Iraq says to buy 36 F-16 fighters from U.S. Reuters has a story on the Iraqi government’s decision to buy jet fighters from Lockheed. I think it’s fascinating because of what it neglects to mention. Iraq is dependent on the US for air support because we spent ten years and two wars blowing up the Iraqi air force. And, we’ve convinced them to replace the Soviet equipment we blew up with US-made stuff. I am delighted by how cheery and breezy this is.
Last post written a couple days ago. Tonight I’m watching Al Jazeera English on my Roku (live web stream) and CNN on my TV, as the ship of state lurches wildly.
First comment: ten minutes of Al Jazeera contains more actual information than, so far, forty-five minutes of CNN.
Second comment: Jazeera has academic pundits, CNN has partisan ones. Also, no Democrats on CNN so far, though there was a ten minute interview with a Republican senator. Our media landscape is so distorted that lots of people think CNN has a liberal slant.
Third comment: the horse race (that is, who’s winning and who’s losing) seems to be much more important to CNN than the actual issue under discussion. Likely because it’s more accessible to people who aren’t following the details day to day, and because drama makes good TV. Lazy, lazy.
Fourth comment: the President of Argentina is on Al Jazeera calling us fiscally irresponsible. Argentina. Calling us fiscally irresponsible.
I have traditionally thought of myself as a politics junkie, and grew up talking politics with my parents at the dinner table, usually with the news on. But as an adult how much I pay attention to national politics has varied. I’ve often alternated between stretches of obsessively watching the news and the coverage and the punditry, and stretches of tuning out. I have been mostly tuned out since 2008, likely the longest stretch of my life. I think the problem is that I actually like government, and how politics influences the process of governing a country. Every time I turn on the news I already know what the story is.
The media colludes in this. What Jay Rosen calls the “view from nowhere” is most of the mainstream media’s idée fixe that the only way to be credible is to be objective. The trick with objectivity is that it’s much easier to write a story that says both sides are extreme than it is to appear to choose sides. Rosen is eloquent on this, and Paul Krugman is really, really angry about this.
I see it as partly a lingering side-effect of Watergate. One result of that is that cynicism about the media became fashionable. But what I see as the more corrosive side-effect is that the media decided that they were part of the story. Enterprising young reporters seem to dream of being Woodward and Bernstein, but most of the scandals since have been either much more tawdry or much worse. Woodward has slowly, imperceptibly, become the establishment. His studies of the Bush Administration seem to be classics of the genre you get when you trade access for lines in print–I read as much as I could stand of either Bush At War or Plan of Attack (about fifty pages as I recall), and gave up when I realized it was a series of administration talking points with Woodward’s name on them. And yes, The War Within was critical, but not critical on the scale that was deserved.
There’s a train wreck looming in Washington this week about the debt ceiling, and as I write it looks dubious that there will be a deal. I am sure the cable news networks will be covering it wall to wall, but I am also sure there will be about nine parts punditry to one part actual fact. And I’m sure CNN will leave it there with great frequency. Which means my choices are Fox News (not gonna happen) and MSNBC, which cleverly built itself a niche as the liberal response to Fox…and then decided that they needed to be more balanced; plus, institutionally they’re more interested in horse races than government. Al Jazeera English actually does a better job with being balanced (in the “accurate” and “factual” senses of that word) than any of the American networks, mostly because they really don’t care if their press passes get revoked.
The press is a filter, theoretically designed to help manage information in the public interest. Practically it manages information in its own interest, which is understandable. But now politics seems to be almost exclusively about managing the filter rather than running the country. That’s always been true to a certain extent, but I have never seen it so bad.
I am a news junkie. I do not trust the news right now.
The launch of the new TWIT studio is throwing my schedule off. I’m waiting on Macbreak Weekly and TWIT Photo, and listening to Hypercritical on 5by5.tv. Siracusa is usually a little more critical than I can handle, but I have to admire the truth in advertising.
Podcasts are part of the rhythm of my week, so naturally I got sucked in by the BBC’s link bait headline “Who Still Listens to Podcasts?”. It tells the story of how podcasting was a fad, then a phenomenon, and now has become part of the media landscape…if a small one.
But Leo Laporte and Dan Benjamin have built very influential online businesses around podcasts, and Laporte just spent a bazillion dollars on something that looks like a real TV studio. Benjamin mostly does audio. Both of them work very traditionally: they find really interesting people to talk to about things their audiences are interested in. I’m a geek, so that means tech.
What’s compelling is the conversation. For me the audio is also a compelling format, since I spend so much time in front of screens. It’s portable. The price is right. Though, from a business perspective, Laporte’s sponsors are responsible for: my backup strategy, my domain name registration, my car. And if I were running a web business I’d totally be buying from Dan Benjamin’s sponsors.
Anyway, rough day today and I am twitchy because I don’t have soothing podcasts to listen to. Civilized life is not now possible for me without podcasts.
Ars Technica has a study on how cellphone usage is self-reinforcing. This ties in with a thought I have from time to time about quiet devices.
Part of what I like about my Mac is that it runs quietly and efficiently and isn’t constantly insisting that I update it or adjust it or further secure it in some way. Like every Windows computer I’ve ever had has.
My iPhone is indispensable, but kinda needy. I’ve turned off most of the automatic notifications, but it still pings or buzzes at random, Skinnerian intervals. Most of my email and feeds get read there now, so there’s always a chance when I pick it up that there will be something new and wonderful to read. Perfect operant conditioning. I also find it perfectly workable as an ebook reader–it’s the first one I’d tried you could actually read poetry on…but I *hate* it when my book rings. And, of course, iPhone is constantly hungry. The effect is as if it’s constantly tugging at my sleeve.
My Kindle, on the other hand, is quiet. No interruptions, battery life measured in weeks, and it requires an effort of will to do anything with it other than read. Mostly I manage it from my computer or my phone. So it sits quietly on my nightstand.
The notebooks I bought earlier are even quieter: easy to carry, quick to boot, great screen resolution, and unlimited battery life. And they’re so familiar to use that they blend into any situation I’m in and let me focus on what’s going on.
Fall assortment
Totally did not notice I was doing this, but I seem to have set myself up to go back to school. The Harvard Book Store is selling Field Notes stuff, and I want to encourage them. Have been wanting some more Flair pens, and been wanting to try the bold size Pilot G-2. The backpack is a side effect of not quite having enough room either on my last trip or while wandering Wordcamp Boston. So, bit by bit over the last three days I have bought this pile of stuff, without really quite noticing there was a theme. Now that I see it, it makes me smile.
I love juxtapositions like this, from Finland in World War II.
(courtesy of In Focus at the Atlantic)
(this post brought to you by Bacon Ipsum and PlaceKitten, with thanks to Mike Susz for the bacon, @kadamwhite for the kitten, and @saracannon for the second look at Twenty Eleven)
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I think Google Plus has pushed me over the edge. I finally have more places to publish on the web than my tiny lizard brain can process.
Here’s my list:
Still thinking about Clay Shirky’s latest discussion of the newspaper business. His basic contention is that a newspaper is an arbitrary collection of things designed to sell advertising. I agree. Newspapers always argue for their centrality in terms of the metro desk: investigative reporting, holding politicians to account. In reality, what sells the paper (and therefore the advertising) is the sports, the comics, the TV listings, and the coupons.
This, actually, is not entirely unlike the library business. Public libraries (and to a lesser extent academic ones) think of themselves as being for public information and education…when in fact what they do most of the time is loan DVDs and best-sellers. It’s OK–I’m a librarian, I can say these things.
I’d like to pay for the metro section of my local paper, the Boston Globe, without having to get a bunch of other stuff with it. Most national and international news, even there, comes from the AP, which I can get directly a couple of ways. I have the entire Internet for lifestyle, and could really not care less what my local movie critic thinks.
I’m currently paying ten bucks a month for the Kindle edition of The Economist, which is about the same as the intro print subscription price. The chief benefit of the format, from my perspective anyway, is that there are no ads.
Again via Shirky, the ads are what created newspapers. I’d be perfectly happy to pay $50-$100 a year for professional news about my community’s business, but I suspect that if that would pay the bills it would have already happened. I also suspect, however, that newspapers are trying to figure out not how to survive, but how to survive while making double-digit profits like they traditionally have.
