On Thursday, Peter Alexander, national correspondent at NBC News, reported (on Twitter, where most reporting happens now) that the U.S. Treasury Department had quietly eased sanctions to allow U.S. companies to do business with the Russian FSB; 40 minutes later, he noted that it was a “technical fix” planned under the Obama administration. The first tweet was retweeted more than 6,200 times, the second a piddling 247.
This has been the pattern of late. Last Saturday, following Trump’s controversial executive order on refugees, CNBC’s John Harwood reported that the Department of Justice had no role in evaluating the order (3,000+ retweets); one hour later, he issued a correction (199). Similarly, Raw Story cited American Foreign Policy Council scholar Ilan Berman to suggest that there was “no readout of Trump-Putin call because White House turned off recording.” The tweet linking to that story has 9,700 retweets, and travel blogger Geraldine DeRuiter’s outraged tweet — “They. Turned. Off. The. Recording. When. He. Called. Putin. IF OBAMA HAD DONE THIS THE GOP WOULD HAVE HAD HIM TRIED FOR TREASON.” — has been retweeted nearly 30,000 times. Berman took to Twitter to explain that he didn’t know “for a fact” that the recording had been turned off; it was simply “conjecture.” Twenty-seven retweets.
Care for more? There was a great deal of Supreme Court–related misinformation. Jeff Zeleny, CNN senior White House correspondent, reported that the White House had set up Donald Trump’s Supreme Court announcement as a “prime-time contest,” noting identical Twitter pages for potential appointees Neil Gorsuch and Tim Hardiman (1,100+ retweets); a half hour later, he noted that the pages were in fact not set up by the White House (159 retweets).
Off of Twitter, NBC News reported that Gorsuch, Trump’s nominee, “opposed campus military recruiters” in an op-ed written for Columbia University’s student newspaper in February 1987. It wasn’t true. The U.K.’s Daily Mail reported that Neil Gorsuch founded a “Fascism Forever” club at his Jesuit high school. That wasn’t true, either.
And there was still more. Reuters reported that Trump was responsible for the SEAL-team raid in Yemen that left an American soldier dead, and even approved the operation “without sufficient intelligence, ground support, or adequate backup preparations.” It almost certainly wasn’t true.
The Associated Press reported that Donald Trump “warned in a phone call with his Mexican counterpart that he was ready to send U.S. troops” into the country. A spokesman for Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto immediately decried the report as “absolutely false,” and U.S. officials explained that the comments were intended as a joke.
Half a dozen sites reported that Donald Trump changed the name of Black History Month to “African-American History Month.” False.
Again: This was all within the last week.Journalists, citing Donald Trump’s own serial fabulism, have lamented that journalism is uniquely difficult in the era of Trump. It’s not. Journalism, as a trade, is the same now as it was under Barack Obama as it was under George W. Bush. The basic rules still apply. When you make a claim, have as many sources as possible at hand to support it. Name your sources, as often as possible. If you do not have reliable evidence for a claim, don’t make it. If you don’t have a firm grasp of your subject, consult an expert. Be fair-minded. Be honest.
The above does not require “skepticism.” It does require prioritizing what is true over what is exciting. Anyone with a high-school diploma has been instructed in how to read with a basic amount of discrimination — to note the difference between “primary” and “secondary” sources, to evaluate the credibility of an assertion. We should be able to expect journalists to exercise at least this much discernment.
There is a theory, which has mustered considerable assent, that Donald Trump — or at least Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, and Sean Spicer — are working to undermine not simply the left-leaning press but the very notions of “fact” and “truth,” so that they can wield power more effectively, shielded by a nationwide epistemological fog. Perhaps this is so. But even if it is, the situation is not righted by the journalistic corps’ doing the same.
This country has plenty of activists, in government and out of it. Massive numbers of people on both sides are prepared to march and shout and donate and propagandize on behalf of their preferred causes. We don’t need more activists. We need journalists.
Category: media
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No comments on Shorter version: Do your job correctly
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Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt:
It is not unprecedented for a White House to view the media as the enemy — the “opposition party,” as presidential adviser Stephen K. Bannon labeled us last week.
But it is vital that we not become that party.
After an exhausting, often alarming first week of the Trump administration, many people were telling journalists that we can no longer conduct business as usual.
“You’re bringing a spoon to a knife fight,” one acquaintance told me.
We need to stop covering the president’s tweets, we were advised. We need to label his false statements as lies. If White House counselors are dishonest, we should stop interviewing them. If Breitbart or parts of Fox peddle Trump propaganda, we should be the voice of the other side.
No. The answer to dishonest or partisan journalism cannot be more partisan journalism, which would only harm our credibility and make civil discourse even less possible. The response to administration insults cannot be to remake ourselves in the mold of their accusations.
Our answer must be professionalism: to do our jobs according to the highest standards, as always.
If the president makes a statement, we report it. If it is false, we report the evidence of its falsehood. If the president’s critics say he is a totalitarian, we report that. If their charge is exaggerated, we provide the evidence of exaggeration. We investigate relentlessly.
So far, I believe The Post has been setting the standard in this difficult job. It is not boasting for me to say so, because as editorial page editor I have no input in The Post’s news coverage. I am only a reader, like all of you.
On the opinion side of the house, which I oversee, we are entitled to our opinions. But here too it is important to maintain a thoughtful perspective.
We on The Post’s editorial page spent the better part of the past two years warning the country not to elect Donald Trump. We said he was unfit by temperament and experience, misguided on many issues and a potential danger to democratic norms.
Now we find ourselves in the unusual position of hoping to be proved wrong.
The opening of the Trump administration has not been encouraging, to put it mildly. But that doesn’t change our mission.
We must distinguish between words and deeds. We must sort the good from the bad. And, in a political culture inclined to view every adverse action as the onset of a potential apocalypse, we must distinguish the merely regrettable from the genuinely harmful, and the genuinely harmful from the irreversibly damaging.
When, as one of his first executive actions, Trump blocked a fee reduction for federally insured mortgages, he was taking a prudent, modest step to protect federal finances, not opening a war on working people.
When Trump ordered the creation of an office to assist the victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, he sent an inaccurate message about the prevalence of such crime, but the office itself seems unlikely to do much harm. But barring refugees from war-torn countries, and favoring one religion over another — that defaces our democracy. It betrays a tradition of American generosity and tolerance that we have occasionally strayed from in the past — and always have come to regret doing so.
I am not complacent. There is nothing normal or healthy about a White House counselor telling the media it should “keep its mouth shut” for a while, nor about a president obsessing over his ratings, taunting those he calls his “enemies” and branding journalists “among the most dishonest human beings on earth.” Such attitudes should be frightening to all Americans, not just those of us who work in the business.
But we can’t allow ourselves to be brought down to that level. We do not spoil for a knife fight. Whatever comes at us over the next four years, what we should wield is our pens and our laptops, our facts and our fairness.
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The New York Times’ Frank Bruni shows one …
You know how Donald Trump wins? I don’t mean a second term or major legislative victories. I’m talking about the battle between incivility and dignity.
He triumphs when opponents trade righteous anger for crude tantrums. When they lose sight of the line between protest and catcalls.
When a writer for “Saturday Night Live” jokes publicly that Trump’s 10-year-old son has the mien and makings of a killer.
“Barron will be this country’s first home-school shooter,” the writer, Katie Rich, tweeted. I cringe at repeating it. But there’s no other way to take proper note of its ugliness.
That tweet ignited a firestorm — and rightly so — but it didn’t really surprise me. It was just a matter of time. This is the trajectory that we’re traveling. This, increasingly, is what passes for impassioned advocacy.
Look elsewhere on Twitter. Or on Facebook. Or at Madonna, whose many positive contributions don’t include her turn at the microphone at the Women’s March in Washington, where she said that she’d “thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House,” erupted into profanity and tweaked the lyrics to one of her songs so that they instructed Trump to perform a particular sex act.
What a sure way to undercut the high-mindedness of most of the women (and men) around her on that inspiring day. What a wasted opportunity to try to reach the many Americans who still haven’t decided how alarmed about Trump to be. I doubt that even one of them listened to her and thought: To the barricades I go! If Madonna’s dropping the F bomb, I must spring into action.
All of this plays right into Trump’s hands. It pulls eyes and ears away from the unpreparedness, conflicts of interest and extreme conservatism of so many of his cabinet nominees; from the evolving explanations for why he won’t release his tax returns; from his latest delusion or falsehood, such as his renewed insistence that illegally cast ballots cost him the popular vote; from other evidence of an egomania so profound that it’s an impediment to governing and an invitation to national disaster.
There’s so much substantive ground on which to confront Trump. There are acres upon acres. Why swerve into the gutter? Why help him dismiss his detractors as people in thrall to the theater of their outrage and no better than he is?
And why risk that disaffected Americans, tuning in only occasionally, hear one big mash of insults and insulters, and tune out, when there’s a contest — over what this country stands for, over where it will go — that couldn’t be more serious.
After Rich’s tweet, “Saturday Night Live” suspended her, and she was broadly condemned, by Democrats as well as Republicans, for violating the unofficial rule against attacks on the young children of presidents. Chelsea Clinton, on her Facebook page, urged people to give Barron space and peace — something that wasn’t always done for her, for George W. Bush’s daughters or for Barack Obama’s.
But the treatment of presidential progeny isn’t the real story here. And that’s a complicated saga anyway, because so many presidents and candidates try to have things both ways, putting family on display when it suits them and then declaring them off limits when it doesn’t.
The larger, more pressing issues are how low we’re prepared to sink in our partisan back-and-forth and what’s accomplished by descending to Trump’s subterranean level. His behavior has been grotesque, and it’s human nature to want to repay him in kind. It feels good. It sometimes even feels right.
Many people I know thrilled to the viral footage a few days ago of the vile white supremacist Richard Spencer being punched in the head during a television interview. But that attack does more to help him than to hurt him.
Many people I know thrilled to BuzzFeed’s publication of a dossier with unsubstantiated allegations about Trump. But that decision bolstered his ludicrous insistence that journalists are uniquely unfair to him. It gave him a fresh weapon in his war on the media.
If Trump’s presidency mirrors its dangerous prelude, one of the fundamental challenges will be to respond to him, his abettors and his agenda in the most tactically prudent way and not just the most emotionally satisfying one. To rant less and organize more. To resist taunts and stick with facts. To answer invective with intelligence.
And to show, in the process, that there are two very different sets of values here, manifest in two very distinct modes of discourse. If that doesn’t happen, Trump may be victorious in more than setting newly coarse terms for our political debate. He may indeed win on many fronts, over many years.
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… the end of a career next week, ESPN.com reports:
Brent Musburger, one of the most recognized and prominent voices in the history of sports television, will end his play-by-play career with ABC/ESPN at the end of January, it was announced Wednesday.
Musburger, 77, who brought his folksy delivery to countless games — most beginning with his “You are looking live” catchphrase — since entering the national stage in 1975, will call his final game Jan. 31 on ESPN as the Kentucky Wildcats host Georgia at Rupp Arena (9 p.m. ET).
“What a wonderful journey I have traveled with CBS and the Disney company,” Musburger said in a statement. “A love of sports allows me to live a life of endless pleasure. And make no mistake, I will miss the arenas and stadiums dearly. Most of all, I will miss the folks I have met along the trail.”
Musburger told The Associated Press that he plans to move to Las Vegas and help his family start a sports handicapping business.
A member of the National Sports Media Association Hall of Fame, Musburger joined ABC in 1990 after a long stint in which he was the lead voice of CBS Sports. He also received the National Football Foundation and College Football Hall of Fame Outstanding Contributor to Amateur Football Award in 2011 and the Vin Scully Lifetime Achievement Award in Sports Broadcasting in November.
For ABC, ESPN and the SEC Network, Musburger has hosted and/or called play-by-play for the NBA, college football (including seven BCS Championship Games) and basketball, golf, NASCAR and IndyCar races and the 2006 FIFA World Cup. He called the Little League World Series from 2000 to 2011. He also hosted Super Bowl XXV’s pregame and halftime shows as well as the 1991 Pan Am Games from Cuba.
With ESPN Radio, Musburger handled play-by-play for NBA games, including the NBA Finals, for many years. He also was the original host of its daily “ESPN SportsBeat” segments.
“Brent’s presence and delivery have come to symbolize big time sports for multiple generations of fans,” ESPN president John Skipper said in a statement. “When he opens with his signature ‘You are looking live,’ you sit up straight in your chair because you know something important is about to happen.
“Brent’s catalog of big events is unmatched, and he has skillfully guided us through some of the most dramatic and memorable moments in sports with his authentic and distinctive style. He is one of the best story-tellers to ever grace a sports booth. We and the fans will miss him.”
During his 15-year tenure with CBS, Musburger was the host or had play-by-play duty on NFL games and the groundbreaking studio show “The NFL Today.” He also worked the NCAA Final Four, tennis’ US Open, the NBA, the Masters, the Belmont Stakes, College World Series and also did baseball play-by-play for CBS Radio.
“The biggest show of my life was ‘The NFL Today,’” Musburger said. “It was the first of the live pregame shows, the live halftimes and the live postgame. So we were really the pioneers.”
He has been behind the microphone for some huge moments in sports, including Doug Flutie’s Hail Mary pass for Boston College that beat Miami in 1984, as well as Villanova’s historic NCAA championship upset over Georgetown in 1985.
“Brent made every event feel larger,” said Stephanie Druley, ESPN senior vice president for events and studio production. “To me, there is probably not a greater storyteller as a play-by-play person. He can spin a yarn like nobody else, and it made games definitely more enjoyable to watch.”
His career hasn’t been without controversy, as Musburger admittedly didn’t “shy from an opinion” — such as his comments about Oklahoma’s Joe Mixon during the recent Sugar Bowl after surveillance video of the Sooners running back punching a woman in 2014 was released in December.
“I am not shy from an opinion,” Musburger said. “And I know many of my opinions are gonna be controversial, ’cause there are many people who don’t like them.”
Musburger, a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, started his journalism career at the Chicago American newspaper but soon thereafter joined Chicago’s WBBM-TV as sports director in 1968. He then moved to KNXT-TV in Los Angeles, where he served as co-anchor of the nightly news alongside Connie Chung.
“Nothing in the world replaces the friendships I’ve made — with crews and people,” Musburger said. “And that includes the fans. I mean, I’m never alone. Wherever I go, someone’s gonna come up. Someone’s gonna come up and ask about a team. Or a game. Or an experience. I’ve got millions of friends out there, OK?”
What did Musburger do? The easier question is what didn’t he do. (One thing not listed here: Coanchor of the 6 p.m. news with Connie Chung on CBS’ Los Angeles station.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko_PKsevn_I&t=237s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAYYg2roZrE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcQx40atibU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_PMPsRuIB0
Musburger seemed to be everywhere either hosting or doing play-by-play for CBS in the 1980s. He was supposed to be CBS’ lead baseball announcer when CBS got broadcast rights. And then CBS fired him, according to one version because of bad ad pre-sales.
That was one contract after Musburger juggled offers from CBS (his then-present employer) and ABC (his then-future employer) and, believe it or not, WGN-TV and radio, where he was offered to work Cubs games with Harry Caray and Bears games. (Wayne Larrivee got the latter job instead before he left to announce for the correct NFL team.) After CBS fired him, Musburger went to ABC, turning down offers from WGN and Turner.
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I’m not sure I agree with all of what Sean Blanda (probably not related to the oldest NFL player in history, George), but he raises interesting points:
At its inception, Medium likely thought what many well-intentioned startups and news outlets do. It realized that trust in news media has never been lower. That the confusion around legitimate news sources has caused mixups about basic facts. Yet online news consumption is at an all-time high, and the younger generation overwhelmingly prefers it to any other format. It then tried to take advantage of the opportunity.
Many have walked this path and many have failed. Some publicly and spectacularly. Most instead slowly become something antithetical to the “better system” they hoped to build. The reason so many fail isn’t because they aren’t well meaning or smart. It’s because the incentive structure of online news is fundamentally broken.
Companies from Medium to The Washington Post to Mashable to Buzzfeed all eventually run into the same unthinkable truth: The methods used to fund modern journalism simultaneously undermine trust in the news outlets.
Editors, writers, and executives at today’s news outlets are all in a no-win situation where they are forced to contribute to the causes of their own demise to survive. In any other business, companies would try, fail, and another would take its place. This is good and needed.
But for news, the failures are happening at a glacial pace and bad actors are profiting as the trustworthiness of our news outlets are breaking down in slow motion. The result is the worst kind of feedback loop, where well-meaning people try to “fix” the news. But instead, those methods erode trust in all news outlets leading to a total breakdown in discourse.
You can draw a straight line from the bad incentive structure forced upon news outlets to the unprecedented divisiveness in our country. And it’s time we realized what’s going on.
The Business Model is The Message.
Few industries have the indirect business model of journalism. When Ford fulfills its mission and makes safe, durable, fun, car they make more money. When Mother Jones fulfills its mission and spends 18 months in a searing exposé of private prisons that shifts government policy, the revenue line barely moves. From its business recap after their ground breaking investigation into prison abuse:
Conservatively, counting just the biggest chunks of staff time that went into it, the prison story cost roughly $350,000. The banner ads that appeared on the article brought in $5,000, give or take.
An extreme example? Yes. But this disconnect is why, despite good intentions of digital news outlets, nearly all eventually drift into a weird double life. One where, on one hand, they are producing objective journalism that improves Americans’ understanding about their world. While on the other, they are subverting any trust gained from that journalism to make money.
How? If my media friends will forgive the oversimplification, the current news landscape requires the following order of operations.
Step 1: Accelerate your reach via social media (mostly Facebook) by optimizing much of your content to be frequently shared.
Step 2: Leverage your reach and sell advertising space on your website using programmatic (or automated) advertising technology.
Step 3: Leverage your reach some more by selling “native advertising” or “sponsored content” for select companies.
Step 4: Repeat from step 1.These incentives align fine for most editorial websites. But when applied to current events/news coverage, none of the methods to increase revenue involve uncovering corruption or increasing understanding. The above steps can be profitable without ever being “correct” or “fair” or nuanced or any of the many characteristics of capital-J Journalism. Instead, each way of making money creates an unending pressure for scale and reach at all costs. …
Social-ready content
Programmatic rewards scale (meaning: the more people that see the ad, the more money one makes). Native advertising rewards scale. Therefore, the news outlet has to build up as many followers on all of its social platforms as possible. This results in editorial practices that don’t prioritize nuance, accuracy, or originality. Instead, whatever plays on social is king. For example, Buzzfeed encourages “community posts” to help maximize the chances something will catch fire on social. Here’s Buzzfeed’s “community posts” that have 95% of the template for the reported news.
Or, perhaps the most egregious, a site will prioritize frequent, bloggy, opinion content or content that confirms a certain group’s worldview because they just know it will go viral. The Interceptprofiled such a casefrom The Washington Post when WaPo reported (and later retracted) that the Vermont electrical grid had been hacked by Russia with no evidence to back up the claim:
The Russia-hacked-our-electric-grid story now has a full-scale retraction in the form of a separate article admitting that “the incident is not linked to any Russian government effort to target or hack the utility” and there may not even have been malware at all on this laptop.
But while these debacles are embarrassing for the paper, they are also richly rewarding. That’s because journalists — including those at the Post — aggressively hype and promote the original, sensationalistic false stories, ensuring that they go viral, generating massive traffic for the Post (the paper’s executive editor, Marty Baron, recently boasted about how profitable the paper has become).
Another example from Daniel Ketchell who dissects how a 7-minute long interview with former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger about bipartisanship was taken purposefully out of context. …
Was the takeaway from this (full transcript by Daniel Ketchell):
Well, what changed was that now he is elected. And now it is very important that we all support the president, and that we all come together and we stop whining and it becomes one nation.
As Obama said many years ago it’s not blue states and red states — it’s the United States of America. And there’s a great letter that I just dug up the other day that President Bush, the first, wrote to President-elect Clinton. And he said ‘I’m in my office right now and I just want you to know that I respect this office and I respect that you won and you are my president. And I want you to be very successful because if you are successful then the country is successful.’
And this is exactly what I feel about Trump. It’s what I felt about Obama or anybody. When someone is elected then you go 100% behind them and you help them and help them shape the future of the country.
The problem isn’t that news outlets make these mistakes. It’s that they make them because they have business incentives to do so. Remember: news outlets have to do well on social media in order to make money.
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So, let’s recap:
Most outlets chasing reach leverage social media (mostly Facebook) to get content read by as many people as possible. This changes the reward from “quality” and “originality” to getting content to spread virally. This decreases trust. In fact, it’s better to have more content than less, so lots of disposable stuff is written quickly, with little regard to what it adds to discourse. This decreases trust. Virality requires a visceral emotional reaction by the reader, regardless of nuance or truth. This decreases trust. Bonus points if you can shame an “other side” that your audience is galvanized around, and alienate those not included in your chosen tribe (hold that thought). This decreases trust. Then, enterprising people create content with the sole focus of taking advantage of this machine which floods the zone (like our friends with the Dwayne Johnson story) and, yes, decreases trust. Meanwhile, campaigns for companies are written as articles and published in an outlet’s feed, further confusing readers which… well, you get it.
However, these outlets have to do these things in order to pay for the “good” stuff. Yes, news outlets (and their fans) can point to the great reporting done by their outlet. But they often ignore the consequences of how that reporting is funded. Yes, advertisers can claim that some algorithm places their ads. But they ignore that their marketing budget is supporting sites with deceitful ends. Yes, social networks can claim they want to be an agnostic platform. But they ignore the credibility they give bad content.
Meanwhile the reader sees the entire picture, often unable to separate what’s an opinion, what’s an ad, what’s fake, what’s a “quick hit”, what’s a deeply reported story, or what’s sponsored content. To continue the metaphor, it’s like if Ford only profited when it sold unsafe cars slapped with the Ford logo at its dealerships. And then, years later, wondered why nobody trusted them anymore.
We’re Being Played.
News outlets have been gunning for wide reach since the days of the penny press. This is no revelation. What’s different in our modern landscape is that the wide reach is attained using social media and platforms completely outside of the control of the news outlets. And the stuff that sells on social media is content that plays to the reader’s identity and confirms the reader’s preexisting beliefs.
Buzzfeed practically invented “identity content” and founder Jonah Peretti knew years ago that to succeed in the age of the Internet media outlets had to appeal to our own tribalism. He wrote as much a decade before Twitter was even invented in a 1996 journal article:
The internet is one of many late capitalist phenomena that allow for more flexible, rapid, and profitable mechanisms of identity formation. Connecting capitalism and identity formation requires extensive contextualization.
And later in the article (emphasis mine):
I assert that the increasingly rapid rate at which images are distributed and consumed in late capitalism necessitates a corresponding increase in the rate that individuals assume and shed identities. Because advertisements link identity with the need to purchase products, the acceleration of visual culture promotes the hyper-consumption associated with late capitalism.
Americans are being played against one another because our media consumption is reinforcing the idea that we’re more different than alike. Because that’s what shares. Because that’s what builds their social media reach. Because that’s what results in better scale for native and programmatic advertising. Because news outlets have to do this to survive.
All of the means outlined above (in which news outlets mortgage their credibility for money) cause the distrust for news outlets to filter down into distrust for the people that believe or identify with those news outlets. Remember our example with The Washington Post rushing to judgement on the power grid hacking story?
Fans of WaPo could refute the example as being indicative of the paper’s larger failings. After all, the paper has demonstrably produced incredible works of journalism. Those fans would be correct. But detractors could point to the articles WaPo got wrong. Or the opinion pieces that were offensive to them. Or to the uncomfortable relationship WaPo has with sponsored content. Those detractors would be correct.
Soon we stop trusting outlets that don’t talk to us the way we’d like, because we can point to a failing of their trustworthiness. Every news outlet is not equally trustworthy. But we no longer analyze what we read on a case-by-case basis. We see who is sharing news from which outlet and make the call.
You can see this in the way ideas are discussed online. Whether you choose to divide a group by income, geography, race, industry, movement, or party we often associate a news outlet with its worst moment and a group with its worst members. We refuse to discuss ideas with people who we have disagreed with in the past, blurring the difference between ideas and the people that have them. We no longer believe in political principles, but political parties. We care less about the general welfare of our fellow Americans and instead get caught up with a cosmic score card that shows our group is winning. …
We get sliced and sliced into smaller and smaller groups, each with its own group of pundits, publications, and Facebook memes. And as advertising mixes with propaganda mixes with actual reporting we can’t tell the difference anymore. It’s a never-ending scorched earth campaign, made possible because harming trust and encouraging tribalism is economically rewarded. In other words, the economic incentives of news directly contribute to the divisiveness of our country.
Facebook collects the ad money. Advertisers get the clicks. News outlets live to fight another day. No group has any incentive to change and the rest of us are left fighting it out.
Silicon Valley and the Unscalable Industry
But, and here’s the cruel part, history is repeating itself. As Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Medium ALSO have no economic incentive to solve these problems. It’s the reason the Twitter community continues to wait for tools to manage abuse. It’s the reason Google continues to highly rank and provide advertising for content that is purposefully meant to deceive. That Facebook can only throw severaltoken efforts to appease those who blame the platform for spreading “fake news” while not giving publishers any compensation. The reason they can do that? They can wait it out. Those platforms control the audience and the ad market.
Facebook, Google, and Twitter (but especially Facebook) don’t make any more money by supporting journalism. The worst “fake news” ever written is that these companies somehow have a reason to care about good journalism. Facebook’s stock won’t skyrocket if its users share a hard-earned and important scoop over some meme. Medium, to its credit, is realizing what it was contributing to and is trying to do better.
But the content we read online is going to continue to be backed by harmful business incentives. That is, until either the consumer demands otherwise or until some enterprising person can build a repeatable model that allows journalism to thrive without being mercy to platforms for advertisers that care about reach. Seeing that the latter has never happened, all we have is the former.
Common Ground
I know I’ll sound like some kind of pollyanna to suggest that if the American people demand more of their media outlets, advertisers, and social networks everything will work itself out. But I’d guess, regardless of your politics, you and everyone you know is tired of the current climate.
You’re tired of those participating in the current media landscape acting like we can keep a republic via sweet Twitter burns or made-to-go-viral videos on Facebook with no context. Tired of people who don’t think like you totally misunderstanding reality as you see it. Tired of charlatans playing to the worse instincts of their tribe and getting rewarded. Tired of pinning the promise of journalism on the good will of its members who have every economic incentive to do otherwise. And, call me naive, but I’m tired that Americans of all walks would rather find reasons to hurt one another than help one another.
Any solution is complicated and I have no illusions that it would happen in the next few years, if ever. But the first step is admitting we have a problem. Not one just one “side” or one outlet. But all players, news outlets, readers, advertisers, social media companies need to admit what we all know deep inside: Nobody is happy with this, and it’s time to try something new.
I see a few problems with this. First: Media outlets are businesses, and businesses have to make money first. No advertisers, no business. Advertisers pay all the freight in radio, TV and free print, and almost all of the freight online since few people are willing to pay for online content.
At this point trying to get people away from media outlets that fit their worldview is like trying to put the genie back into the bottle. Related to that is a fact pointed out in this comment:
Let’s get something straight here: This has been a problem from the very beginning when newspapers were the only mass media. Anyone who says the news media isn’t biased in some way is deeply ignorant of how things work. Even Medium is biased by virtue of the sort of media that it is.
The reason people are jaded is because for one of the first times in history, with very little effort, they can compare and contrast news resources and clearly see the bias slithering right there in front of them. Note that the bias doesn’t imply that the article isn’t truthful. If you read the Daily Caller, you’ll know that it is a right wing point of view. It may be the naked truth as a right winger sees it. Nevertheless, if they report about goings on in a foreign country, it is usually accurate — incomplete perhaps, but still accurate.
Likewise, if you read Mother Jones, you’ll expect a leftist point of view. Does that mean that the latest findings on Global Climate change that they happen to report are untrue? No. You might want to read a secondary source as well, just as you would with the Daily Caller, but the report is still probably accurate as reported.
As long as they cite well known sources, as long as they stick to reporting real facts without making anything up, I’ll read it.
Thus my assertion: Don’t Hide Your Bias. You got your funding from somewhere. Don’t be shy about who is behind your publication. The more upfront you are about where your funding comes from, the more seriously I’ll take your publication. Remember who broke the story about Bill Clinton’s infidelities while in office: It was the National Enquirer. Even a stopped clock is correct twice a day.
The final problem is the assumption that our problems really can be solved. Politics, remember, is a zero-sum game — one side wins, the other side loses. Life is increasingly also a zero-sum game; if fixing our problems involves taking something away from someone, there will be resistance.
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I will be on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Ideas Network’s Joy Cardin Week in Review segment Friday at 8 a.m.
Joy Cardin and all the other Ideas Network programming can be heard on WLBL (930 AM) in Auburndale, WHID (88.1 FM) in Green Bay, WHWC (88.3 FM) in Menomonie, WRFW (88.7 FM) in River Falls, WEPS (88.9 FM) in Elgin, Ill., WHAA (89.1 FM) in Adams, WHBM (90.3 FM) in Park Falls, WHLA (90.3 FM) in La Crosse, WRST (90.3 FM) in Oshkosh, WHAD (90.7 FM) in Delafield, W215AQ (90.9 FM) in Middleton, KUWS (91.3 FM) in Superior, WHHI (91.3 FM) in Highland, WSHS (91.7 FM) in Sheboygan, WHDI (91.9 FM) in Sister Bay, WLBL (91.9 FM) in Wausau, W275AF (102.9 FM) in Ashland, W300BM (107.9 FM) in Madison, and of course online at www.wpr.org.
None of those radio stations is carrying my other on-air work this week, because WPR doesn’t do sports broadcasts. (WPR was apparently the first broadcaster of the state boys basketball tournament; if public radio did sports today, one would assume it would sound like a TV golf broadcast. Wisconsin Public Television carries UW sports, though less since the Big Ten Network came into existence.) Tonight will be my third game of the week, preceded by a doubleheader Tuesday, followed by game four Friday, on three different radio stations. (It’s helpful to not mess up station identification where you are, though that is less important than making sure all the commercials run.)
Friday is apparently National Fun at Work Day, which to me is a bit too close to the concept of loving your job, which you should never do, because your job doesn’t love you. It is, more importantly, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the anniversary of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Less seriously, it’s Thomas Crapper Day, in memory of the promoter (though not inventor) of the flush toilet.It’s also National Chocolate Cake Day.
Unrelated, I think, It’s also National Chocolate Cake Day.
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Two law school professors make the case that the First Amendment won’t necessarily protect the news media:
When President Trump declared on Saturday that reporters are “among the most dishonest human beings on earth,” it was not the first time he had disparaged the press. Nor was it out of character when, later that same day, his press secretary threatened “to hold the press accountable” for reporting truthful information that was unflattering to Mr. Trump. Episodes like these have become all too common in recent weeks. So it’s comforting to know that the Constitution serves as a reliable stronghold against Mr. Trump’s assault on the press.
Except that it doesn’t. The truth is, legal protections for press freedom are far feebler than you may think. Even more worrisome, they have been weakening in recent years.
The First Amendment provides only limited protection for the press. Over the centuries, courts have affirmed that it prohibits government censorship and offers some protection against defamation lawsuits. But journalists themselves have few constitutional rights when it comes to matters such as access to government sources and documents, or protection from being hounded by those in power for their news gathering and reporting. In those respects, journalists are vulnerable to the whims of society and government officials.
America’s press freedom, in other words, is something of a mishmash. There are some legal protections, but the press also relies on nonlegal safeguards. In the past, these have included the institutional media’s relative financial strength; the good will of the public; a mutually dependent relationship with government officials; the support of sympathetic judges; and political norms and traditions.
However, each of these pillars has recently been shaken.
A generation ago, perhaps the strongest pillar was the economic power of the institutional media. Even small, local newspapers could afford to undertake investigations and to hire lawyers to argue for access to public meetings and for open courtrooms. But today both large and small newspapers across the country are closing, and the surviving publications have diminishing resources to continue to fight.
Likewise, the public’s good will, which long sustained the freedom of the press in America, has evaporated. In the 1970s, nearly three-quarters of Americans reported they trusted the news media, and the press was able to translate this support into substantial opportunities for news gathering: People who trusted the media were more likely to bring them leads and to demand that the press be allowed to cover newsworthy events. Today, however, public confidence in the press has dropped to its lowest level in Gallup polling history.
As for the relationship between the press and government officials, that too has changed. Until recently, the press relied on politicians for access to information while politicians relied on the press for access to the public’s ear. This ensured that government officials would never shut out the press entirely. But with the fragmentation of the news industry, this is less true; the established news media can no longer claim to be the primary source of the public’s information. (And when the president can convey his messages directly via Twitter, the press loses even more power.)
In addition, the courts cannot be relied on — at least not as they once could be — for forceful protection of press liberties. The Supreme Court has not decided a major press case in more than a decade, in part because it has declined to do so, and in part because media companies, inferring the court’s relative lack of interest, have decided not to waste their resources pressing cases. Several justices have spoken negatively of the press in opinions or speeches. Lower courts have likewise become less favorable to the press, showing more willingness than in the past to second-guess the editorial judgment of journalists.
As each of these press-freedom pillars weakens, the one remaining pillar must bear more than its share of the weight. It’s the one, however, that President Trump now seems most keen to destroy: tradition.
It is primarily customs and traditions, not laws, that guarantee that members of the White House press corps have access to the workings of the executive branch. Consider the Department of Justice’s policy of forcing reporters to reveal confidential sources only as a last, rather than a first, resort. Journalists have no recognized constitutional nor even federal statutory right for such protection. It’s merely custom.
This is why we should be alarmed when Mr. Trump, defying tradition, vilifies media institutions, attacks reporters by name and refuses to take questions from those whose coverage he dislikes. Or when he decides not to let reporters travel with him on his plane, or fails to inform them when he goes out in public. Or when he suggests he might evict the White House press corps from the West Wing and have his administration, rather than the White House Correspondents Association, determine who gets allowed to attend briefings.
We cannot simply sit back and expect that the First Amendment will rush in to preserve the press, and with it our right to know. Like so much of our democracy, the freedom of the press is only as strong as we, the public, demand it to be.
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… he’s not going to be president for very long, because none of us will be around for much longer, or so claims London’s Daily Star:
Conspiracy theorists have been warning a massive planet – called Planet X or Nibiru – will wipe out life on Earth for some time.
Now a paranormal researcher claims to have combined astronomy, scientific research and the Bible to calculate the date of the apocalypse.
In his book Planet X — The 2017 Arrival, author David Meade says the killer planet will first appear this September.
And it will crash into Earth the following month.
According to Meade, Planet X is actually a star with seven planets and moons – including Nibiru – orbiting it. The so-called “truther” explains we haven’t spotted Planet X or Nibiru yet as they are approaching from a different angle, above the South Pole.
He said: “This makes observations difficult – unless you’re flying at a high altitude over South America with an excellent camera.”
Overwhelming evidence suggests the alien star system will approach from the south, pass to the north and then loop back around, Meade claims.
The gravitational pull of the passage will be devastating, Meade says – but its effects are already being felt.
He says recent earthquakes and volcanoes around the dreaded Ring of Fire are down to the push and pull of Planet X system.
Catastrophic earthquakes have rocked Japan, Peru, New Zealand, Argentina and Indonesia over the past few weeks. …
Meade claims the Book of Revelation, in the Bible, says when Nibiru will reveal itself.
Revelation 12: 1-2 speaks of a “sign in heaven” of “a woman clothed with the Sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head”.
Using computer models of the movement of the stars and planets, Meade claims this will match the astral alignment on September 23.
He said: “During this time frame, on September 23, 2017, the moon appears under the feet of the Constellation Virgo.
“The Sun appears to precisely clothe Virgo…Jupiter is birthed on September 9, 2017.
“The 12 stars at that date include the nine stars of Leo, and the three planetary alignments of Mercury, Venus and Mars – which combine to make a count of 12 stars on the head of Virgo.
“Thus the constellations Virgo, Leo and Serpens-Ophiuchus represent a unique once-in-a-century sign exactly as depicted in the 12th chapter of Revelation. This is our time marker.”
The Bible says all this will happen before an angel opens the Sixth Seal of Revelation – and when he does there will be a great earthquake and the moon will turn red.
Meade claims the sign of the Red Dragon with seven heads, 10 horns and seven crowns on its head – mentioned in Revelation 12: 3 – represents Nibiru.
Using “biblical chronology”, he says this will appear on October 5 – and wipe out life on Earth.
Maverick scientists have speculated about the existence of another planet – usually called Planet X – since the 19th century. But the theory fell out of favour, so in 1976, when writer Zecharia Sitchin claimed to have to have found a description of a giant planet called Nibiru among the writings of the Babylonians – an ancient civilisation famed as pioneers of astronomy – he was ridiculed as a crackpot.
He claimed the orbit of Nibiru – which was home to advanced alien race called the Annunaki – brought it near Earth every 3,600 years.
So-called “truthers” have prophesied the next time Nibiru passes nearby it will destroy life here with a collision or near-miss. They were roundly mocked – until scientists at the California Institute of Technology found evidence that suggested the prophesy might actually be true.
Space boffins claimed to have found evidence of a long-fabled ninth planet up to 15 times the size of Earth in the dark outer reaches of the Solar System last year.
They named the icy giant – which takes 20,000 Earth years to orbit the Sun – “Planet 9”.
Just like Meade, they claim Planet 9 is approaching Earth from an oblique angle.
And they say it is so gigantic its gravitational field is actually causing the Sun itself and the entire Solar System to tilt on a six-degree angle.
And in a final staggering coincidence, the Caltech astronomers claim we will see Planet 9/Planet X/Nibiru…by winter 2017.
“Staggering” sounds like what the unnamed Caltech astronomers were doing when they (allegedly) came up with this story. About “biblical chronology,” the Book of Revelation was written after the Gospels, but most Biblical scholars give the most importance to the Gospels. And Matthew 24:36 quotes Jesus Christ as saying, “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”
Just in case, though, root for the Packers to win the Super Bowl and for the Badgers to win the NCAA men’s basketball championship. There may not be another one.
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The Dallas Morning News reports:
Troy Aikman is certainly a popular guy in Cowboys country, but apparently he and Fox broadcast partner Joe Buck aren’t as well loved out in Green Bay.
As of noon Wednesday, more than 16,000 people have signed a Change.org petition seeking to ban the Aikman-Buck duo from calling Packers games from the booth.
“This is a petition to get Joe Buck and Troy Aikman banned from announcing/commentating on the Green Bay Packers,” according to the petition’s page.
“On behalf of the Green Bay Packers fans across the world, we would like action taken to prohibit them from giving their constant negative input about our team. We are sick of the biased announcing always coming from them.”
On Thursday morning, Aikman broached the topic in an interview with The Musers on The Ticket (96.7 FM/1030 AM), saying “there’s a long line they’ve got to get in to try to keep us from calling games.”
He noted that the Packers have tried this before, as well as Seattle fans a few years back.
“I don’t know if there’s Cowboys fan petitions, but I get it from Cowboys fans too, saying that I’m against their team,” Aikman said.
In taking the criticism, Aikman said he relies on advice he heard from another man who spent quite a bit of time in the NFL booth.
“I remember what Pat Summerall years ago told me back when I was still playing,” Aikman said. “People didn’t have social media, they would write fan mail. And he said, ‘Hey as long as I’m getting fan mail — hate mail I guess you could say — from both sides, then I feel like I’m doing my job. But I think there’s some truth in that.’”
Many of the petition’s signees claim that the announcing duo are “too negative.” Other signees show off their failure to grasp basic grammar by calling them “bias” when the proper adjective is “biased.”
Aikman said he’s a bit confused by that suggestion.
“It is pretty remarkable, though, especially for Packers fans,” he told The Ticket. “We’ve had their games in recent weeks and they’ve played great, we’ve talked about how great they’ve been playing and how great Aaron Rodgers has been. So it’s a little bit confusing, but it is what it is.”
“I could not care less about that. I know Joe, he does get a little bit bothered by it. He’s a little sensitive when he hears that people don’t want us to broadcast their games.”
There is no requirement for action to be taken based on Change.org petitions, especially not for a private company like Fox. But it has become a popular venue for airing grievances online and seeking out others who agree with you.
“Last I’ve heard, we will be there on Sunday, and we’ll be calling the game and we’ll try to do the best job we can,” Aikman said.
Buck and Aikman, or at least one of them, have done a lot of Packers games, including …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiDlZG_ptEk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Uqm9Gnd_FM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXq8C5sbRzU
Buck and Aikman called the Packers’ last five games of the 2010 season, including Super Bowl XLV. They’ve also done the Packers’ home playoff loss to Minnesota, the Packers’ home playoff losses to the Giants, the Packers’ overtime playoff loss to Seattle, and the infamous 4th-and-26 game, among others. This is more likely the result of Packer fans not wanting to hear bad news, which could be anything complimentary of the opponent.
Richard Ryman tries to explain:
People have theories on why Buck and Aikman are so despised, or just Buck and not Aikman, or just Aikman and not Buck. (Or Cris Collinsworth, but let’s not go there). Most petition signers offer little in the way of specifics, and many seem to type the wrong first letter when spelling Buck.
Some, while specific, were “heads I win, tails you lose” head-scratchers. One signer said, “Joe Buck never played a down of football and thinks he’s an expert … and Troy is just another ex jock that tries to sound important.”
But there were some thoughtful signers.
Marcia Van Gorden, a grandmother and Packers fan living in Minneapolis, gave an appropriately measured (i.e. grandmotherly) appraisal.
“Maybe I’m being sensitive, but it seems that in comparison to most other announcers, these two don’t seem to provide equitable focus on both teams. That’s in terms of the tone and what’s verbally expressed. An announcer may have played for a particular team, but when it comes to his or her announcing job, that needs to be set aside,” she said.
Don Tremby of Racine knows why “those two guys are lousy. (Last) Sunday’s game, I could tell specifically there was action going on and these guys were up there in the booth chattering about everything they were interested in instead of what was going on in this game. (Aikman) should be put in the bathroom and lock the doors.”
Gussert traces it to when they started doing games and Aikman was, he thinks, more negative.
“When there was a discretionary play-call by the coach or a referee’s call, he would always side against the Packers,” he said. “I would suspect someone (at the network) talked to him about it.”
The hatred is not universal.
“Some Packer fans seem to have a problem with Troy Aikman, but I am not sure why,” said Gary Getzin of Wausau. “Maybe it goes back to the Cowboys in the ’90s, when they beat Green Bay most of the time. Aikman’s analysis as a former quarterback is usually pretty interesting to me. Joe Buck seems to be on top of things and meshes well with him.”
Matthew Faulkner, a Packers fan in Milford, Del., agreed, preferring them to the other No. 1 network announcing teams.
“You know it’s a big game when they are calling it. As an analyst, I appreciate Aikman’s knowledge and experience — you always learn something whether it be about a particular play or scheme,” he said. “You won’t find a better play-by-play man than Buck in my opinion.”
In baseball, the only thing Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians fans could agree on was that Buck liked the other team better. And there’s this tweet from @LionsMemes: “Can Joe Buck shut up about the Packers winning the NFC North, or can’t he resist because he loves them so much?”
Granted, it was on a page called “Shut up Joe Buck,” which guaranteed, shall we say, a certain kind of response.
At least one Dallas fan signed the petition to have Buck and (gasp) Aikman taken off this week’s broadcast because they are biased (gasp, gasp) against the Cowboys.
Such profound hatred requires a professional appraisal. We offer two.
Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television & Popular Culture at Syracuse University, suggested that if fans watched the game alone, they might come away with a different impression. When people are watching the game in groups, they tend to cheer and holler and engage with one another when their team does well, but pay more attention to announcers when things aren’t going their way. As a result, they only hear the bad things about their team, or the good things about the other team, which is much the same thing.
“If they are doing their job, they are for the most part trying to be basically, usually objective,” he said. “Which means half of what they say is going to be objected to by the supporters of either team.”
Buck addressed being reviled by fans of just about every team when he talked to StewPod on Yahoo Sports and in an Esquire interview, both in October before the World Series.
“It’s kind of the world I live in,” he said on the podcast. “Baseball fans in particular are used to hearing their hometown guys and the team announcers go all summer, and then we show up. The deck is kind of stacked against you. I have to play it down the middle.”
Aikman defended himself Thursday to the Dallas Morning News. “I’m surprised they only came up with 25,000,” he joked about the petition’s signatures goal, before claiming the same level of disinterested interest in the game versus the teams.
“If you objectively and rationally look at the job these two do, each one has their own issues,” Thompson said. “Aikman comes not totally prepared, but when it comes to strictly football, he’s good. There might be some people that Joe Buck just rubs the wrong way. That seems to attach itself to Joe Buck.”
And let’s face it, we’re in an age when social media has an out-of-proportion effect. In other words, when people are of a mind to complain, they like to find other liked-minded complainers to commiserate with. Hello Twitter. Howdy Facebook.
“You can have these conversations turn into a critical mass within hours,” Thompson said.
Ryan Martin, psychology chair at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, specializes in studying anger and what to do about it. He said all that social media sharing probably is not healthy.
“That kind of venting usually gets people more worked up than it does help,” Martin said. “The more you invest personally in the outcome of a game, and the more you build your life up around it, the more angry you’re going to get when things don’t go your way.”
Martin, by the way, grew up a Vikings fan, and was convinced Buck loved the Packers.
USA Today ranked the top NFL announcers one year ago, and came up with …
4. JOE BUCK, FOX …
Disclosure, coming up with No. 1 and No. 2 and No. 9 and No. 10 were simple. Filling in the rest was next-to-impossible. Get me on a different day and maybe Buck is No. 3. Heck, maybe even Tirico is No. 2. The next guy on our list could be up there too. But today, we get Buck at No. 4, which feels about right. He got a lot of flak early in his NFL career for being too lifeless on the call — his lack of enthusiasm on the David Tyree catch became infamous — and over-talkative. He’s improved greatly at both. Here’s what he told FTW about his football strategy earlier this year:If you’re well-read and you know what the storylines are, I think you can bounce around. You set up the play, you set up the players doing the play, then you get out of the way. This is TV. People are seeing the handoff to Rashad Jennings. Then you pick it up on the backside. Who made the tackle or who made the catch? Football is a more cut and dry.
It sounded like he didn’t have that mentality early on. Now he’s on top of calls, he always gets down-and-distance right, knows when to yell and knows when to flip on the cough button. (If it seems like I’m harping on those last three, it’s because it’s all anyone should ever look for in a football announcer.) …
8. TROY AIKMAN, FOX …
Here’s where we start our next level of announcers, fascinatingly the color men for three of the four broadcast network — two ex-quarterbacks and one ex-coach. Why is Aikman eighth instead of lower? Because he’s the easiest to ignore. The next insight Aikman gives to a game will be one of the first. He’s content to let the replay dictate what he says and where he goes with it. But Aikman is inoffensive enough that he rarely detracts from a game, except when he’s wishy-washy on replays (take a drink every time Troy says, “well, Joe, I’m not sure” and you’ll be on the floor by halftime). The worst you can say about Aikman is that he’s a non-factor.
Gene Mueller, who works for the Packers’ flagship radio station, commits an act possibly against his own professional interests:
Green Bay football fans are touted as among the best in the game: endlessly loyal, savvy and smart. …
Why is it then, that this gaggle that bleeds green and gold, that pays hundreds of dollars so they can frame a worthless piece of paper in a man-cave (I’m one of ’em), that can recite the name of every coach back to the founder by heart have its collective undies in a bundle about … television announcers?
Joe Buck and Troy Aikman are working a lot of Packers games these days on Fox–that’s what happens when your team is really good. The network assigns you their top crew. Yet some in Titletown have worked themselves in a froth about the two, claiming they’re biased against Green Bay. One chucklehead is going so far as to launch a petition drive to have them yanked from Packers telecasts.
Puh-leez.
We seem to slog through these same smelly waters each year around this time as Green Bay is advancing in the postseason. It was just two years ago this month that Buck took to the pages of the Journal/Sentinel to affirm his respect for franchise. Buck told columnist Gary D’Amato the origin may be the guilt-by-association that comes with being alongside former Cowboy Troy Aikman, renowned 1990’s Packers-slayer. Three times, Green Bay went to Dallas in the Jimmy Johnson era to fluff it’s playoff progress. Three times, Aikman and crew sent them home for the winter. “it’s just the nature of the business,” Aikman told D’Amato. “It’s part of the job. … they want you to be biased toward their team.” Buck’s dad, Jack, worked the Ice Bowl for CBS so the offspring’s Green Bay chops run deep. “In the NFL there’s Green Bay and then there’s everywhere else,” he told J/S. “It’s just rare. It’s an honor to be there.”
We live in a time of “fake news”, of people believing what they want to believe and reading only that which supports their suppositions, facts be damned. Truth is, Aikman and Buck have no anti-Packers bias, and the haters have yet to present the smoking gun that proves a slant. None. There’s nothing in it for the duo to take a side, to pick a fight, to emit even the slightest bit of a bias. They’re in the league up to their elbows every week, needing to talk to coaches, players and front-office types. If anything, the networks–not just Fox–are too quick to anoint the next super-star, to make irrational comparisons between a hot rookie four games into a pro career and a legend with his retired number on a stadium wall. Or, to ask the hard questions about a sport that is having a hard time dealing with players who end up on police blotters or who die way too young from the hits they’ve absorbed over a career.
Are Aikman and Buck critical of Green Bay when the Packers are playing poorly? Certainly. That’s their job. Fun fact: we here at Radio City get accused occasionally of being too soft on the Packers in tough times, the thought being that the front office keeps an editorial boot on our collective necks since we’re “The Flagship Station”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Listen to Wayne Larrivee and Larry McCarren, who call it like it is no matter what. And, having worked the network pre-game for a season, I can honestly say that NO ONE in local programming or in the Packers front office EVER told me what to say. The only edict: always refer to the team in the plural, as in “Packers”. Thus, in the team’s eyes, you aren’t a “Packer fan”. You’re a “Green Bay Packers fan.”
Does anyone question the loyalty–or the pigskin acumen–of the local fan base that booed the Packers offense and Aaron Rodgers during the regular season loss to the Cowboys back in October? Or the legion of sports talk radio listeners/self-appointed GM’s who wanted everyone fired and Green Bay’s city charter revoked amid the four game slide that left the Packers 4-6? What then of those loyal season ticket holders took a pass on playoff tickets when the offer to buy came around at the height of the slide? Enough to give thousands who’d never get inside Lambeau a chance to buy in for Sunday’s win over the Giants, thank you very much. How about the folks who’ve owned seats since Lisle Blackbourn yet eagerly sell their tickets at huge profits, handing someone swaddled in purple and gold a prime spot at the Lambeau 50 yard line?
You can’t spell “fanatic” without “fan”. Our love knows no boundaries, and a lot of us think we always know more than the executives/coaches/players who’ve worked the sport all of their lives. We pay for our seat, buy our schwag, invest our emotions and think that gives us the right to spout off. Fine. These traits aren’t unique to Packers fans.
What IS ours, and ours alone, is the respect the rest of NFL fandom seems to have for us: the way we honor our past, embrace our present, anticipate our future. While other franchises can’t sell all of their seats Green Bay’s season ticket waiting list stretches from DePere to Waldo–single spaced, I might add. Other cities think we’re smarter than the average NFL bear, loyal to the end and wise to the ways of the oddly-shaped ball.
So why would some of us diminish our cred with such a ridiculous, petty, baseless fight? A good fan should be more concerned with Jordy’s ribs, the sporadic run game, the banged-up secondary and the need to stop a Dallas ground attack that shredded the Pack’s defense that first time around.
THAT’S what a solid, head-in-the-game Packers fan is thinking about as Sunday approaches, not the men who’ll be describing the game for a national TV audience, two guys who are convicted of nothing but trying to do an occasionally glamorous job rendered thankless by a few who hear what they want to hear while disregarding the rest.
You’re smarter than that, Packers fans. And the Rhodes Scholars among us will turn down the TV volume and let Wayne and Larry describe what we hope is another Green Bay win Sunday night.
The other option — which won’t happen before Sunday and probably won’t happen at all — is for the networks to use available technology to allow fans of each participating team their own announcer in the much-lower-tech 1960s. (And as CBS and Turner have done in three broadcasts of the NCAA Final Four, the second two featuring announcers for each team.) If you want Packer-oriented announcers, Fox would have to hire Kevin Harlan from CBS and Jon Gruden from ESPN. (Gruden was a Packer assistant before he was Tampa Bay’s coach, but Fox can use its John Lynch for Bucs games.)
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A figure of Madison media history died last week:
Richard E. “Dick” Flanigan, age 81, passed away on Thursday, Jan. 5, 2017, following a short illness. …
His first job after college was working for WTVO in Rockford, Ill. This is where he met his future wife, Valerie Vinet. They were married a year later, in 1968. The newlyweds made Madison their home and Dick began working at WMTV where he served as the art director. During his career, he hosted Lenny’s Inferno as Mr. Mephisto from 1969-1982.
If you are old enough and you grew up in Madison, you may have watched …
Isthmus interviewed Flanigan several years ago:
Mr. Mephisto. If you are at least 30 years old and lived in Madison between 1966 and 1982, this name is familiar to you — especially if you were a horror-movie buff, insomniac or impressionable boy during those years. Mephisto was the host of Ferdie’s Inferno and, later, Lenny’s Inferno, during its run late Fridays on WMTV.
Indeed. The festival’s focus on frightening independent films synchs well with the inventive low-budget approach taken by the Inferno and the entire phenomenon of late-night horror shows on television. “The whole idea behind doing the Inferno the way we did it was, it was fun,” Flanigan explains. “If it wasn’t fun I don’t think we would have lasted as long as we did.”
Born and raised in Rockford, Illinois, Flanigan came to Madison in 1967 when WMTV hired him as its art director. This was, he says, “like dying and going to heaven.” Ferdie’s Inferno had already been on the air for a couple of years by then, with program manager Jack Crowley as Mephisto. Sponsored by American TV, the show broadcast classic horror movies, vintage episodes of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits and other frightening fare. Mephisto presided over commercial breaks. Flanigan remembers Crowley as “crazy” but also “a good man.” When he left the station, promotions manager Carl Ames succeeded him in the role of Mephisto. “One of the best on-air talents I ever saw,” Flanigan says of Ames, “and one of the best writers.” When Ames left WMTV circa 1969, Flanigan inherited Mephisto duties. It was, he recalls, “the path of least resistance.”
By then, Ferd Mattioli’s health was in decline, and his brother, Lenny, had come up from Chicago to run American TV. The company sponsored the show through 1982, at which point it went of the air here.
“It was almost all improv,” Flanigan says of the format. “We didn’t have any budget. Which was OK, fine, I understand the business end of it. So I tried to create the format where we had the most flexibility and I could surround myself with people who were more talented than I was. People who were very good at what they do, and they’re crazy.”
A glimpse of this can be seen in a montage of still photos from the show.
Among the most significant of these characters was John Sveum, who filled the role of the voice in the box that sat on Mephisto’s desk. …
“I brought John Sveum in from the beginning and created this idea of just a voice in the box,” Flanigan recalls. “What that did was there’s nothing you can’t do with a box that has a voice, and there’s always the mystery of just exactly is in there.” The interplay between Mephisto and the voice in the box was among the Inferno‘s most memorable dynamics. The voice in the box also freed Sveum up to fill other roles. “Things just happened,” remembers Flanigan, who calls Sveum “really gifted” in his ability to take on different characters who appeared on the show. …
Over the years, Flanigan has learned there are countless people in his sons’ generation who grew up with the show, who stayed up past their bedtimes to watch, and are now adults.
It was a great ride, he allows. “When you have to supply content for 12 years, you go through the gamut,” he observes. “We had serials, we had half-hour shows, hour shows, we had Twilight Zone, we had Outer Limits. I turned thumbs down on Doctor Who. That was the biggest mistake I ever made.”
Maybe so, but this was offset by all the good decisions he made. None were better than lobbying the station and his sponsor for the Universal horror package that included the original Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Wolf Man, Dracula and other vintage classics. These were the movies Flanigan himself had grown up on.
“I remember being in a movie theater and seeing the coming attraction for Frankenstein,” he says. “It was being re-run. I was born in ’35, and this thing was being brought back. In those days, they used to do that, wait seven, eight years and bring it back. And I’d never heard of it. And I’m sitting in the theater and I’m looking at this and it scared the hell out of me. It really did.”
The original King Kong was another classic that scared him. But one of the most effective horror movies of all, he says, was the original Thing from Another World. “I took a stopwatch,” he remembers, “and in an 87-minute movie, that Thing was onscreen for less than three minutes, and yet they created this atmosphere and this tense buildup to confrontation using one of the oldest ploys in the world, a small group of people banded together where they can’t get help, menaced by an overpowering force.
“I remember the first time I saw The Thing,” he continues. “I was a freshman or sophomore in high school, and I went alone in the middle of winter. And I had to walk from a bus stop on an unlit street to get home, and it was edgy, it really was. That movie really got to me. But then you see it again and you like it just as much the second time.”
Growing up on the old classics impressed upon him that the best movies start with good writing. A good director and good cast are also essential to a good movie, in his view. All the CGI in the world can’t make up for any one of those three factors, he contends.
Describing himself as a cinephile with eclectic tastes, he says he is impatient with most contemporary slasher flicks that substitute gore and other fright-for-fright’s-sake conventions instead of a compelling narrative arc. “You can’t kill Mike Myers,” he observes, “so why try? It’s boring. Put the costume on ’em and the story is lousy and there’s no direction, the movie isn’t gonna go anywhere. It’s inept.”
He also tends to dismiss spinoffs, sequels and remakes as inadvisable, with little chance of equaling or surpassing the original movie, though he cites the latest Indiana Jones release as an exception to this rule. He is an admirer of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, as well as Hitchcock. …
He pauses, calling to mind an anecdote from his Inferno days. “Boy, I sure wish I had this Inferno. We did an Inferno with Kentucky Fried Theater when they were just starting out. They came out and they just wanted to be on the show. There were a couple things they did that were hilarious. One of them, he was real thin and he took his shirt off and we had a turntable in the studio big enough for a car, because they used to do car commercials and they’d rotate them on this turntable. Well he went out on that turntable and he did a mime of a piece of bacon frying. And it was hilarious to watch the convolutions he went through, but I said we can add to that, because we had a kitchen set there, so I told our studio manager to start one of the stovetops and put a metal frying pan on that and as he’s doing this pour some water on it and hang a mic over it and it sounded just like bacon frying when that water hit that hot pan. And he could hear it and he’d react to that and it was hilarious.”
That was one of the shows that went unrecorded for the archives. “Who knew?” Flanigan asks. Every week was like that. You never knew what might happen. “We’d get ahold of something that Lenny would give us to destroy because Lenny loved that stuff and we enjoyed doing it. He loved watching pickaxes go through TV sets.” Characters on the show would tear apart various stereo components, set fire to a turntable and cook eggs on them, brandish a big hocking knife, throw things at Mephisto.
Mephisto was an easy target. His face was white. Everything else was black: hair, soul patch, hat, cape. And there was that Mephisto snarl. “The thing about Mephisto that I always thought made people like him was that he treated everybody as if I am god, this is my domain, what I say goes, which was exactly wrong, because he wasn’t,” Flanigan observes. “There are people who throw pies and people that get hit. Mephisto never threw a pie. But he never once thought he wasn’t the boss. And of course he was a doormat. You can’t help but kind of like him. He’s the biggest idiot you ever met in your life and they just abuse him, but he just kind of swings with it.”
“The Inferno” was one of the last late-night shows that TV stations used to carry, in the days before late-night network TV after “The Tonight Show.” That lasted longer than the related trend of TV stations producing their own kids’ shows, such as WISC-TV’s “Circus 3,” or TV stations’ carrying old movies on weekend afternoons and weeknights. All have been replaced by more news programming, more network programming (sports on weekends), syndicated programming and infomercials.
Milwaukee and Green Bay TV stations had their own versions.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 