Think you’re man enough for Ann Coulter? Dream on, pretty boy, dream on. Since President Clinton’s acquittal, the lawyer and pro-impeachment pundit has sought to establish herself as a serious political commentator for all seasons, a cause she advanced in her George column this month by posing in a miniskirt on a barstool and complaining about how hard it is to get a date in the capital: “Boys in Washington,” she says, “don’t know how to ask.” (Curiously, they seem to find acid-spewing ideologues intimidating.)
Her love life notwithstanding, Coulter has been busily flirting with political office, giving substance to long-flying rumors that she would challenge Connecticut Rep. Christopher Shays in the Republican primary. She declared May 24 on C-Span’s “Washington Journal” that “someone will run (against Shays), and it might be me,” and her July column, George editor Richard Blow said, will be “about the temptations of running.”
Would Coulter run as a lawyer-politico or as a columnist? Earlier in Salon, Blow had said Coulter’s running — then a rumor — would be a clear conflict that would necessitate dropping her column, a position he reiterated after her comments, although he said Coulter’s posturing did not disqualify her yet. “Ann is a dramatic person,” Blow said, “and it genuinely is hard to tell whether she is serious or just needling a congressman she doesn’t respect.” He added that he’s discussed the no-run-and-write rule with Coulter: “I think that one of the reasons she’s not bothered by that is that she knows if she ran and continued to be a columnist, then we would have to give Chris Shays equal time. Nothing would infuriate her more.”
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James Poniewozik’s column appears in Media every Monday and Thursday
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The unexamined question is why one would ban a columnist from running at all. The rule obviously assumes a conflict of interest, although one could argue that’s a moot point for a political columnist, whose job is by definition to advocate her own agenda: Do we assume that a noncandidate Coulter would otherwise write columns opposing her own political beliefs? More important, it ascribes a power to the media that journalists’ laughable history as candidates hardly bears out.
Everyone knows how omnipotent the media are, right? We make kids kill kids, promote cheap sex and expensive products, brainwash the public into liberal or conservative mind-sets, undermine religion and murder celebrities, all before lunch. Seeing as how we can remote-control the electorate from our keyboards, then, why don’t we have one of our own in the White House? Mightn’t it amuse us?
It’s not for lack of trying. We’ve lately seen the attempted campaigns, notably, of former CNN host Pat Buchanan, magazine publisher Steve Forbes and former journalist Al Gore. Yet it’s arguable how much, if at all, their press training helped any of them. Buchanan probably benefited most, since — although he was a Nixon speechwriter and a columnist — it was hosting CNN’s “Crossfire” that gave him prominence. One would think that a veteran of pancake makeup would know enough to wipe the flecks of froth from his lips before public appearances; but after he won the 1996 New Hampshire GOP primary, his apprenticeship didn’t keep him from hefting a rifle over his head in Arizona, assassinating his campaign in the process.
Buchanan, nonetheless, is trying again, as is Forbes — who has not just his own magazine but a vast personal fortune and thus, given the common wisdom about the joint dictatorship of money and media, should have crowned himself emperor by now. (Note to Coulter: Though Forbes continues to write his editor’s column — conflict or no — that’s hardly lifted his poll numbers from the basement.)
Yet unlike, say, Ross Perot, Forbes has made little of his story of inheriting — sorry, running! — a magazine to reinforce his outsider/businessman status. Indeed, Forbes’ new series of early ads (available online) do just the opposite, filming the candidate in black-and-white on an Oval-Office-like set. The ads do include now-familiar anti-Washington rhetoric and call for a flat tax “that looks like it was designed by a normal human being” (Forbes may have inadvertently spotted such a person, as a child, on a birding expedition). But visually, and more powerfully, they reposition him as an insider for credibility: Not only do they not say, “Steve Forbes is an outsider magazine publisher,” they effectively say, “Steve Forbes is already president of the United States.”
And why shouldn’t Forbes downplay his media background? It hasn’t much helped former Nashville Tennessean reporter Gore, who brags about his ink-stained past to come off as a regular working stiff but has thus-far played the Washington press like a warped banjo. And as a profession, journalists have done a pathetic job of translating our allegedly sweeping influence into political power: Historically, generals, lawyers — even, or especially, farmers — are way ahead of us, and candidacies like William F. Buckley’s 1965 New York mayoral run are better media springboards than political ones: Buckley launched “Firing Line” the next year.
A prominent media figure may well make a serious White House run someday, but it’s hard to imagine who: Picture, for instance, George Will eating barbecue. More mediagenic figures, on the other hand, risk charges of superficiality. More plausible is a mogul candidacy: Ted Turner occasionally floats the tantalizing idea of a loose-cannon bid. But while the CNN founder’s role in the Time Warner empire would raise huge conflict concerns, his money might be his greater asset, given that the man who once said Christianity is “for losers” is perhaps one influential American who becomes less electable the more access he has to cameras. In Italy, TV magnate Silvio Berlusconi did become prime minister in 1994, but in the land of the five-second government you’re more likely to be elected PM than get a parking ticket.
But one thing George has taught us — no, I’m serious — is that politicos make more successful media figures than journalists make political figures: That magazine alone now gives ink to Coulter, Paul Begala and advice columnist Alfonse D’Amato. Which may be a good sign for Coulter, who seems to be using her media moment in the only really practical political way: to get a brief visibility boost without getting tarred as — ick! — a journalist. Is Connecticut man enough for Ann Coulter? Maybe, maybe not, but one suspects she’s not too chicken to ask it for a date.
It was just over a year ago that, amid the disillusion and rancor engendered by an impeachment battle in Washington, an ambitious young man named Stephen Glass taught America to laugh again. Far from acting alone, the New Republic fabricator was simply the most entertainingly outlandish in a series of journalistic supervillains — liars, hypers, thieves — and scandals that would continue through the summer with Mike Barnicle, Patricia Smith and the CNN/Time “Tailwind” debacle. It was the spring, and then the summer, of shame, and pretty soon we advance-ordered a whole series of calendars on the theme: We wondered what the media industry would do to top itself, but never doubted it would manage to.
So imagine our surprise that a year later the headlines are filled with media enterprises cleaning up their acts, or at least being handed a mop by the judge. Police perp walks for the cameras were struck down in court. Jenny Jones was hit with a $25 million judgment. The Supreme Court prevented reality-TV shows from accompanying police into private homes (and, just Tuesday, rejected a related appeal from CNN). TV episodes and entire series have been yanked for violence, while TV wrestling was essentially accused of murdering a man when wrestler Owen Hart died in a stunt accident: “Fatal fall blamed on competing cable shows,” read one headline.
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And, in perhaps the ultimate back-breaker for ugly media, Jerry Springer was first restrained (the final episodes this season, such as “I’m Proud to Be a Prostitute,” were pulled, creating a lucrative market for a new set of “Too Hot for TV” videos), then bowdlerized altogether, as his show’s owner, Barry Diller’s Studios USA, declared it would no longer air violent or profane “Springer” episodes. (The studio has made and backed off from such a declaration before.) Reruns, USA said, would be re-edited accordingly; I assume the resulting seconds-long episodes, consisting of the credits and Jerry’s final thought, will be sandwiched into gaps between commercials on other shows.
We are, in other words, witnessing an outbreak of taste in the media, and if I fail to put scare quotes around the T-word it is because there are not enough quotation marks on all the keyboards in all the world to convey the sarcasm with which that term should be uttered here. On the side of the legal decisions, the judicial system is declaring “Fran ‘paparazzi are slimeballs’ Drescher, c’est moi” with regard to privacy vs. press rights. And the media, perhaps under the pressure of such decisions, are taking steps toward self-censorship in the name of appearances.
You can sum up this mind-set in one word: “post-Littleton.” In media today, as my colleague James Aley e-mailed me recently, “post-Littleton” is becoming a universal shorthand for pusillanimous inoffensiveness. “Post-Littleton, do we really want to say his advisors ‘shot down’ the trial balloon? Post-Littleton, should we use a bomb in that graphic?” Pundits are sprinkling the phrase and its variants (“in the wake of Columbine …”) into their work like so much dehydrated Zeitgeist powder, to imply that some immutable, vaguely described change in society has occurred. But given the addlepated window-dressing decisions that have resulted, you have to wonder if “post-Littleton” isn’t best translated as “for a couple months or so, until we bomb a new country and everyone forgets about it.”
Take, for instance, CBS president Les Moonves’ recent explanation of why the network canned its Mafia series “Falcone”: “It’s not the right time to have people whacked on the streets of New York.” First, as an NYC resident, I anxiously wait for Moonves to let me know when my life is again expendable. (Fall 2000? During mid-season replacements?) Second, there’s a root contradiction captured in Moonves’ further explanation: “While it’s not fair to blame the media for the rampage … anyone who thinks the media has nothing do with this is an idiot. We felt a responsibility not to put it on now.”
If in fact the media are truly culpable for violence (though I suspect the Mob’s Hollywood-related recruitment boost likely plateaued in the ’70s), why the need for those qualifiers: “It’s not the right time … put it on now“? I might be reading too much into the phrasing, but however genuine his emotion, Moonves’ heart-cry captures perfectly the pointlessness of such media palliatives by building in its own escape clauses. In effect, it says that we in the media aren’t to blame for these problems — so we can’t really do anything about them — but we won’t shirk our responsibility to … to … to do what? To act like we’re doing something. To be inoffensive.
It’s as if we’re moving toward some Clintonian, ineffectual trade-off of free expression for security. No, not even security. Comfort. Quietude. I respect your feelings about guns, and you respect my feelings about vulgarity, and we both respect the other guy’s feelings about tobacco or alcohol or sex, and in this potlatch of empty gestures we all tacitly agree that the primary purpose of the mass media, above all, is to avoid hurting anyone’s feelings. The result’s a trifecta: bad public policy, bad broadcasting and publishing, and probably ultimately bad business to boot.
Without defending Springer in particular, one can defend what his show stands for: a judgment-free ethos that has been better, not worse, for the overall media flow. I don’t mean the argument that daytime talk shows have given disenfranchised classes a voice on the air. A lot of Springer criticism does smack of class bias — one wonders why the term “trash TV” is so popular among white-collar elites — but Jerry’s hardly restored the working man’s lost dignity, either. Still, Springer is a product of a television era in which smart, often taste-free material can also move from the fringes to the mainstream if it can pay its way: where Matt Groening can move from the Doms-Seeking-Submissives classifieds’ neighborhood to 8 p.m. opposite “Touched by an Angel.”
This country in general, and in particular its art form, television, don’t do taste best. We do vulgarity, obscenity, rudeness: Philip Roth, Robert Crumb, pre-talk-show Roseanne. Many of our more decorous high artists, like Henry James, left the country. None of this, of course, is to say that Jerry Springer is an American artiste, but God help us if we start relying on Barry Diller or Les Moonves to discern the difference. Springer’s show is undeniably scummy, but it’s like the bacterial scum left after you brew a good beer. That is, it’s the unavoidable byproduct of ferment. Without that, you’ve got nothing but water and grain, which you may recognize as the principal ingredients of white bread.
Prosperous nations find a lot of things to spend their money on — pyramids, ziggurats, spices, silks, opium.
But it’s fair to say that, until now, used
shoe horns were not high on the list. Yet today our historic economic boom is looking like a
nationwide garage sale, with consumers patronizing auction sites, hobbyists’ magazines and TV antiques and crafts shows to turn themselves into merchants and convert their free minutes into cash. In 1997, the clichi went, you were a brand; in 1999, you’re the whole damn store.
People have always collected and traded; what’s different today is the degree of intensity and
mercantilism. Everything — Grandma’s punch bowl, the kids’ Furbies — is now a potential profit source;
everyone either is a seller or ought to be thinking damn hard about it. When “The Phantom Menace” came out, for instance, collecting experts advised not to expect a big payoff from saving Darth Maul figurines in the original packages — because everybody else has already had the same idea. Twenty years ago, relatively few people kept unopened Star Wars toys; today, why else would you buy one? (Think how many fools bought Pet
Rocks and actually opened the boxes!)
A main beneficiary and supporter of this “every man his own thrift shop” mentality is
href="http://www.ebay.com">Ebay, the wildly successful online auctioneer connecting shoppers with purveyors of finer Happy Meal toys worldwide. Sure, Ebay’s success owes much to its ingenious e-sales model. But you
shouldn’t discount the effects of old-media buzz, either.
High-profile Ebay auctions of items like Mark McGwire home-run baseballs grabbed headlines and drew heavy traffic from rubberneckers. On May 22, MTV aired
href="http://www.mtv.com/sendme.tin?page=/mtv/tubescan/coolcrap">“Cool Crap,” a special
centered on an Ebay auction of music relics (a Geri Halliwell self-portrait, an appearance on “Total Request
Live”). The show amounted to a giant commercial: It’s a blast to blow your savings on the Internet! Likewise, for months Rosie O’Donnell has peddled celebrity-signed goods on Ebay for charity (using the site, despite her high-profile gun-control preaching, well before it announced a ban on weapons sales earlier this year). People magazine and other outlets have arranged similar synergistic auctions. It’s a win-win-win: The
sponsor looks good, needy kids get paid and Ebay’s market cap goes up another gazillion dollars.
In this feedback loop of mutual flackery, Ebay uses the TV shows’ reach and the shows use Ebay’s coolness
factor, which is enhanced with each plug. Ebay’s greatest asset is making its name synonymous with
“auction” even as Amazon and others horn in on its business; a
href="http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_22/b3631001.htm">Business Week cover story
depicts the coming battle between Amazon’s fixed-pricing model and Ebay’s fluctuating “dynamic pricing.” (A wonderful coinage, incidentally: Expect to hear it embraced by gas-station owners come the next Middle East crisis, as they dynamically up their pump prices by 50 percent.)
The site’s had help from journalists too, who went nuts for Ebay early on. William Gibson penned
the seminal love letter to the site in Wired early this year. Even the most thoughtful Ebay write-ups, like James Gleick’s in a recent New Yorker, usually include first-person tales of auction action. You won’t believe
this weird thing I bought on Ebay! And there’s plenty more where that came from! People will sell
anything! I’m addicted! Hooked! Me, a level-headed writer! “Man, is it fun,” gushed NPR’s Rich Dean, recounting the swell time he had dropping $1,700 on a Gretsch hollow-body guitar. “It’s a game for the buyers and the sellers.”
In effect, Ebay has become a commerce and entertainment site; the company understands —
– after numerous others have failed to lure people to Web soap operas, hypertext fiction and push technology — that the true indigenous online entertainment genre is
commerce. “It’s a game”: Sears, Roebuck in their dreams never scored a plug like this. NPR’s Dean is exactly right; by adopting an auction model, Ebay inherited a whole lexicon in which you don’t buy, you win. And, as proven by its high-traffic baseball memorabilia auctions and tie-ins like “Cool Crap,” in today’s mercantile culture you can gather a sizable crowd just to watch.
And it’s not just Ebay junkies and Furby worshippers who are playing. Just when you forget why the
government founded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, along comes a program like “Antiques
Roadshow” to remind you: the great masses of a functioning democracy need a reliable source of appraisals for their Chippendale furniture.
PBS’s highest-rated weekly show brings a traveling group of collectibles experts from town to town,
where contestants line up for hours to haul in Great Grandpa’s infantry doodads, the family silverware and
their Augustus Saint-Gaudens engravings for on-the-spot valuations. I say “contestants” because there’s
really nothing better to call them. Though it poses as an informational program, “Roadshow” is really the
perfect game show for the public TV crowd. Participants aren’t rewarded for dumb luck, as in a lottery,
Daily Jumble-level word-sleuthing, as on “Wheel of Fortune,” or autodidacticism, as on “Jeopardy!”
They’re rewarded for their Merchant-Ivorized good taste and their heritage. Whatever “Roadshow” teaches
about crafts or history, above all it teaches, with hard numbers, the value of coming from good people.
Certainly there’s plenty to learn here about turn-of-the-century carnival glass and Civil War letters (Iowans are worth more, owing to a dearth of literate Midwesterners in the 1800s). But the producers know what we really care about are the cash estimates, delivered with a Wink Martindale warm-up (“Nancy … do you have any idea what this piece is worth?”) as the contestants absorb their five-figure windfalls with tight-lipped smiles and reserved oh-my-goodnesses — because, of course, our sort of people don’t make unseemly displays like the plebeians on “The Price Is Right.”
And that’s why “Roadshow” is one of the most entertaining — and, yes, addictive — programs on TV: it
appeals to our own basest materialism and yet lets us look down on that same materialism in its
contestants. (Which also explains the fascination of the rare segments where experts detail, exhaustively,
why an item is a fake, sometimes debunking generations-old family histories in the process.)
But if the economy’s really spewing silver like a rigged slot machine, why are we pricing up our
possessions as if we were wheelbarrow-pushers in Weimar Germany? Maybe it’s actually a perverse
result of that boom, or at least its hype. In New York magazine,
href="http://www.nymag.com/critics/view.asp?id=2203">Nathaniel Wice recently wrote about
target="new" href="http://www.witcapital.com">Wit Capital, an online broker that allows small
investors to buy IPOs at the initial offering price (sometimes); he boasted about buying MarketWatch.com at $17 and flipping it at $97. At this juncture in history, folks can make 600 percent profits in a day not through work or particular insight but simply by having a broker or computer and a sufficient stake. Is this a strong economy? You betcha! If it weren’t, there’d be a big pile of these folks’ heads rotting in Battery Park right about now.
In a bad economy, everybody has an excuse not to get rich. But in a strong one, you can feel poor even if
you’re not. Every glance at the business section is a reproof, every minute not spent e-trading an
opportunity loss. If only we had bought Amazon in 1997, we think — if only we had bought Amazon in
November. If only, if only. And so we start to see everything we have for its market value. If only
Grandma hadn’t bought such crappy furniture. If only I hadn’t played with that original
target="new" href="http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=109571683">Boba
Fett. Thus is born a new national pastime, a new favorite sport. And you’ll never catch us bitching
about the salaries of the players.
You can learn everything you need to know about media by reading the
ads in advertising magazines — the meta-ads, that is, the ones that
advertise media outlets to advertisers. The ads read eerily like mid-1700s New
Orleans auction posters: “CourtTV captures women 18-49 … CourtTV
has them locked up.” E! network? “We’ve got those upscale 18-49
year-olds.” Entertainment Weekly? “Over 8 million trend-setting,
free-spending, cool-worshipping pop-culture vultures. Ours, all
ours.” And the barking in this flesh trade gets louder the younger
the bodies are; a quasi-pederastic trade ad for Seventeen shows an
onyx-haired, smokily staring nymphet lying in a field: “She’s the one
you want. She’s the one we’ve got.”
Light of my
life, fire of my loins! As the TV networks rolled out their fall
schedules this past week, the obsession of the aging rouis of
advertising and broadcasting resulted again in lineups, with the
exception of CBS’s, that are heavy on teens and young adults (and almost
exclusively white): a vast menu of high schools, prep schools and
post-school dating in Manhattan. The NBC Effect of the mid-’90s –
the creation of a republic of affluent 18- to 34-year-olds by targeted,
elite-oriented Must-See shows from “Frasier” on down to “Union
Square” — has shaded into the WB Effect, in which the youngest
sector of that state is splintered off. (“Our focus,” said WB’s
president in announcing its lineup, “is 12- to 34-year-olds and that’s
it.”) Network TV, having once decided that the perfect television
show is a half-hour sitcom about
href="http://www.nbc.com/tvcentral/shows/justshootme/">well-paid
media professionals, has now decided the perfect show is an
hour-long serial about a well-paid media professional’s
target="new" href="http://www.dawsons-creek.com/">self-absorbed,
crybaby kid.
href="http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/browse-mixed-new?id=RsvCant&images=im
ages/modeng&data=/lv2/english/relig/rsv&tag=public">Young lust
has made good copy pretty much since humans stopped dropping dead at
age 20, and in the era of school shootings there will no doubt be
much agonizing over
href="/media/eric/1999/03/03eric.html">whatever
the hell the new youth TV says about our Inner Sophomores. But
when it comes to TV, it’s important to remember that networks are
programmed not by cultural studies scholars but by businesspeople who
make decisions out of financial interest (at least when the opportunity to get laid doesn’t intervene).
So why aren’t there more shows directed at seniors? In a society
where ageism has been a truly pressing concern ever since the
baby boom neared its Social Security payday, the popular
interpretation of this phenomenon is that normally bloodless
capitalists lose their senses when confronted by age, forgetting out
of sheer prejudice that older people have money to avoid taking with
them. It’s the cult of youth! It’s America’s perpetual childhood!
It’s our unhealthy attitude toward natural change! Even the New York
Observer’s hilarious take on NBC’s “upfront,” or fall-lineup
presentation, broke into uncharacteristic, earnest outrage over the
Peacock’s smarmy derision toward CBS’s seeking over-49 viewers: “as
if that were a sin, as if they did not buy products.”
It’s an understandable response — who has more money to blow than
older folks? But there’s a reason networks are blowing off oldsters.
We viewers don’t understand precisely how our attentions are valuable
to a network. We like to believe that every time we flip on ABC, a
dollar drops into Michael Eisner’s vault, where later he rolls around
naked in the big fluffy green pile. But the fact is TV stations don’t
make money simply because we watch them. They make money because
advertisers pay them in the belief that we will watch them.
That takes care of misconception one; misconception two is that advertisers want as many
people as possible to watch their spots. Advertisers, as a rule, aren’t motivated by vanity. (Advertising agencies, now that’s another
story.) Companies don’t put out ads in the hope that as many people as possible will enjoy their product. They put out ads in the hope
that as many people as possible who would not otherwise have bought
their products will buy them.
Note that who would not otherwise have. The catch here is that
advertisers will work harder — and hence will pay more — to reach
affluent younger viewers, whose TV watching hasn’t increased as much
as older people’s demonstrably has. In other words, it’s not that
businesses don’t want money tainted with the stench of the grave.
It’s that they don’t believe they have to chase after it. While some ad
professionals have attacked this reasoning as outdated, the
prevailing feeling among advertisers is that they can capture 50-and-ups through news, cheaper entertainment programs and the like.
It’s a familiar situation to older parents: You do and do and do for
the networks, but do they appreciate it? As American Demographics
pointed out, last TV season saw a decline in 18- to 34-year-old
viewership on every network but WB (which, if it wants me to put that
cockamamie “The” before its name, can send its lawyers after me).
The magazine extrapolated from this that the ’99-00 season “may be
the first in a long time in which the networks return to one of the
basic tenets of their business: broadcasting,” as opposed to
narrowcasting toward a young slice. Makes sense, right? If those
punks are too busy watching Eric Cartman, starting up e-businesses or
attending gun shows to catch the fine fare we slaved over a hot
banquette at Spago to cook up for them, then screw ‘em! Except that,
as the fall lineups showed, the kids’ absence has only made them
harder to get, and thus more valuable.
A bit of advice, then, for older Americans (though considering that
Salon, ahem,
href="/adsales/default.html">boasts that 90 percent of its readers are between 18 and 49, I realize I’m addressing a
mostly empty chamber here). If you want your interests better
represented outside CBS, you need to start watching network TV more
like 12- to 34-year-olds: decreasingly and elusively. Oh, I know, you
personally don’t watch that much television — hey, I never
look at the damn thing! — but because, um, so many of your peers are
skewing the figures, consider joining a bowling league or taking up
pottery making. In your restricted, valuable hours, watch fewer
shows. Those you do watch, watch slavishly. (You’ll have to be cruel
in winnowing: If those young go-getters on “JAG” bore you for a
second, fire their asses!) And for God’s sake, stop watching the
news; you’ll concentrate your attention’s value, and we’ll all be
glad to be rid of the laxative commercials.
It wouldn’t hurt to be fickle with your money, as well: The other
part of TV’s youth bias is advertisers’ belief that codgers are set
in their ways. (This view seems especially old-fashioned in today’s
market, as Christine Larson argued in the May 10 Adweek — if
anyone’s going to be drinking Surge in 30 years, send me straight to
href="http://www.transparencynow.com/logtable.htm">Carousel now.)
So switch from Colgate to Pepsodent, Delta to Northwest, Chrysler to
Toyota and back! Roll those big fat IRAs of yours over a few times,
and see who comes crawling!
In other words, you can cry about anti-wrinkle bias, or you can wage
guerrilla war. Eat the same breakfast flakes two mornings in a row,
and you’ll get all the Kevin Williamson dramedies you deserve; but
wise up and make advertisers paranoid, and
href="http://www.dqmw.com/">Jane Seymour will never want for
employment again. And a generation to follow — namely, mine — will thank you for your
pioneering. We bask in attention today; but already NBC in
its advertising-mag ads is darkly hinting that “Gen Y [12- to 17-year-olds] is 60 million plus and growing, larger and more receptive
than Gen X.” I only wish I could join your struggle. I hear, though,
that UPN’s rolling out an hour-long dramedy about a white, 30ish
media critic hangin’ in Brooklyn with his posse of quirky, free-spending friends, and, you know, something just tells me I Must See it.
Like not a few people I know, I pretty much stopped listening to radio after I moved to New York. (Hereinafter “radio” excludes public radio, a genre which, in New York anyway, is largely a magazine for people with busy hands and eyeballs.) With a few exceptions, the 10-hits-all-the-time sameness of what this bumpkin had naively assumed would be a cooler radio market left me nostalgic even for the Detroit area’s mediocre offerings.
I’m not saying there’s no decent radio in New York, though its quality is inversely proportional to its receivability in my apartment (like free-form WFMU, which I have to catch online). And I freely admit I’m making gross generalizations. But gross generalization is what makes or breaks radio, by its passive nature: You turn on the radio to leave it on, so if you find a station — or the entire radio palette — disappointing in general, you’re not going to turn it on at all.
And gross generalization, especially in a big market like New York’s, is what radio programming is all about: With a high listener-to-bandwidth ratio, the market has a hard time sustaining anything not aimed at the broadest swaths of listeners. It may be doing right by those swaths, but my misanthropic little demographic of one is now getting its highly narrow-cast broadcasts online, trading solidarity with the Radioland masses for the chance to hear Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos Postizos instead of Backstreet Boys.
In addition to thousands of Netcasts of offline radio stations and numerous DIY amateurs, a number of new-media companies are jumping into online audio. Recently Lycos and Yahoo have claimed a piece of a field that includes Viacom’s Imagine Radio, Spinner.com and Rolling Stone Radio, among others. (The latter just hooked David Bowie, the recidivist Net opportunist, to DJ an online channel.)
Commercial broadcasters discount their online competition, and if it principally appeals to already-lost causes like me, they may have a point. Compared with the single-application appliance for receiving broadcast radio — a “radio” — sound quality is still a problem over low-bandwidth connections. And although Internet audio can allow listeners to customize their own “stations” and can offer theoretically endless micro-categories — drum ‘n’ bass, a zillion variations of “alternative” (ironically, probably the most common category) — content is still a problem for some. Lycos, with its whopping five channels — Adult Contemporary! Smooth Jazz! — has yet to catch up with the daring programming offered by an airplane-seat armrest. And sites are still struggling for viable advertising; many use banner ads, which I suppose are effective on listeners used to staring blankly at their radios. (There’s also the potential for channel branding, hinted at by Spinner’s “Doritos Radio,” a mild ranch-flavored blend of alt-rock staples. The first broadcaster to offer channels of Gap and Banana Republic commercial music will be sitting on a gold mine.)
But if online music servers do someday cut into traditional radio’s audience, the irony is that they’ll do so by employing every strategy broadcast companies have used to ruin radio — only better and more efficiently.
Is having your music picked by algorithm and spun by computer heartless and sad? Given that that’s more or less standard operating procedure in commercial radio — as a fine “Marketplace” radio series just detailed — it might as well be your algorithm and machine. Will millions mourn the companionable DJ’s voice? They’ll dance in the freaking streets! The great delight of most Internet radio, not including simulcasts of broadcast stations, is the near absence of speech. (This ignores some loquacious amateur Net-casters, but they’re really competition for, if anyone, public radio — they’re far more public than it is.) Radio stations have for years acknowledged they’ve turned jocks into liabilities: hence “More Rock, Less Talk!”
Likewise, broadcasters might counter that they provide local flavor you can’t get by surfing MacroRadio or choosing an out-of-town station. Except that the radio business long ago made locality irrelevant — you can go to any city and hear your K-Rock or Z-Rock or Q-Rock, something called “The Edge” that still has the MTV Unplugged version of “About a Girl” in heavy rotation, a Hot 100 or 95 or 104, a classical station that plays a lot of Pachelbel. DJs, weathercasters, even traffic reporters are piped in. Even the commercials are site-generic: I recently heard an ad saying a “local doctor” was looking for subjects for a heartburn study and giving a toll-free number. Act now, citizen of Your City Here!
In other words, if radio stations can be easily improved on by button-pushing online, they have no one to bitch to: That’s what they’ve turned themselves into. If I’m going to listen to a piped-in newscaster sitting in some bunker in Pennsylvania, I might as well hire my own. Radio sites already collect ZIP codes, the better to target ads; use that info to plug in local headlines here, weather, traffic and Lotto numbers there, and you’ve already got a station as local as most of what “local radio” offers.
A larger question is whether the resulting audience atomization — All You, All the Time — is antisocial, misanthropic, even. On the one hand, customized broadcasting allows for community building: Imagine Radio allows listeners to post their customized channels for public listening, as can the much more active DJs at Shoutcast, who create and share programming online. On the other hand, these are ever smaller communities. One of Imagine’s slogans is: “It’s what you want to hear!” It’s an empowering declaration; it’s a 3-year-old’s tantrum. Could narrow-cast, interactive music be another ATM, another online catalog — another friction-free convenience that spares wired individualists the messy, frustrating contact with the masses? Another electronic 10-foot pole that exacerbates our sense of entitlement, of impatience, of dissatisfaction with the ability of biological humans to service our desires perfectly?
Maybe. Maybe that’s what I like about it, whatever that says about me. Lately I’ve been listening to Imagine, which boasts a listener-feedback feature. You can give any artist a frequency ranking on your customized station, from 0 (never again) to 5. Having this power animated a silent, constant critic in my head, a really harsh little son-of-a-bitch who judges immoderately and grows harder to please with every censorial ruling. I just offed Dishwalla, for instance. Pow! Over! Hooverphonic? Screw that! Soul Coughing? See you in hell!
I have begun employing this Godlike power liberally, and lately I have come to believe that — unless laws forbidding the Net-casting of too many consecutive songs by the same artist intervene — through various dyspeptic fiats I will ultimately arrive at my perfect radio station, which will play absolutely no artists at all. Leaving me, in the end, no worse off than I was with all of New York City radio at my disposal.
Immediately after an act of violence, there is a blessed and brief moment of lingering senselessness. As I start this article, Thursday morning, little is known about the boy who shot up a high school in Conyers, Ga.; even as I type it, details are coming out; by the time you read it, very likely, we will know, yet again, exactly what is wrong with America: his clothes, his parents, his music, his weaponry, his school, his movies, his elected representatives. (Or, of course, the refusal of the media to suppress news of school violence to avoid copycat incidents.)
It was only minutes after news of the shooting broke that news outlets started turning to Conyers students for their voices and details. What was the kid like? “He always talks in class, and he’s always disturbing people.” Yet, “He seemed quiet. He’d never do anything like this.” But of course, “We weren’t surprised.” Cable-news reporters reached out to teens in Georgia and even in Columbine for quotable, Trench-Coat-able details: Who were his friends? What were his interests? Why is this happening to your generation?
It’s good to see reporters going to high-school students for 411 on their schools, of course. But there’s a limit to how much input the popular media discourse will accept from kids, as a curious, semi-coincidental report on CNN Thursday morning reminded us. The results of a CNN-Gallup poll of teens following the Littleton shooting showed, among other things, that kids largely thought students themselves were responsible for school violence — that, for instance, taunting of students by others is a major factor in these incidents, rather than pop culture or government policy.
“The kids themselves,” we heard, “look at other students, not at external factors like gun control, the media and so forth.”
What?! Don’t these punks read the newspapers? Are we expected to believe that they feel they and their peers should take responsibility for their own actions? That if one of them shoots up a lunchroom — or conversely, tortures a classmate so severely that said classmate busts into dad’s gun cabinet — said teenager just might be more responsible for the consequences than Charlton Heston or Gerald Levin?
What is this country coming to? If schools aren’t teaching kids to blame others for their own misfortunes and moral failings, what the hell are they teaching? How will these children survive in today’s society if they don’t know how to shunt responsibility onto formless external monoliths?
The reporters and commentators who will pick over the events in Conyers will be glad, of course, for any inside information on the logistics of the shooting and the musical tastes of the shooter. But when the students themselves give interpretations of the events that are more mature and accepting of personal responsibility than their professional adult interpreters’, don’t expect those to be reflected in the after-blather.
We’ve seen this before, of course, especially in the aftermath of Littleton. Reporters turned to students, often with comical results, to get the inside skinny on their violent classmates, their schools’ social systems, their record collections, what have you. But once the kids have provided fodder for talking heads to apply their preconceived agendas to, it’s time for the kids to put their heads down quietly in their foxholes. Thus on the day of the Littleton shooting, Columbine students were peppered with questions about the Trench Coat Mafia, but were largely ignored once they started protesting that the media were ludicrously inflating the role of one school clique among thousands.
Our chatterers have a few set responses for questions like this — blame guns, blame entertainment, blame both — and they’re not particularly interested in hearing new ones, even from the kids at the front lines. (Given that the Georgia shooting coincided with a gun vote in the Senate, gun-control advocates quickly made the link, and if the past is a guide, their opponents will be quick to look for evidence in defense.) They may, one or all, be right, wholly or partly, but it would be easier to credit them if they actually entertained the beliefs of kids who are actually willing to believe they aren’t the mindless pawns of forces beyond their control.
But that’s a childish belief, I suppose. You’re truly an adult when you know enough to believe in bogeymen.
