19 posts tagged “journalistic turpitude”

is articles like this.

Jon Stewart, the iconic media critic and political satirist from television’s “The Daily Show,” had a sold-out crowd howling Saturday night at the University of Vermont’s Patrick Gymnasium — and mined Vermont’s marriage-rights debate for material.

True to form, he waded into an emotionally charged issue (and one sharply debated in the Legislature) with healthy doses of absurdist logic.

“I can understand being against gay marriage — if they decided to make it mandatory,” he said. “This isn’t a cultural divide: They’re wrong.”

Thanks, Detached Anchorman Tone, for robbing Stewart of all character and wit.

As expected, during the rest of Saturday’s performance, Stewart, 46, strayed from the edgy scripting style he forges for TV audiences and returned to his roots as an irreverent stand-up comic.

He talked about Burlington: "Could your town be any prettier?" Later, remarking: "I saw a guy with a 'gay pacificists for Nadar button. It's an usual place."

Stewart has hosted “The Daily Show” since 1999, and has received numerous Emmy awards as a writer and producer.

No stranger to controversy, Stewart has also earned renown as a candid and aggressive guest on politically conservative talk shows.

He has also written or co-written two books and acted in several films..

It's like they're writing about some obscure Romanian pop star who's touring New England.

My reporter-friend Derek says that the failure of newspapers isn't on the content side, it's on the business side. The papers are as good as they always were, it's just that the advertising base has rotted out from underneath them. I agree with this generally, and it's a ridiculous disaster how most American newsrooms have to fill the same-sized newspaper with half-sized staffs every morning.

But look at this article. Jon Stewart isn't some mysterious figure who has to be presented to us with phrases like 'he has earned renown'. Stewart is an extremely public figure, and anyone under 35 will be familiar with his show and some of the movies he's been in. Well, 'Half Baked', at least.

One of the ongoing failures of print journalism is this Current Events 101 tone, as if everything has to be written for the layest possible audience. If science publications don't explain how photosynthesis works every time a new plant is discovered, I don't see why newspaper culture pages have to present Jon Stewart to me like I just moved to Vermont from Malawi.

Newspapers are dying of specificity. Just as the diversity of content into sports, politics and technology publications killed Life Magazine in 1972, the diversity of voices into young and old, left and right, naive and snarky is wilting newspapers in 2009. Why should I read a Jon Stewart for Dummies review when I can hop online and find one written with a context and perspective I can relate to?

To my mind, it's this prisming of authority that threatens newspapers the most. Rather than read one weekly movie reviewer in my front-porch lump, I can choose from 500 online, and decide to follow the ones that reflect my sensibility. Plus, I can participate in discussions of movies, TV and comedy long beyond their airdates, and don't have to rely on the 'no spoilers' model that newspapers have been delivering the past five decades.

I'm not trying to engage in the Death of Newspapers cheerleading you often come across on the 'neener neener'-net. Less journalism (by which I mean reporting, not reviewing what's already out there) is always and necessarily a bad thing, and we're gonna have a decade or two of some serious Informed Democracy Fail before we come up with a new model.

But for now, newspapers should compete where they can add value.

I lived in Britain (well, London) for a year, and the one thing I couldn't get over was how the class system bled into everything. Anecdotes beginning with 'I was in Budgens the other day ...' were greeted with a wince. Formerly connotation-free personal habits, such as brushing my teeth, were suddenly signifiers. I was told at one point that I ate my toast in a lower-class way (i.e. sliced rectangularly. Common, don't you know.)

I've been watching with some interest the saga of Jane Goody, a British reality show contestant cum celebrity cum cancer victim who died this week:

The first time she was mentioned in the press, in May 2002, Jade Goody was described as a "pretty dental nurse, 20, from London". But 24 hours later, as she began her gobby, ignorant trajectory in the Big Brother house [It's a British reality show, Mom -- Mike], The People went on the attack under the headline: "Why we must lob the gob". Before long it was open season. The Sun called her a hippo, then a baboon, before launching its campaign to "vote out the pig". The Sunday Mirror rejected porcine comparisons on the ground that it was "insulting – to pigs".

[...]

As her performance on Big Brother made clear, her years of formal education had left Jade Goody with little knowledge. She thought that a ferret was a bird and abscess a green French drink; that Pistachio painted the Mona Lisa; that Sherlock Holmes invented the flush lavatory; that East Anglia ("East Angular" in Jade-speak) was abroad; and that Rio de Janeiro was "a bloke, innit?"

[...]

By 2007, when she made her second visit to the Big Brother house on Celebrity Big Brother (alongside her surgically-enhanced mother Jackie), Jade Goody had become, by her own account, "the most 25th inferlential person in the world" and a bona fide celebrity. She was said to be worth £2-4 million, was the proud owner of three "footballers' wives" style homes, a £60,000 turbo-charged Range Rover and was the "author" of a best-selling autobiography.

 

The unexpected fourth ring of this circus came last year, when Goody announced that she had terminal cancer, and had only a few months to live. Thus followed the quickie-marriage to the convict, various TV specials and, somewhere in London, a team of BBC editors cueing up a slow-motion montage set to The Four Seasons.

I was in London for the first few years of the Jane Goody tabloid judgmento-frenzy, and I remember being amazed at the vitriol being aimed at this woman (who I had never heard of), who was just a reality show contestant, not a head of state or a powerful CEO. I shouldn't be surprised that the Daily Mail and the Sun are writing sober, thoughtful obituaries now that the target of their exclamation-pointed normativizing has become un-famous in the only way they will allow.

Any obituary that wants to note the broader social implications of Jane Goody should at least mention the following point:

Nobody wanted to stop and ask: why doesn’t Jade know much? Here’s why. Her mother was a seriously disabled drug addict, so Jade didn’t go to school much because she stayed at home to look after her. From the age of five she was in charge of doing the cooking and ironing and cleaning.

Jade explained: “As early as I could remember I’d spent my whole life trying to protect my mum – frantically hiding the stolen chequebooks she used to have lying around the house when the police barged in on one of their raids; desperately denying to the teachers at school that she’d hit me for fear of being sent to social services.”

Her father treated her even worse. He stashed a gun under her cot, and her first memory was of him shooting heroin in her bedroom, his eyes rolling back and his body juddering. Eventually, after periods in and out of prison, he was found dead from an overdose in the toilet of a Kentucky Fried Chicken.

“He died without a single vein left in his body,” Jade explained. “In the end he’d injected every single part of it and all his veins had collapsed – even the ones in his penis.”

[...]

Go to any extremely unequal society – say, South Africa, or South America – and you will find a furiously suppressed sense of guilt. It’s hard not to ask, at the back of your mind: why am I here in this mansion, while they are in the slums? This guilt is resolved one way: by convincing yourself that the poor are sub-human, and don’t have feelings like you and me. Oh, the people in the barrios and townships? They’re animals! They stink! They’re stupid! Jade and Vicky and the labelling of the poor as “chavs” filled that role for us. They know nothing! They are repulsive!

I clicked on this New York Times article because I read the (awesome) headline

Mistrial by iPhone: Juries’ Web Research Upends Trials

The use of BlackBerrys and iPhones by jurors gathering and sending out information about cases is wreaking havoc on trials around the country.

Nine paragraphs and three anecdotes later, just as I'm starting to think, 'OK, here comes the creamy statistical center', I get:

There appears to be no official tally of cases disrupted by Internet research, but with the increasing adoption of Web technology in cellphones, the numbers are sure to grow.

This is still an interesting issue (in that the jury-trial system is gently but firmly being revealed as kind of a joke), but that news hook is loser. The number is sure to grow?! This is journalism done backwards.

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...most likely we can brace ourselves for new lows on US and global equities in the next 12 to 18 months. Eventually a more sustained recovery will occur once we are closer to clear signals that this ugly global U-shaped recession is not turning into a L-shaped near depression and that the global economic recovery is clear and sustained. Until then expect very volatile and choppy US and global equity markets with new lows reached in the next months and the year ahead.

 

What are you basing this on, exactly? The last time that housing overspeculation and bubble burstage profoundly affected Wall Street? You know, 90 years ago, when we all drove buggies and seamstressing was America's most dynamic growth industry?

I'm not saying this dude is wrong, necessarily. I'm just saying that plotting stock market data points in the future isn't remotely science. It's barely even economics. It's just one more Predictocrat, standing in Krakow in 1939, shouting 'World War I lasted only four years! Therefore, Hitler will withdraw in 1943! Plan accordingly!'

An excerpt from some pithitude called 'Why Facebook is for Old Fogies':

3. We never get drunk at parties and get photographed holding beer bottles in suggestive positions. We wish we still did that. But we don't. (See pictures of Beer Country in Denver.)
[...]
6. We're old enough that pictures from grade school or summer camp look nothing like us. These days, the only way to identify us is with Facebook tags. (See pictures of a diverse group of American teens.)

Whose desperate idea was it to insert these parenthesey links at the end of each paragraph like this?

After a stand-up comic tells a searing story about, for example, his premature ejaculation with his girlfriend, you don't want him to suddenly stop and say 'For more information on this and other sexual dysfunctions, there is an information booth in the back with a number of pamphlets. Now, back to the hilarity.'

I genuinely feel sorry for the writer of this piece. This is the closest thing to gang rape a team of marketers can inflict on an attempt at art. Your editors are deliberately trying to distract readers away from your story, dude. You're trying to affect a Cool Dad tone, and every time you make a funny, grandpa calls in from the next room: 'Lemme show you some pictures!'

Also, 'A diverse group of American teens'?!  Would anyone want to click on a gallery that is marketed in this way? Imagine the popularity of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition if it was advertised as 'See pictures of fertile teenagers affecting awkward poses in bathing attire'. 

I know the Internet is supposed to be this endless frontier of connected interests and journa-augmentation, but take it easy, Time. Sometimes it's OK to have 100 words in a row without any of them being blue and underlined.

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My friend Derek, a reporter for a newspaper that mocks the immensity of his awesome with its small-townity, posted a note responding to the New York Times claim that 'During each recession cycle between 1968 and 2004, the rate of growth in evangelical churches jumped by 50 percent.'

This has to do with numbers, and how journalists use them.

Let's look at the sentence. Growth RATES increase by 50 percent. It's cited just like that in the Times article. Sounds impressive. Except it's not. Well, not that impressive. I Googled the actual study, [PDF] which found a correlation between economic downturns and an increase in Evangelical growth. The growth rate increased from .98 percent to 1.52 percent in recession years. Now that lands with a turd-like thud on the page, doesn't it? Citing it as a percent change will sex that right up.

A 1 percent to 1.5 percent increase is indeed a 50 percent rise in the rate. (Ex: If your church has 1000 members, it would grow by about 10 people in a non recession year, or 15 during a recession.)

It's not to say that journalists shouldn't have reported the study, and in the reporter's defense, the citation was pretty far down. However, expressing the change in growth rate as a 50 percent "jump" gives people the impression that Evangelical churches GROW by 50 percent in recessions. At best, it makes the issue unclear. At worst, it distorts the truth.

I have no doubt I've been suckered by companies, governments, etc., using fuzzy math to make the numbers look more impressive or less damning. (And reported them.) But journalists shouldn't willingly fiddle with numbers like Play-Doh.

If I say there was a 300 percent increase in assaults in Yourtown, USA, it's shocking. But if I tell you the total went from 2 to 8, it's not so shocking, is it? What so often happens is that the more impressive interpretation of the numbers hits the echo chamber, context be damned. "Tonight at 6:30, one local town is reeling after learning assaults increased 300 percent!"

If you're going to report the percent change, I think you owe your readers the raw numbers, too.

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You just knew the whole 'Michael Phelps smokes pot oh my god what ever shall we do' story was going to lead somewhere irritating eventually. And ... yep, there it is: He's losing his Kellogg's endorsement. Say goodbye to that dream of being the seventh Lucky Charm marshmallow shape, Mike.

One thing that always strikes me about these little outrage-flocks is that it seems like everyone, from the media to the politicians to the Pop-Tart-makers, is acting to appease the imaginary 1950s housewife rotating in a snowglobe in our brains. There is a difference, it seems to me, between 'someone might be offended' and 'someone got offended'.

Maybe I'm sheltered here in the onani-tundra, but is there anyone in America who sees a story about a 23-year-old engaged in a nominally illegal activity and is genuinely bothered? Like, pit of their stomach, 'please make it go away' bothered? I feel like pretty much everyone, from my grandma to those 'God Hates Fags' sign-holders, were prepared to give this one a pass.

Seriously, can we, as a society, define a threshold of tangible outrage to which we will react? I'm talking, like letters to Congress and tearful 911 calls. Five hundred? A thousand? A million? Otherwise, we're just holding ourselves to the moral standards of the 'your water fountain is over there, darky' generation.

is so you can use your favorite picture.

From Jonah Lehrer, talking about a woman who lost her life savings to this Madoff pyramid scheme dude:

It's an awful story, and I can't imagine how terrible Penney must feel. And yet, I read her entire tale without feeling any genuine sympathy. Sure, she lost all of her money, but so what? It's her own fault for investing with Madoff in the first place. If she hadn't been so greedy then none of this would have happened. That was my callous first reaction. (And, if my friends are a representative sample, I'm not the only one who felt such heartless feelings.) I blamed the victim.

Of the seven words in that phrase, Lehrer appears to misunderstand four of them. It's like he's saying 'if my ice cubes are warm and liquid...'

In her review of the 'Twilight' novels:

Reading the book, I sometimes experienced what I imagine long-married men must feel when they get an unexpected glimpse at pornography: slingshot back to a world of sensation that, through sheer force of will and dutiful acceptance of life’s fortunes, I thought I had subdued.

Ummm, yes, those men who have not so much as glimpsed pornography since they gave it up for gleaming matrimony lo those many years ago. Are there women below the age of mummified who believe in this version of men, or marriage, or pornography?