June 23, 2004

Immediacy is the new truth…

I feel like I've been dancing around this notion for years now. But somehow, in recent months, the horrible truthfulness of this has become crystal clear. And what is horrible about it is not that it is some faceless monster converting the mindless to its ranks and out to destroy the world. It is that the very smartest of us are being sucked into the vortex of speed, not only unable to escape, but trying to move ever faster into the storm, desperate to be the first to be first.

Of course, the internet is the medium that has made this possible. Like any new technology, it is nothing but a tool. But that tool of communication, put into the hands of so many, is not really in our control.

What I have the most time to observe is the media. I am part of it. I am a commentator on it. I hear stories about medical chat rooms that allow for amazing exchanges between doctors or sites where people from my nations can gather in hope of building bridges and even sex sites of every flavor imaginable and beyond. But I am watching my industry. And like so many notions that seek refuge in immediacy, it is far to easy to point the cyber-finger at Matt Drudge for what we see in sped up, more reckless news cycles.

Drudge has been reckless at times. And it took some time before his politics became clear. But while The Drudge Report exposed the downtime between media knowledge and media reporting, which I now think of like the 30 seconds of inferior security in a movie bank heist in which the thieves are able to take advantage of the lapse just in the nick of time, it serves mostly as a compelling headline service with a very specific point of view. If I were the financial backer of Air America, I would be finding my liberal Drudge and doing the same thing for the left, focusing all the media attention that Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo can muster to create a site that offers all kinds of news but that selects left-leaning journalists to link through. That said, there is no illusion to Drudge. What you see is what you get. And like any other journalist, when he breaks news, one must be aware and appropriate wary of the sourcing.

The infection of immediacy may have started, in part, with a newspaper editor saying, "Why did I have to read that on Drudge before I saw it in our paper?" But you can't blame Drudge for that. Nor can anyone blame Drudge for the infection of immediacy at the newspapers that are held high above the others as the papers of record. It is these papers acquiescence to immediacy and the journalistic failures that follow in turn that have taken the disease from being one of the internet ghetto to being one of all media.

Coca-Cola has its secret formula and KFC its 12 secret spices, but time is the media's special secret ingredient. You got some sense of it in All The President's Men. But the film was so artfully written and the stakes so great and familiar that it was a lot more fun than real journalism. You aren't really supposed to see behind the curtain, even though we are allegedly finders of truth. Even the most beautiful girl is probably wearing some kind of make-up or body support that you aren't supposed to notice.

Slowly, time has become more valued than the absolute passion for truth and with the loss of time, all the other values of journalism are left just inches from the precipice at all times. Getting it first has won over getting it right.

But here is the major problem… traditionally, when Matt Drudge screwed up or overstated or propagandized, people shrugged their shoulders and move along. It was "The Internet," after all… not to be taken too seriously. But when The New York Times screws up or overstates or propagandizes, it carries with it the may decades of being THE paper of record. And in city after city and town after town and country after country, that record is given the force of truth. Except in a case when it decides to tie itself to the cross, as it did with Weapons of Mass Destruction recently (and I have some grave doubts about the motivation behind that move), there is no great value to the Corrections page. There is no going back.

And then it boomerangs back to Drudge - which is standing in here for "The Net," just as The New York Times is for big-time mainstream media - and the public acceptance of unformed ideas that they have read in the NY Times, driven by immediacy, further legitimizes what they are reading on Drudge because it has become nigh impossible to distinguish big-media's drive for immediacy and the Drudge Report's.

Perhaps the moment of world devirginization came on election night 2000 when the media bounced back and forth on the winner in Florida. (Michael Moore turns this ugly moment of premature reporting into a part of "the conspiracy" in Fahrenheit 9/11… but Moore could turn my choice of a Venti Americano instead of a Grande into a conspiracy if that were his want. I think my feelings about this film have become clearer as the notion of throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if it sticks, and thus, is done, is messy and inaccurate and unfortunate when it comes to so important a topic.) It seems to me that things have gotten progressively worse since then.

And that's where I start looking at this through the prism of media coverage.

Harry Knowles is not the Matt Drudge of the movie business. Although he has done almost exactly the same thing as Drudge, using the dead time between actual events in the life of a film production to stick his nose in and to "report" what is happening before it is fully formed, the difference between hard news, where Drudge mostly traffics, and the film business is massive. To simplify a bit too much, there are very few hard facts in moviemaking. While it is a business, it is mostly an art… at least the part that Harry cares about in print. And as such, Knowles has become first and foremost a purveyor of opinions about the industry he covers and not a seeker of fact.

But once again, the boomerang strikes. Only this time, as the papers of record get sucked into the tides of immediacy, they are not only rushing to print half-baked facts. They are rushing to print half-baked opinions.

A point of clarity. What people who love AICN and other speed outlets can't seem to separate and what I think is absolutely critical to any real discussion of the values of these sites is that there is (or can be) a real distinction between calling something a half-baked opinion based on objective journalistic standards and calling the person offering the opinion a half-baked idiot.

Of course, the level of discourse on and about AICN (and the many speed sites that it stands in for in this conversation) gets very personal and rarely embraces any objective standards. There is nothing wrong with that, really. One of the great things about the web is that it is a great gathering place of opinion and people can choose the playground on which they want to stomp. I don't like be abused, so I don't spend much time on those boards. For whatever reasons, the discourse I have with THB and MCN readers is far more civil. Perhaps it is because we don't have boards and therefore, the opportunity for things to get ratcheted up is not there. (I rarely get e-mail calling me a moron or worse, except when movies like The Passion of The Christ or Fahrenheit 9/11 lift the stakes well before I get to them.)

But the boomerang goes back to the papers of record and they too start reading a little more personal and a little less objective. There is, of course, nothing wrong with opinion journalism when it is so marked. (THB is opinion journalism.) But opinions have become the primary commodity of the web, especially in entertainment coverage, and they are not, in and of themselves, news.

What is a source in 2004?

For me, a story needs to prove a lot before I even see it as a rumor, much less news. Sources can be at the top or the bottom of the food chain. Every source has a motivation. Some are more honorable and some are less. But to forget that your source has a motivation is to set yourself up to print lies on a regular basis.

For me, the moment of transition for the papers of record is still Bernard Weinraub's New York Times story on American Beauty. Since almost no one had seen the film when he wrote about it, but he wished to convey enthusiasm, he quoted, in the New York Times, an anonymous IMDb review of the film. Would he have quoted that opinion had it not matched his? I can't say. But as time has passed, the internet has become the most prolific unnamed source in traditional media. The problem with that is that in the old days, Woodward & Bernstein knew who Deep Throat was. Nowadays, Harry Knowles, et al, choose who their Deep Throats will be. Moreover, as our editor (along with others at AICN), we don't know what Harry's standards really are, as he repeatedly flaunts any of the unwritten but tightly held rules of being a journalist.

Again, the point is not to hang Harry. He's just doing what he wants to. He is not responsible for the reaction of others.

But media outlet after media outlet has stopped taking the time (and resources) to find the full and true stories that they cover for fear of being late to come to table with a piece. The sad irony is that most media types are waiting for The New York Times or L.A. Times or sometimes the Trades or USA Today or The Wall Street Journal (the one outlet that seems to be able to avert its ears from the siren song of immediacy). They don't need it now. And they don't need it right. They just want to get it from a source that feels honorable. They don't even read the stories. They will report dinner party speculation as facts because a big paper printed it.

But when the standard bearer lowers it standards… often below the standards of the flashy, high-speed medium that is the web… we are all left on our own. And as you scrape off the secret sauce of journalism and look at that plain burger, you realize that every layer is critical to the experience of journalism. When you read a big paper, there are layers of people reading every story… perhaps not always enough. But the grammatical and spelling mistakes that squeak through in this column are forgiven by most because there are just two of us looking at it before you do and most of you know that and cut us some slack.

More importantly, you honor me by giving me any trust at all, as I am one voice, without constraints and without the filter of real editing. I wish I had it. I would be a better columnist and a better journalist for it. I would also hate it. But as long as the person editing me knew as much as I did about the general topics about which I write, I would respect their opinion. And even if they didn't, I would respect, as I do you through your e-mails, the bounce of my ideas of their ideas.

But that interaction is one of the main reasons why I love this format so much. I get feedback every day. And since I write five days a week (most of the time… oy!), I can continue the dialogue and speak to your responses to me in a real way. That option does not exist at The New York Times. When a stance is taken at a major daily, it is virtually irretrievable. When a passing web opinion is given weight, it starts to carry the weight of fact, which was never its intention, even if the ego of the opinion giver wishes it so.

This is also becoming more true of the web, as one slice of the opinion pie can travel around, never being put into context. Recently, I have gotten repeated e-mails about my comments on F9/11, questioning how I could say this or that without seeing the movie. The problem is, I saw and reviewed the movie two weeks ago. Someone out there has re-printed one of my pieces and not the others. And that is fair on its face. But it is not accurate. And just because people didn't make the effort to, for example, go to MCN's F9/11 news array and look at everything in context, they are not bad people. It is the fractured nature of the web and often, of web journalism. One must be vigilant to get the whole picture.

The web is still immature and the tools to assure the opportunity to keep filling the knowledge void are hard to come by. Readers of traditional media? They don't even seem to know that they have to make that effort at all.

Faster and faster and faster we go… all of us… no matter what out size… the heavyweights slam the lightweights out of the ring and no one as the time to mention the mismatch… the flyweights buzz around the heavyweights hoping to get in that lucky punch… and the public is left wondering about whether anything is worthy of trust.

Speed kills.