People of a certain age will recall the masssive "I Want My MTV" television ad compaign, in which various rock stars were seen saying "I Want My MTV" in various idiosyncratic ways, the goal being to convince you to call up your local cable TV company and tell them that you really insisted they provide you with the new hot programming service, Music TeleVision. The idea was that MTV was going to give you 24-hours of music videos, so you could tune it whenever you liked and watch and listen to your favorite hit tunes (meaning whatever was hot at the moment).
Nowadays, it's pretty hard to find music videos on MTV. Game shows, reality shows, cartoon shows, movies, whatever, but not a lot of music videos. In fact, it's just a little harder to find music videos on MTV then it is to find news on an all-news channel.
I suspect you see the analogy coming, forced as it is. There must be some factor in television programming which pushes all-whatever channels into a more general format aimed at the demographic slice which, presumably, was first attracted by the promise of 24 hours of a certain kind of program. In the case of "all-news" channels, a significant portion of the programming day is taken up with not news, but news analysis, opinions and punditry, a trend which has resulted in Fox News which, arguably, is almost all opinions and punditry loosely linked to a small amount of objective journalism.
What's interesting is that people of a certain age can also recall the controversy that raged about what newspapers needed to do in order to compete with the increasing importance of television news -- specifically the network nightly news broadcasts, which expanded from 15 minutes to a half-hour and became the preferred source of news for a majority of Americans. The argument was made that since newspapers were no longer the first or fastest source of news, they had to do something to add value to their product to keep people reading.
And this they did -- they added a lot of magazine-type lifestyle sections and tightly-targeted geographic editions for the suburbs, hoping to give people something they weren't getting from Huntley-Brinkley and Walter Cronkite. But what they also added -- and this was highly controversial at the time -- was more news analysis (very carefully labelled as such), and the "op ed" page, where opinions and punditry reigned supreme.
In fact, I think one could make the argument that if respectable newspapers, the sine qua non of objective journalism, hadn't broken that barrier of acceptability, it's unlikely that it would have been allowable for all-news TV channels, when they came along, to carry so much non-news material. (Of course, if there is indeed a factor pushing all-whatever channels to become more generalized, it's interesting to speculate what all-news channels would have added to their line-ups if they couldn't add news analysis, opinions and punditry.)
So, as we look back on these past trends, I wonder what it tells us about how the various kinds of news media will change in response to the increasing influence of blogging as a source of information, analysis, opinions and punditry? Will all-news channels and newspapers start providing more actual news coverage, something they can do that bloggers cannot, realizing that they can't hope to compete with the range of opinions and the variety of analyses available in the blogosphere? Of course, journalism is expensive, and cost-effectiveness becomes more important as news outlets are slurped up by media conglomerates. News programs are no longer the status-providing loss-leaders they once were for the networks and local stations, they're expected to not just pay their own way, but to be a profit center. That means cutting costs, and cutting costs means fewer reporters, fewer foreign bureaus, more reliance on canned "news" etc., which are not exactly trends which lend themselves to providing more objective news.
So the news media may be in a bind. On the one hand the cheap filler they've been relying on will start to get some fierce competition from a new medium, and on the other their masters won't want to spend the money to provide the one thing they can provide in order to compete more effectively, news.
Postscript: Of course, it also occurs to me that I (and everyone else who pontificates about the effects of blogging on journalism) could be hugely overstating the influence that bloggers will have. It may well be that a taste for consuming blogs might be more similar to a taste for consuming public access television, and therefore somewhat limited as a mass influence.
absolutist
aggresive
anti-Constitutional
anti-intellectual
arrogant
authoritarian
blame-placers
blameworthy
blinkered
buckpassers
calculating
class warriors
clueless
compassionless
con artists
conniving
conscienceless
conspiratorial
corrupt
craven
criminal
crooked
culpable
damaging
dangerous
deadly
debased
deceitful
delusional
despotic
destructive
devious
disconnected
dishonorable
dishonest
disingenuous
disrespectful
dogmatic
doomed
fanatical
fantasists
felonious
hateful
heinous
hostile to science
hypocritical
ideologues
ignorant
immoral
incompetent
indifferent
inflexible
insensitive
insincere
irrational
isolated
kleptocratic
lacking in empathy
lacking in public spirit
liars
mendacious
misleading
mistrustful
non-rational
not candid
not "reality-based"
not trustworthy
oblivious
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out of control
pernicious
perverse
philistine
plutocratic
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propagandists
rapacious
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unrealistic
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venal
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virtueless
warmongers
wicked
without integrity
wrong-headed
Thanks to: Breeze, Chuck, Ivan Raikov, Kaiju, Kathy, Roger, Shirley, S.M. Dixon
recently seen
i've got a little list...
Elliott Abrams
Steven Abrams (Kansas BofE)
David Addington
Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson
Roger Ailes (FNC)
John Ashcroft
Bob Bennett
William Bennett
Joe Biden
John Bolton
Alan Bonsell (Dover BofE)
Pat Buchanan
Bill Buckingham (Dover BofE)
George W. Bush
Saxby Chambliss
Bruce Chapman (DI)
Dick Cheney
Lynne Cheney
Richard Cohen
The Coors Family
Ann Coulter
Michael Crichton
Lanny Davis
Tom DeLay
William A. Dembski
James Dobson
Leonard Downie (WaPo)
Dinesh D’Souza
Gregg Easterbrook
Jerry Falwell
Douglas Feith
Arthur Finkelstein
Bill Frist
George Gilder
Newt Gingrich
John Gibson (FNC)
Alberto Gonzalez
Rudolph Giuliani
Sean Hannity
Katherine Harris
Fred Hiatt (WaPo)
Christopher Hitchens
David Horowitz
Don Imus
James F. Inhofe
Jesse Jackson
Philip E. Johnson
Daryn Kagan
Joe Klein
Phil Kline
Ron Klink
William Kristol
Ken Lay
Joe Lieberman
Rush Limbaugh
Trent Lott
Frank Luntz
"American Fundamentalists"
by Joel Pelletier
(click on image for more info)
Chris Matthews
Mitch McConnell
Stephen C. Meyer (DI)
Judith Miller (ex-NYT)
Zell Miller
Tom Monaghan
Sun Myung Moon
Roy Moore
Dick Morris
Rupert Murdoch
Ralph Nader
John Negroponte
Grover Norquist
Robert Novak
Ted Olson
Elspeth Reeve (TNR)
Bill O'Reilly
Martin Peretz (TNR)
Richard Perle
Ramesh Ponnuru
Ralph Reed
Pat Robertson
Karl Rove
Tim Russert
Rick Santorum
Richard Mellon Scaife
Antonin Scalia
Joe Scarborough
Susan Schmidt (WaPo)
Bill Schneider
Al Sharpton
Ron Silver
John Solomon (WaPo)
Margaret Spellings
Kenneth Starr
Randall Terry
Clarence Thomas
Richard Thompson (TMLC)
Donald Trump
Richard Viguere
Donald Wildmon
Paul Wolfowitz
Bob Woodward (WaPo)
John Yoo
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recent listening
influences
John Adams
Laurie Anderson
Aphex Twin
Isaac Asimov
Fred Astaire
J.G. Ballard
The Beatles
Busby Berkeley
John Cage
"Catch-22"
Raymond Chandler
Arthur C. Clarke
Elvis Costello
Richard Dawkins
Daniel C. Dennett
Philip K. Dick
Kevin Drum
Brian Eno
Fela
Firesign Theatre
Eliot Gelwan
William Gibson
Philip Glass
David Gordon
Stephen Jay Gould
Dashiell Hammett
"The Harder They Come"
Robert Heinlein
Joseph Heller
Frank Herbert
Douglas Hofstadter
Bill James
Gene Kelly
Stanley Kubrick
Jefferson Airplane
Ursula K. LeGuin
The Marx Brothers
John McPhee
Harry Partch
Michael C. Penta
Monty Python
Orbital
Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
"The Prisoner"
"The Red Shoes"
Steve Reich
Terry Riley
Oliver Sacks
Erik Satie
"Singin' in the Rain"
Stephen Sondheim
The Specials
Morton Subotnick
Talking Heads/David Byrne
Tangerine Dream
Hunter S. Thompson
J.R.R. Tolkien
"2001: A Space Odyssey"
Kurt Vonnegut
Yes
Bullshit, trolling, unthinking knee-jerk dogmatism and the drivel of idiots will be ruthlessly deleted and the posters banned.
Entertaining, interesting, intelligent, informed and informative comments will always be welcome, even when I disagree with them.
I am the sole judge of which of these qualities pertains.
E-mail
All e-mail received is subject to being published on unfutz without identifying names or addresses.
Corrections
I correct typos and other simple errors of grammar, syntax, style and presentation in my posts after the fact without necessarily posting notification of the change.
Substantive textual changes, especially reversals or major corrections, will be noted in an "Update" or a footnote.
Also, illustrations may be added to entries after their initial publication.
the story so far
unfutz: toiling in almost complete obscurity for almost 1500 days
If you read unfutz at least once a week, without fail, your teeth will be whiter and your love life more satisfying.
If you read it daily, I will come to your house, kiss you on the forehead, bathe your feet, and cook pancakes for you, with yummy syrup and everything.
(You might want to keep a watch on me, though, just to avoid the syrup ending up on your feet and the pancakes on your forehead.)
Finally, on a more mundane level, since I don't believe that anyone actually reads this stuff, I make this offer: I'll give five bucks to the first person who contacts me and asks for it -- and, believe me, right now five bucks might as well be five hundred, so this is no trivial offer.
