Mainstream Media: Of Course We're Whores. So What?

Like Glenn Greenwald, I was happy to see The New York Times give us a classic front-page expose in the April 20 Sunday edition, on the Pentagon stage-managing corporate and retired "military analysts" appearing on national TV networks to make precisely the points the Pentagon wanted to make. Talk about your Mighty Wurlitzer! And like Glenn Greenwald, I was waiting for some kind of reaction from CBS, Fox, ABC, NBC, CNN ... surely they couldn't sit still and pretend this story never appeared? Well, yes they could.

Thankfully, Glenn Greenwald made his frustrations known in Salon. The networks know that David Barstow was telling the straight story in his NY Times article about the depths to which they'd been used, and they didn't care to be reminded of it. As Greenwald said, news organizations never disclose when outsiders or their own cohorts accuse them of being corrupt in the newsgathering process, so we shouldn't be surprised. Nor should we be surprised about the Pentagon analyst scam. With budgets slashed in the newsroom, most TV news organizations are so used to the concept of "embedded war reporting" that they'd love to get pre-made video clips from the Pentagon and broadcast them as their own. Good old Eric Alterman of The Nation magazine has regularly been claiming that the mainstream media has sunk to such depths, its members are beneath contempt. Glenn Greenwald provided specific examples of this treachery, by showing how TV networks pretend David Barstow and The Times do not exist. Here's one instance where the steep decline of journalism should not bother anyone, as TV network news would be better off not being in existence.

Shoulda Been a Used-Car Salesman

And the implosion of traditional journalism continues. In the space of eight hours Feb. 29, I watched the company I've worked for for umpteen years split itself into four pieces, and then learned that my old alma mater, The Albuquerque Tribune, stopped publishing on Feb. 23. The lights go out, one by one....

Broken Models, Free Lunches

As we catapult in slo-mo toward what may be the most significant recession in decades, I keep hearing the same analogy being offered in industry after industry regarding broken models of economic transactions betwixt developer and end consumer. In the business in which I work, journalism, the models of revenue generation are so broken, with ad revenues both in print and online predicted to take another steep drop in the next two quarters, that people are beginning to wonder how any news coverage outside of superficial-opinion blogs will be subsidized any more. See Brian Fuller's regular coverage of this in Greeley's Ghost.

The same is true in the electronics industry I write about. Chip developers hear of crises in broadband delivery mechanisms from everyone ranging from the top of the chain (Netflix, YouTube, Facebook) to the carriers, to the communication-equipment manufacturers, yet no one will pay them adequately for developing complex chips to handle high-speed communications. Repeat the model in the music industry, automotive, light industry, medicine -- supply chains are universally ripped asunder, folks, and they are not being cobbled back together.

In the "stakeholder" movement to push for corporate social responsibility, activists often talk of corporations having to plan for "externalities." In other words, environmental regulations, labor issues, human rights issues, are long-term external costs that don't fit into normal quarterly business plans, so companies have to work the externalities in to the way they do business.

Why wouldn't the same be true for individual consumers? We have gotten very used to the idea of free lunches in our lives, particularly since the advent of the Internet. In addition, global systems of energy, communications, and trade have gotten so complex, as Arthur C. Clarke would say, they become "indistinguishable from magic." If you wave a magic wand, you don't have to pay anyone, right?

This same factor works in state and municipal budgets. Pity the Midwestern industrial-belt states, overtaxed but unable to sustain infrastructure any longer. Then look at Western states, where libertarianism is so ingrained, folks don't want to pay for public renovation and park-system and infrastructure projects. The new model may be the mid-Atlantic and Deep South states, where people are willing to pay a little extra to get municipal redevelopment that actually works.

This might be the way to look at repairing broken supply chains in the private sector, at least as far as the end consumer is concerned, by repeating the mantra "No one rides for free, folks." We need to make explicit all the hidden costs of running shows, from maintaining a broadband Internet to making sure our bridges are in adequate states of repair. Sometimes that means paying higher bills with explicit (and well-explained) charges for externalities people take for granted. Sometimes that means (gasp) higher taxes. How do we convince people that they've been feeding off too many free-lunch troughs and that higher taxes might be good for them? Hell if I know. I just know I've lost my libertarian friends.

The Sounds of One Shoe Dropping

My company's CEO, Steve Weitzner, got pushed aside today for not being brutal enough. Brian Fuller has the story here. This is the incredibly-shrinking world of journalism in the 21st century, get used to it.

Human Adaptability and the Decimation of the Landscape

A close friend was upset with my characterization of the U.S. auto industry, particularly since I blamed its problems on both a bottom-up and top-down malaise. I pointed out that my former boss, Brian Fuller, does the same with the journalism industry in his excellent blog, Greeley's Ghost. This represents neither masochism nor a suicidal death wish for one's chosen profession. It's called tough love in the face of unprecedented change.
In the popular musical Fiddler on the Roof, protagonist Tevye must face each of his daughters' demands that he break with the Jewish tradition to accommodate changes in the "new" Russia. He bends and bends until he gets to Chava, telling her if she marries outside the faith, he cannot bend or he will break. She elopes.

In the 21st century, whether we are employed in auto manufacturing, chip manufacturing, or media and information services, we are being asked to bend and bend and bend again. Some would say this means "bend over," and would characterize each adaptation as submission. The problem is, typical bifurcations between boss and employee, or between ruling, middle, and working class, no longer apply. This is why the DailyKos' call for a blogger's union sounds so silly. There's so much self-employment in the new society, we end up oppressing ourselves.

Within a matter of years or even months, the industries we have spent our lives with may no longer exist. Just this week, a survey from Veronis Suhler Stevenson indicated online news advertising will eclipse newsprint advertising by 2011. This could mean that printed newspapers are gone before 2020, not by 2035 as pundits were saying only a few years ago. Those on manufacturing lines, whether in production of SUVs or DSPs, may find all available jobs moved to Asia before 2010. And in this case, fighting globalization is like the proverbial King Canute trying to hold back the ocean.

The grimmest aspect to the new reality harks back to the famous quote from Vietnam about having to "destroy the village in order to save it." Old models on manufacturing, information dissemination, etc. were clung to for so long, the old world may have to be utterly destroyed before a new one can take its place. Sure, that sounds Jacobin or even Pol-Potist, but let's look at journalism. No one wants to support serious information-gathering any more, everyone wants infotainment, so the sources of legitimate news may have to vanish before society swings back to seeking good information. You can make a similar argument for David Ricardo notions of "comparative advantage." If the society wants Wal-Mart-like lowest possible prices on everything, manufacturing goods that are safe to use may be impossible, even in China. But the manufacturing industry may have to utterly collapse before people decide that lower prices are not always best.

Kafka alluded in The Metamorphosis to maintaining the adaptability to cope with suddenly finding you were only an insect, dreaming you had been a human. That's where we're standing today. In our national affiliations, in our employment, in our personal relationships, we will have to bend and bend and bend again in adapting to the 21st century, kicking over traditions and assumptions one by one. If we choose, like Tevye, to say that we cannot bend any more or we will break, we will be left for dead in the snow. Of course, there's always the option of withdrawing completely from the society now in gestation. But involvement is always more fun. And that requires an adaptability that must become close to infinite.