Chez Pazienza over at HuffPo, and his blog Deus Ex Malcontent. Pazienza was a producer fired from CNN recently for writing a liberal blog. I’d stop watching CNN in protest, except I stopped watching that clown show long ago.
I studied Liberal Arts math/science at Penn State in the late 70s, but most of my friends were journalism majors met at the school newspaper, the Daily Collegian, where I worked as a cartoonist. This was during the aftermath of the Nixon resignation, the wheelhouse of Hunter S. Thompson, and the culture of Woodward and Bernstein, and somehow it all went Horribly Wrong. Growing up means losing campus-born-and-nurtured innocence about the way things work, and maybe this was always going to happen, but from the time a second-tier actor (third tier if you count the movies with the monkey) got hired on to play President of the United States in 1980, the path seemed weirdly inevitable.
For a while CNN looked like the Brave New World, but it mutated into some weird People Magazine publicity machine. Britney’s latest on-camera flip-out or the drug overdose of blue jeans model easily moving in front of the oil companies’ campaign to apparently simultaneously annex and depopulate Iraq. The lesson, as always, is ‘follow the money’. A news organization run by MBAs is not a news organization … it is, and will always be, a profit-seeking beast.
And if that starts happening to the blogs, same story. Although for now, the Internet has proven novel enough to confuse most of the old media money. Entry barriers are low, and sites like Talking Point Memo do provide some current hope for the Future of Information.
Frank Rich is on his game today as well, speaking about Hillary’s Audacity of Hopelessness. My brother and I are split on the Hillary/Obama question. He was working lights on an event Obama was involved with and felt like he was more marketing than substance, so favors Hillary’s experience. Hillary comes across to me badly … reeking of the sort of politics that says ‘do what you have to do, say what you have to say, to win’, seemingly oblivious to the fact that we are trying to withdrawal from toxic doses of that crap. I am willing to try something very new. I don’t buy into any of the messianic messaging that seems to be springing up around Obama, but I do hope that this could signal the opening of a door. To quote the good doctor, “History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of ”history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.”. (HST)
