Raging Cynic

I’m sure all of us state-side have been thoroughly inundated with those messages about the switch from analog to all-digital television. I’ve been seeing these spots for months without giving them much thought. Seems just like government televised spam to me. I’m sure it’d cost less to do a mass mailing, but we’re talking TV here, not something as un-important as, say, ballot measures and polling places. I digress. After enough of those spots I finally started to think about graft. Let’s face it, it takes a lot to get those government gears turning.

Finally a thought came to me. People can get discounts for their digital converter boxes, but how about the smaller stations that still have to try to reach their customers? Lower-power stations don’t have to switch to digital transmissions. Less viewers means less revenue for them.

And the viewers in remote areas who were relying on these smaller stations, who tailored their news for smaller, more localized group (almost like the bloggers of broadcast TV), what will they have? Won’t they be more likley to swtich to the shinier digital stations? Stations that can be tuned in with that digital box without having to fool with more buttons and settings? Even less revenue for those smaller stations.

Media consolidation! That’s what it boild down to. Running smaller stations that already can’t afford the switch will be pinched harder and harder with less viewers and ad revenue.

Here’s a fine example from the Charlston Gazette [ link] where WSAZ had to fire eight people to afford the $4 million equipment upgrade. How many stations throughout the US are going to be shaken down or left on the curb?

Oh, and in a humourous note, the city of Wilmington, N.C., was used as a proving ground, switchign to digital last week, months ahead of the nation’s Feburary switch. What’d they to? Flipped a giant switch. Adorable.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m pleased as punch that Hillary finially came to her senses and dropped out. Better for all of us, I’m sure she sees that. And, though I don’t know how much good a Catholic VP will be for building Obama’s support base and I don’t know much about the guy, I didn’t know much about Gore before he came up either.

What’s bothering me though is the several very redundent emails per day that I’m getting from the various Democratic groups I’m affiliated with. And it’s the same stuff. They’re just recycling the same material three, four, or five times a day. Crying out loud peope, organize your selves! These are different groups for a reason, they should be serving their different demographics with different information. If there’s information on other lists, include it as links, blurbs.

Is it that they’re just too lazy to do that? Don’t have the expertiese? Or just lacking the organization? Maybe it’s that comic rule of threes blown out of proportion; they think that if they repeate the information over and over, people are more likely to read it? All gets ignored by me. One compiled newsletter would work so much better.

And I get even more pissed of at NBC. Part of their exclusive US rights package for the Olympics is that viewers in the good ol’ “Land of the Free” cannot access streaming web feeds.

Is it too much to ask that I’d want to watch the Woman’s Beach Volleyball finals LIVE?

Heaven forbid that I should be able to get some information or current events from the internet. I can get watch one-legged coke-whores crapping on masochistic midgets live, but live - REALLY live, not that NBC 3 hour delay joke of a live broadcast! - Olympic coverage is censored.

I’ll hope to have another post soon with a way around this….probably involving a Chinese proxy. Love the irony.

What the hell is NBC doing?

Would you like and example on how things go wrong when you spend too much money on graphic effects and not enough on talent? Bob Costas and his parade of offensive, overly opinionated, and overly obnoxious chorus of “Sportscasters.” Now, I usually tune out who’s saying what due to my preference to avoid such annoying and inane prater, but this Olympic cycle just seems to scream cultural ignorance and racial bias far more often than I’m used to.

Now this might be due in large part to the clearly dated attitudes that Béla Károly repeatedly expresses through condescending comments about the Chinese gymnasts. Maybe it’s the way that Mary Carillo comments on everything but tennis. Maybe it’s that no one on the NBC team has realized that they couldn’t pronounce an non-European name to save their lives and takes no steps to correct this (and why shold they, it’s not like they had any notice that the Olympics would be in Beijing or could possibly think that a person with an Asian name might be qualifying or earning  a spot that puts them in competition with a European nation).

Is there any doubt that the controversy over the tie between He Kexin and Nastia Liukin wouldn’t have been heard if it was Liukin who took the gold? And how about the commentator referring to one of the Chinese gymnasts as a “little firecracker?”

How much time do we have to spend listening to the inane opinion breaking through an otherwise entertaining international contest? How hard would it be for NBC to get some people who know enough to not be so annoying and a bit more objective? Is this NBC’s final admission of not giving a damn?

How bad is it in the international context? I’ve got a friend in China now (yea, the same China that’s repeadly accused of journalistic hyper-control) who were shocked that such blatantly narcissistic, nationalistic opining is part-and-parcel of our Olympic broadcasts.

Then there’s the issue of their liberal use of the word “LIVE.” Their broadcasts are delayed by at hours. I can see the results of an event before the start hits the airwaves. They even keep that “LIVE” tag up during the slow motion replays. Do they hope to be so obvious about this that they assume we know they’re lying? It’s not like a few minute delay to do some post processing, it’s a few hours we’re talking about? If they can’t do it live, don’t say it’s live, is that so hard?

Here’s the true shame that all of this brings to light: print journalism is going out of business but operations like NBC keep running on nothing more than bidding for exclusive coverage and shiny graphics while they let standards of integrity and tallent slip farther and farther from the line of actual journalism. But then, of course, it’s been a long and steady transition from news to entertainment.

Eh, why am I even surprised anymore?

It’s nice when we can keep getting others to do our dirty work, isn’t it? BET founder Bob Johnson (also a strong Clinton supporter), has recently made comments that Obama wouldn’t be worth noticing if he were White. Apparently, the first female candidate for the Presidency is not worth remarking on (otherwise we’d be sexist) but Obama’s half-black background is fair game in the battlefield of politics-by-proxy.

After firing Geraldine Ferraro for making racist comments about the sucess of Barack Obama’s campaign, Hillary, once again, has pawns lined up to spread animosity and take flack on her behalf. Fantastic.

Why doesn’t she accept that the debate now (or, at least, the debate following McCain’s appearance on Hardball) is all seen in an McCain vs. Obama  paradigm? She’s already being phased out. It’s somewhere between sad and short-sighted that Hillary is unable to realize her own 3rd place standing here.

Her desperation can only be explained in one way: She’s got debts owed.  Politics, and political favors, don’t come cheap.

While I have met a good number of people who are tremendously well versed on a variety of subjects, I cannot say I’ve yet had the pleasure of meeting one able to demonstrate an understanding (and do keep in mind the difference between understanding something and knowing bland facts about it) everything. It is a fact I accept as part of the natural order of things that some know more about one thing than others and, as such, must sacrifice the small details of an phenomenon so keep the larger picture within focus; delving into atomic spin orbitals isn’t really necessary when explaining how a microwave works.  It becomes expected that experts know enough about something to boggle our minds with details (after all, that’s why they’re experts) and, for the sake of not loosing an audience, leaves out details which would be either lost or distracting to the lay person.  But at what point does this simplification become oversimplification? More disturbing, how far will we let someone broad stroke an issue before it’s evident that they’re skipping important parts, parts that shouldn’t be skipped, for a better selling story?

These thoughts came to mind during an interview I caught on Berkeley’s KPFA Flashpoints program. They broadcast an interview with journalist Robert Fisk earlier this evening (Jan 29th) in which Fisk, as befitting his great familiarity with the Middle East went into good detail on some of the more shadowy details of the current US led occupation of Iraq (beyond my own knowledge without question). There was a bit more. Something in his voice that was familiar to me through the time I’ve spent living overseas as an expat. Something in the same tone as the sentence I just wrote. There’s a tone of “I know more than you possibly can because I’ve been there.”

Is there credit to this notion? Some, surely. There’s something about living in a place that goes beyond merely studying it. It goes back to the distinction between knowing a place in the academic sense and understanding it in a way that’s somehow more. But there’s a danger to this. In the same way one with a financial stake in, say, the automotive industry may not be the most objective reporting on failing auto safety, one with an emotional stake in a country or region may, consciously or not, tend to overlook it’s shortcomings in a way that creates the same one-sided world view he would criticize from someone who’s never been there.

It’s a balancing act, you see, to allow yourself to experience enough of a place to understand it better without letting yourself get carried away with the prevailing ideas of a place.

While embedded journalists and experts are without a doubt invaluable to our understanding of the world, we should all keep in mind that thin line between reporting and supporting and how easy it can be to drift over.