Tag: media

SOPA: What’s it all about?

It’s no surprise that the huge anti-SOPA/PIPA Internet protest on Wednesday caught a lot of people under the chin.  This included several American lawmakers who weren’t aware that the Internet is more than a bunch of geeky guys (the kind they pushed around in high school) playing video games in their parents’ basements.  These senators and congressmen (persons of congressness?) woke up Wednesday morning to discover there is a power in this world that they can only fantasize about.  They also discovered that Washington, DC is actually connected to the rest of the country.  Most of them probably had to sit down for a minute to take it all in.  Regardless, chances are good SOPA and PIPA are dead, and the only side effect is the American government may shut down for a while as frightened lawmakers make themselves scarce in the face of an angry mob of lobbyists.  Ah, democracy!  Ya gotta love it!

The thing that surprises me, however, is why people didn’t see this coming.  The battle for information didn’t just start last Tuesday, nor, for that matter, is it over today.  These are just the most recent shots fired in a war that’s been going on since our hairiest ancestors learned how to grunt.  And, BTW, although cries of censorship look good on bumper stickers and make terrific sound bytes, make no mistake: this current battle has nothing to do with banning content.  It’s all about who gets to use the content available, and how.  This is a battle between old media and new media, just like it was seven centuries ago when minstrels found out Gutenberg was printing more than just Bibles.  They didn’t like it because they were about to be put out of business.  Fast forward to 2012 and it’s Hollywood vs Silicon Valley.  Plus ca change!

If you’re still confused, let me break it down for you.  We need to go way back to caveman days, when life, although very similar to ours, was a whole lot simpler.  This is how the media worked back then and it’s how it still works today.

It all started one night when Grog, the Caveman, was lying around the fire, burping up mastodon and wondering what to do with his spare time.  Mrs. Grog probably said something innocuous like, “How was your day, dear?” and Grog proceeded to tell her.  Bada-bing, bada-boom, the world changed.  It was the original “Shooting a Mastodon” story, and although Grog was no George Orwell, the family was enchanted.   Pretty soon, Grog was doing story night twice a week.  Word got around.  After all, Cro-Magnons didn`t have all that much to do after dark.  So, instead of just sitting there, watching the in-laws pick fleas off each other, the neighbours would pack up the kids, grab the Cro-Magnon equivalent of popcorn and head on over to Grog’s cave for some entertainment.   In essence, Grog controlled the media; they were his stories and he told them well.

As I’ve said, despite what anthropologists will tell you, Cro-Magnons were not that much different from us.  They liked a good story; therefore, Grog became something of a celebrity.  The locals started treating him differently – first bite off the bone, closest seat at the fire, that sort of thing.  Grog had a good gig going on.  Enter Cro-Magnon #2 (we’ll call him Eddie for clarity; that’s not his real name.)  Eddie was pretty smart for a Cro-Magnon, given the limitations of his receding forehead.  Eddie saw Grog acting like the world’s first Rock Star and he wanted a piece of that.  He decided that he could tell stories, too.  However, the Cro-Magnon world was limited, there really weren’t that many stories yet, and Grog was already telling them all.  Eddie needed a hook; a reason for people to abandon Grog and come and hear Eddie’s stories (even though they’re basically the same.)   Fortunately, Eddie was kind of a caveman Stephen Jobs, and he figured out that, if he added pictures to the stories even the hillbilly Neanderthals down the road would be snarling around, trying to get in.  So Eddie drew a bunch of pictures on the walls of his cave to illustrate the stories he was telling: the first multimedia presentation.  Suddenly, Eddie was the guy you wanted to see in Cro-Magnon town when the sun went down.  Grog, on the other hand, had three options; go back to being a nobody mastodon hunter, go over and kick the snot out of Eddie or draw his own pictures and get better stories.  Luckily, he chose door number three because, if he hadn’t, we’d all be watching Mastadon Hunt MMMXCVI, in 3D.

It’s way more complicated these days, but the same rules apply.  When things change, the media has to change to accommodate them.  Those who do, survive; those who don’t, go under.  Running crybaby to the government is only delaying the inevitable.  If the large media corporations think that’s a reasonable solution, they’re all going to end up like Eastman Kodak, hunting around like a bunch of cavemen, looking for bankruptcy protection.

The End of the News of the World

I remember a time when journalism was an honourable profession.  I’m even old enough to remember Edward R. Murrow’s boys, albeit at the end of their careers.  These were the folks (Sevareid, Cronkite et al) who came home from World War II determined to change reporting from the William Randolph Hearst school of half truths and outright lies to something better.  I used to read the columnists who followed after them: Mike Royko, Buchwald and Safire.  They reported what they saw, what they investigated, what they could prove, what they knew to be true.  When Cronkite said it on the 6 o’clock news you could believe him.  In those days, journalists were an important part of our society.  They had one simple, extremely difficult job: cut through the spin and tell us the truth — and they did it, or at least tried their best.  Woodward and Bernstein were the last of their line.  So how the hell did we get from there to Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World?  The short answer is we didn’t.  Responsible journalism (as I remember it) was just a bump in the cycle; as Murrow’s boys culture died off, so did their brand of integrity and journalism.

In case you’ve been in a tunnel for the last twenty years, News of the World is a despicable British newspaper.  You can read about it here. It is so sordid and tawdry that, in a land known for contemptible tabloid presses, it has no shoddy rival.  In an international sleaze-off contest, the News of the World would beat The National Enquirer without breaking a sweat.  And for those of you who think this is Rupert Murdoch’s doing, no, the News of the World has always been disreputable.  Here’s a quote from a book written in 1950 about an incident that took place in the 1890s.

“Frederick Greenwood, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, met in his club one day Lord Riddell, who died a few years ago, and in the course of conversation Riddell said to him, `You know, I own a paper.’ `Oh, do you?’ said Greenwood, ‘what is it?’ `It’s called the News of the World—I’ll send you a copy,’ replied Riddell, and in due course did so. Next time they met Riddell said, ‘Well, Greenwood, what do you think of my paper?’ ‘I looked at it,’ replied Greenwood, ‘and then I put it in the waste-paper basket. And then I thought, “If I leave it there the cook may read it — so I burned it!’ ”(J. W. Robertson Scott, The Story of the Pall Mall Gazette (1950), 417—as cited in Wikipedia)

There is nothing good to say about the News of the World and when it announced its impending suicide nobody, except the dregs of humanity who worked there, shed a tear.  Are we clear?

What we call “yellow journalism” or sensationalism has its modern roots in the mid 19th century.  (Incidentally, the News of the World got its start in 1843.)  Believe it or don’t, the industrial revolution actually created leisure time for whole segments of our population.  Meanwhile, as we inched towards universal education, rudimentary literacy became the norm.  In other words, most ordinary people could read, and after about 1850, they had the time to do it.  It was the golden age of the penny dreadful and the dime novel.  It was also a time when the only news available came from newspapers.

As newspaper circulations began to increase, a few enterprising young media people — including William Randolph Hearst, a guy by the name of Joseph Pulitzer and a few others — discovered an interesting phenomenon. The newly literate social class much preferred exciting stories about fires, robberies, murders and corruption to ordinary daily news.  They learned that sensational stories and even more sensational headlines sold newspapers.  It was a no brainer; they gave the people what they wanted.  By the 1880s, sensationalism was firmly established in the print media – all it needed was a name.  In the 1890s, an all-out media war in New York between Hearst and Pulitzer provided that.  As the newspaper headlines got wilder and wilder, the result was the international expansion of “yellow journalism.”  The other side effects were the de facto death of truth in the news and, quite possibly, a media generated conflict — the Spanish American War in 1898.  Plus, the battle proved one thing that everybody already knew: the public was more interested in sordid details, true or not, than factual reporting.  To be fair, not all newspapers of the time were sensationalist rags, and even the sensationalist rags covered hard news stories sometimes, but, in general, murder usually got the front page in even the most respected papers.  For example, one of the biggest stories of the early 20th century was the titillating love triangle murder in 1906 of Stanford White, by jealous husband, Harry Thaw with ex-chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit coyly posing in the middle.  At the time it was called The Trial of the Century.  It was followed immediately by the murder trial of silent film comic Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle, and the murder convictions of two anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti: both trials equally dubbed The Trial of the Century.  Soon after that there was the Lindbergh kidnapping and subsequent trial of Bruno Hauptmann which satirist H. L Mencken mockingly called “the biggest story since the resurrection.” It’s pretty plain that the O.J. Simpson Trial of the Century in 1995 doesn’t hold a candle to what the media was doing decades before.

In less than 48 hours the News of the World will cease to be, thank god.  Of course, its brand of journalism will still ooze out of the pages of a dozen other British tabloids.  Enquiring minds will still buy millions of National Enquirers every week.  Lindsay Lohan’s picture will still guarantee magazine sales and Casey Anthony will get enough ink to drown Cameron, Merkel and Sarkozy combined.  The world might not have changed that much since William Randolph Hearst took over the San Francisco Examiner from his dad in 1887 but for one brief, shining moment, after World War II, there was honour in journalism.  Mike Royko, clearly a man of his time, summed it up best when he wrote, “No self-respecting fish would want to be wrapped in a Murdoch paper.”