Category Archives: The Media

I suppose there has been a dumber Washington Post article, but offhand I can't think of one.

The Senate is considering John Bolton's fitness for office, an issue that has implications for our policy towards North Korea in the past and present, and the world in the future, and the Post Style section runs a critique of the man's hair, mustache and shirt?!?

Bolton's Hair: No Brush With Greatness. John Bolton, President Bush's nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, desperately needs a haircut. It does not have to be a $600 Sally Hershberger cut. Bolton simply needs the basics. Tidy the curling, unruly locks at the nape of his neck, tame the volume at the crown, reel in the wings flapping above his ears, and broker a compromise between his sand-colored mop and his snow-colored mustache.

He needs to do this, not because he should be minding the recommendations of men's fashion magazines or grooming experts but because when he settled in before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week to answer questions about his record, his philosophy and his intentions at the U.N., he looked as though he did not even have enough respect for the proceedings to bother combing his hair — or, for that matter, straightening his tie, or wearing a shirt that did not put his neck in a chokehold. Bolton was one wrinkled suit away from being an insolent mess.

…

Bolton sat before the committee with his tie askew. Not slightly crooked or just a hint off-center but looking like it had been knotted in the dark. The tie itself was an uninspired dark red with bright yellow stripes. It was looped tightly under the button-down collar of his pale-blue shirt — a shirt that encircled his neck in a menacing way.

A Hollywood costumer could not have ordered a more perfectly stern Washington insider. Bolton embraces with a flourish all of the cliches that afflict so many men in Washington. During this testimony, his hand was constantly reaching up to adjust his no-frills glasses. His attire was not merely bland but careless. His hair was so poorly cut, it bordered on rude. Bolton might well argue that appearance has nothing to do with capabilities. But it certainly can be a measure of one's respect for the job.

It was always the case that DC was a bastion of lousy dressing. Power was your job, not your clothes. Clothes was a New York thing. (And in Miami it's too hot during the day for power clothes (or in some cases any clothes); I gather that dressing up is primarily a post-midnight phenomenon.)

Apparently, modern life in the Sultan's court that is 21st century Washington DC is one in which the clothes make the man.

(Of course, living as I do so far outside the beltway, I may be missing some catty subtext based on personal relationships. This may just be an ordinary case of kicking someone when they are down. But that doesn't mean the Post had to print it.)

You might think that the nice folks who watch Fox News channel on cable would support free enterprise.

Not so.

Sam Kimery is a guy who makes a little $8.95 device the size of a thumb that you screw into your cable supply and which then blocks the Fox channel. If I had a TV, and if I had cable, I might well want one to protect my children.

No one forces you to buy one, no one forces you to install one. And only about 100 people have bought them. But that, and a little news coverage, was enough to bring the Foxers out in force:

Yahoo! News – Man Sells Device That Blocks Fox News: The Tulsa, Okla., resident also has received thousands of e-mails, both angry and complimentary — as well as a few death threats.

“Apparently the making of terroristic threats against those who don't share your views is a high art form among a certain core audience,” said Kimery, 45.

Sounds like something you would read at Orcinus.

Update: What is it with death threats? Couldn't be something in the news, could it?

In what can only be described as a sign of impending doom for the print media, the Associated Press, the major US wire service, has announced that AP will offer two leads for some stories. One will be a straight 'inverted-pyramid' lead with the five W's at the top (who, what, where, when, how much — in order of importance), and the other will be that scourge of modern journalism, the back-in lead:

The other will be the 'optional,' an alternative approach that attempts to draw in the reader through imagery, narrative devices, perspective or other creative means.”

Bad. Bad. Bad.

Let me tell you how I know just how bad this is. I have a third grader. Once a week, my third grader has to do a three-paragraph essay for school about a news story, plus answer a few simple questions such as “Where did it happen” and “When did it happen” At the beginning of the year they get a sheaf of topics, and each week we can pick any one that hasn't been done yet and try to find a story on that topic.

You would not believe how hard it is for him — and sometimes for me — to figure out when and where most of these stories happened. Indeed, with back-in leads getting longer and longer and longer, it gets increasingly hard to figure out what it was that happened at all without reading more than half the story…and sometimes key details never appear at all.

Now, I understand that most newspapers are increasingly aimed at about an average sixth-grade reading level, which might be a little bit above the intelligent third grader, so maybe my son's difficulties here are understandable, even though I think he's pretty smart. But consider that I have three university degrees and even if I'm not all that smart, I have been reading newspapers regularly since I was eleven so I have some relevant experience. And even I can't figure out where or when many of these stories happened.

Print journalism has lost sight of its cardinal virtue of specificity. Until now the wire services tended to be a noble holdout against this trend, at least in their news coverage. This latest move by AP will only make the problem worse.

Alex Halavais is teaching Com 497, “Cyber Porn and Society,” in the Communications department at the University of Buffalo. He's done a number of energetic and innovative things, such as offering each of the (400?!?) students a chance to have a blog of their own.

Nevertheless, Teaching Porn seems to be proving to be a mixed experience:

• I have to check the spam folder almost as often as the inbox, since student emails seem to get dropped there easily. Likewise, when I get an email reading “Here as promised the log-in to that amazing adult site,” I have to do due diligence to make sure the author isn’t really one of my students or correspondents.
• I keep the door to my office closed when writing lectures and when someone knocks, I have to make sure the screen is clear of anything offensive, despite the fact that I will be talking about this in front of a class of 400.
• It’s not hard to make some ASL translators blush.

…

• It’s amazing, in a class of 400, what people can take to be a double entendre.

Aside from the little things, there are ongoing challenges. Some segment of the students apparently signed up because they wanted to see porn. This is a bizarre idea to me. I do show porn in the class: either when there is no other way to illustrate something, or when the presentation is (IMHO) very tame, or when it is just too inconvenient to expurgate from, for example, a video clip. (I’ve been using some clips from documentaries that air on HBO that seem to include gratuitous pornography interspersed with some really interesting interviews.) But taking a course has to be the most difficult possible way to obtain pornography. At this stage, it appears clear that a not insubstantial number of the students are going to fail the course, despite some generous curves on the exams. I don’t know that some brief titillation is worth having to admit to failing your porn course.

And then there's the homophobia…

Juan Cole lives up to the title of his blog, Informed Comment, but it's sad it needed to be said.

One of those “just read it” links, as Cole demolishes some Goldberg person who apparently is a conservative pundit sponsored by the louche National Review.