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September 5, 2007 - The Little Mermaid
September 19, 2007
???
I am thrilled to see that the Traditional Media is covering the self-censorship by Fox that occurred at the Emmy Awards on Sunday night. It is the kind of story that I have found slips by all too often. It is, in recent years, the kind of story that was considered the provenance of “bloggers.”
I still hate the word “blogger,” though I have to admit that I find myself allowing it into vocabulary far more often than I once did. After all, how pretentious and irritating it must be for people who I am talking to, often fellow journalists, who have not spent the last decade surfing the web each day, and who follow other journalists who have turned this word into the “Xerox” of web writing.
I cannot begin to argue with people, like Erica Jong, who calls “blogging” overrated in this month’s Radar Magazine. Her perception of what the form is, as has been drilled into her by Traditional Media, is one of personal, self-aggrandizing, verbal diarrhea that everyone is somehow expected to give credence. Indeed, the origin of the word, “blog” is not “all written material on the internet not emanating from an otherwise published medium,” but “personal web logs.” Somehow, as a group of people who were serous about using the medium to do something other than to spew developed, the “power of the Blogosphere” somehow made bloggers of a higher calling comfy with being part of this muscular categorization.
However, when Ms. Jong, still known first and last for the “zipless fuck” of 34 years ago, asks and answers, “How to distinguish a ‘pundit’ from a gasbag? Impossible!,” she shows just how deeply etched the stupidity of ghettoization can be. It’s a stupid as saying that writing books is overrated because it is impossible to distinguish a two-bit hack writing crap sex pulp from a great mind delivering a lasting piece of literature.
But I digress…
Fox’s choice to self-censor at the Emmys becomes too easy to dismiss when, as some have, we start parsing out the details of the moments that were censored. Does it really matter whether it was Sally Field talking about the “goddamn” war or Ray Romano talking about Frasier “screwing” his TV wife? Does anyone who is not grossly overreaching really think that there was some political purpose on Fox’s part… other than avoiding an FCC fine?
The big picture issue, even more than the horror of the Bush Administration era of the FCC, is that the entertainment business is becoming more and more corporate and while we actually have more filmed entertainment choices than ever in the history of the world, the potential for restraint of anything that is in any way dangerous to the corporations is greater than ever.
But it’s not just the worldwide corporations that control the movie studios, networks, cable, satellite, etc. It’s the Traditional Media as well… and the internet, for all the talk about “bloggers” being out of control, is not far behind. With due respect to all the fine minds at all of the media outlets out there, the news game gets narrower and narrower day by day. And yet, the most intense argument that Traditional Media makes about its importance, that they are the ones that build the news stories that the internet media repeats, rejiggers, and comments upon, is a real one.
The attempt we all make so often to define quality is, oddly, a distraction from the reality of the challenge that is being faced by people who deliver all forms of media. There is, factually, more news available to Americans than ever before. But how are CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, etc, etc, etc, serving us? Fox News, for instance, creates rage in many, but is there anything inherently wrong with the bias in their reporting? Is there something inherently superior to the network that leads with Larry King Live?
There is a piece in this month’s Radar Magazine about TMZ.com. The most remarkable thing about it – aside from burying Harvey Levin’s boyfriend somewhere deep in the piece when it would lead any TMZ or most Radar stories – is how uninterested the magazine’s editors and writer John Cook are in the site’s relationship with AOL and Time-Warner. I don’t mean to take away from the fact that someone at Time-Warner had the idea to compete in the harsh gossip segment – which the company’s magazine group never really has – or that hiring Levin turned out to be an excellent call. But the lack of curiosity about the powerful parent is rather stunning. It’s still awfully good, but shouldn’t the daily average of 300,000 visitors a day (times 30 to make 9 million uniques a month) by reported instead of hyping the bigger number? And shouldn’t we be reminded that AOL has tens of millions of people coming through their portal every day?
Word has it that the start up was one of the most expensive budgeted start-ups in web history. Again, congrats. But isn’t the real story here that TMZ.com became a well-funded tsunami, stealing ideas from independent, privately-owned sites from The Smoking Gun to Gawker to Defamer to Perez Hilton to YouTube to TV shows like VH-1’s The Best Week Ever?
And though the management claims the site is profitable, it seems rather unlikely. Moreover, it makes sense that this was headed to being a strip show from the start, the website a pilot, essentially, for a TV producer (Levin) who had failed before, but had another commercial idea. Financially, anyone on the web would tell you that there are not millions in ad revenues for a website like TMZ. There is more money in publishing, when it works. But the real money, in terms of return on effort, is on TV.
But the biggest thing is… TMZ is Time-Warner. E! has always had a number of owners involved, so no one studio parent could be targeted as being responsible when the channel went off the reservation. Will Mel Gibson hold it against Time-Warner if he is considering acting for a studio again? And while one could well make a church and state argument for CNN, does that hold for an aggressive gossip site like TMZ? Moreover, can we really expect that Harvey Levin & Co, who are being propelled forward not only by Time-Warner budgeting, but by endless promotion from within the Time-Warner family of media outlets. (Did you really think that Harvey Levin was hosting Larry King Live because the show got a benefit from him being on CNN’s air or did you get that it was TMZ being promoted by Time-Warner’s CNN division?)
Now, I am not much of a conspiracy guy. I have always said that if you let five people in on a secret, two will be calling friends within 30 minutes of leaving the room. But in these cases, there is less and less internal resistance. What will happen to The Wall Street Journal when Rupert Murdoch’s influence is more strongly felt? I doubt that there will be Fox product promoted in front page stories each week. Rupert is in the WSJ business because it is good for his business overall and if he screws with the franchise too much, he surely knows that he is cutting off his own nose to spite his face. But what you learn after years in this game is that one or two stories can change perception dramatically in our myopic little worlds. So the question is not whether Murdoch will stick a Page Six in the Journal, it’s when he will spike that one key story next month.
And at this point, some will wonder, “who really cares?”
Well, it all connects to bigger issues. Can any of us actually be sure to the answer to the question of whether we would each be more invested in the disposition of the war if we weren’t constantly having Brad and Angelina and Britney and Anna Nicole (more famous in death than she ever was in life) or even the hyperbole of O’Reilly or the comedy of Jon Stewart or this weekend’s grosses in our faces so often? Do the distractions keep us docile or are we seeking out the distractions so we never have to be all that upset?
It’s an endless set of ironies. Disney is beaten on by theater people for making Broadway bland, but even besides arguments that the success of their Broadway presence has buoyed the entire industry for other more challenging works, I would say that at least the consumer is getting what it is being sold with Disney shows. There may not be so many surprises… but at least there are not too many surprises.
Expressing what we think we want or what we want others to think we want is easy. Living these things is hard. Being responsible enough in how we live with the media to ask the hard questions is really difficult. It’s not that we need all media to be split up so that no potatoes touch any vegetables ever. That is nearly impossible. But when we stop thinking about the distinctions is when we empower the most dangerous behaviors.
The key question for us about Fox’s self-censorship is not whether we should have Sally Field combine the words “god” and “damn,” but what our community standards really are and how they should be measured in the future. Do we want the FCC to hold broadcast television to some standard that other networks are not held to simply because a small percentage of the country gets their signal over the air and not via a cable or satellite? Do we want more cable stations to be regulated in the same way? Should economic interests rule?
Questions, questions, questions.
Somehow, I feel like simply the act of asking them is the most political choice of all.
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September 5, 2007 - The Little Mermaid
