroll."

But the story only mentions “schoolteachers, police and firefighters” as examples of workers who benefit from the “Save-A-Hack” move. There’s nothing about Marian Walsh-type job offers, excessive pensions, or anything else to distinguish hackery from state workers just doing their jobs.

Admittedly, it’s easier to cover politics and government when all public-sector workers are characterized as hacks.* It means that’s a silly waste of time to try to make government more effective, to try to determine which programs actually work and which employees are productive. All that matters is that the public payroll, like the crime rate, must come down at any cost. (I’m eager to see how Charlie Baker, the leading Republican candidate for governor, deals with this proposition.)

*I suspect that most Herald readers allow for some exceptions to the rule. For example, “The guy at my city’s first-time-homeowner program who helped get me a mortgage = nice, hard-working fellow. The woman in the office next door trying to help families find places to live after their apartment building burned down = hack!”

I recall when “hack” referred to the minority of public-sector employees who were trying to scam the system, but maybe we can coin a new term to separate them from people who actually put in a full day’s work — something with as much panache as another Herald favorite, “perv.” But I may just be behind on my vocabulary. When I consult my American Heritage, the definition of “hack” doesn’t mention the public sector at all. It does, however, mention the far older and more universally accepted definition of a hack as someone who produces “routine or commercial writing.”

Cross-posted at CW Unbound.

Boston Globe print vs. online

Media Nation's Dan Kennedy asks:

If the Boston Globe (or any major metro) raised its prices to $2 on weekdays and $5 on Sundays, what sorts of print-only content would induce you to pay for it rather than simply reading it online?

OK, here's a start:

1.) A New York Times-level crossword puzzle, or at least a good acrostic.

2.) Comic strips less than 25 years old. Specifically, comic strips that Garfield fans don't "get."

3.) Quirky or offbeat stories from all over New England (because I already know the quirky stories from Boston itself, thanks to my daily blog reading).

4.) "On Beacon Hill" and "Around City Hall" columns by reporters who cover nothing else. I said NOTHING else.

5.) Lengthy TV articles by Matthew Gilbert (as opposed to photo collages of the "Top 10 TV Bosses," etc.)

6.) A tabloid version of the Ideas/book review section, so I can carry it around all week and I can make copies of particularly good articles. (Currently, it's handier to print out each article from the online edition.) But don't reduce the length of the articles.

7.) Cool maps!

8.) Photojournalism in the Boston Globe magazine, other than pictures of food and home interiors.

9.) A good food writer who covers things rather than places (a brief history of Peruvian cuisine, yes; a Q&A with a new chef at a upscale restaurant, blech).

10.)  A handy list of which stores, bars, and restaurants in the Boston area have closed in the previous week, so I don't suggest them to friends. If the economy improves, maybe I'll want to know what has just opened, too.

Forbes writer must not get many party invitations

Matthew Ygelsias objects to this passage in a Forbes column by Bruce Bartlett that slams the US Postal Service:

While some Democratic spending will be called "investments," Republicans can make a strong case that the only ones that really add to the nation's capital stock are those directed by the market. Historically, government-directed investment has been very inefficient. That's why Amtrak and the Post Office don't work very well and why there was a privatization movement in the 1980s and 1990s, which led governments everywhere to sell their state-owned enterprises.

Ygelsias is correct that Amtrak has disappointing service because it's underfunded, and that the Post Office actually works very well. That's why the phrase "the check is in the mail" is universally understood as a lie. If someone claims that they sent you something through the US Post Office and it still hasn't arrived five days later, there's a 99.99% chance he or she didn't send it.

If Bartlett thinks the Post Office doesn't work very well because acquaintances are always claiming that he was sent invitations, Christmas cards, admiring notes, etc. that must have gotten "lost in the mail", he needs a reality check.

Oops, more evidence that I'm not a real American

“I don’t think there is an American who hasn’t stopped today and said a little prayer for the victims of the Virginia Tech shootings,” said ABC personality Charles Gibson while moderating tonight's Perry Mason-style interrogation of the Democratic presidential debates. ("Isn't it true that you plan to raise taxes? Isn't it true that you're on friendly terms with someone who isn't sufficiently patriotic?")

Am I really the only person in the US who didn't say such a prayer today? Well, mass shootings happen often enough in America that tomorrow must be the anniversary of another one, so I'll double up then.