Guillotining the press
posted 12-4-2008 - 10:50 pm

 
[Editor's note: this item was written just days before the Tribune Company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection (reorganization, not liquidation; but given Mr. Zell's ineptitude, it could yet convert to the latter; one hopes for the sake of the employees and readers that it doesn't). Moreover, Conde Nast's Portfolio magazine, cited below, is now itself in a financial bind and may only survive as an online-only publication.]

So today we read about yet another round of firings — what else can you call them? Not layoffs, because those laid off are presumably rehired in time — at the Chicago Tribune. I ran across this bit of news while simultaneously looking at something else on Huffington Post and perusing my e-mail. The mail included the daily post from Gorkana.com, which lets journalists know where their colleagues have taken new positions. We use it to keep tabs on each other; but lately, it's become less a source of information than an exercise in envy and permanently diminished expectations for what David Brooks recently called "The Formerly Middle Class."

Films we love/hate:  Waiting for Hollywood to catch up to the 21st century
posted 8-12-2008 - 7:18 am

 
Last Friday, USA Today reporter Susan Wloszczyna went looking for influential women in the film business to get their take on what the future holds for women in Hollywood. Too bad some of them still have no idea about what real women want to see at the movies. Perhaps they've spent too much time with male colleagues who make juvenile films for other overgrown teenagers to realize that a female equivalent of The Pineapple Express isn't what we're looking for. And like Freud, maybe they should just ask us instead of making silly assumptions and even sillier films.

Movie producer Nancy Juvonen has made 10 films to date with partner Drew Barrymore. Juvonen is right when she says women are picky about which films they see and "want a guarantee for their time," i.e., to walk out satisfied and smiling afterwards. Women don't automatically rush out to see every new 'chick' flick – they want to know a film is worth the effort to see it at the theater. It doesn't necessarily hurt for a film to be more realistic, either. But Juvonen is dead wrong when she asserts that "Knocked Up and The Break-Up are more appealing than 'One day my prince will come.'" Bad choices there: they make a fairy tale, even a grim one, sound good.

Pitiful performance, part 2
or: What the hell were they thinking??
posted 4-20-2008 - 5:15 pm

 
So I get home very late Wednesday night, well after midnight, and I turn on the TV to review what I've taped. Included in what's on the VCR is Wednesday night's debate between the presidential candidates, hosted by ABC. I've seen loads of debates before. Given that this one wasn't hosted by PBS, I wasn't expecting much but the usual tame stuff with maybe one or two legit 'gotchas' on accidentally pertinent subjects. After all, David Brinkley and Ted Koppel are gone, and I couldn't think of anyone at ABC who'd ask much in the way of incisive questions; but you never know. Perhaps one of their Washington-based correspondents would come up with a decent question or two.

Let's just say it right up front: egregiously bad. Terminally stupid questions. Unquestionably the worst debate since presidential debates were first televised. An embarrassment to journalists everywhere. I felt personally offended and insulted by the moderators' blithering inanity.

Shows I love: Battlestar Galactica
posted 4-19-2008 - 10:04 pm

 
WELL. Only three episodes into the new season, and Battlestar Galactica has gotten even stranger than usual.

Everyone and everything seems to be unraveling in its own way. The four newly revealed human-looking Cylons, aka 'skin jobs', the relationships among the key Galactica players, and, interestingly, even the Cylons themsevles are comping apart. As convoluted as things already are, they manage to get even more complicated. Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice. This is indeed a human diaspora through the looking glass.

At the end of last season, four of the five remaining skin-job Cylons were revealed to be key Galactica players — Tigh, Tyrol, Torie, and Sam — who are in critical positions attached to other key Galactica players. They're all stunned by the realization that they're been secret Cylons all their lives and have pledged to each other to collectively keep the secret; but that's getting increasingly harder to do. Even more shocking is the return of the presumed-dead Starbuck, whose fighter plane exploded as it spiraled down into the atmosphere of a gas giant and who claims to have been to Earth. No one is more stunned than she is to learn that she's been gone for two months, not the mere hours that it appeared to her. As glad as some are to see her, they all suspect she's a Cylon — how else could she have cheated death?

Pitiful performance: The failed potty-training of public officials
or How Eliot Spitzer Became a Bimbo
posted 3-12-2008 - 4:37 pm
amended 4-19-2008 2:55 pm; see addendum below

 
I don't envy New Yorkers right now. Two of their favorite offspring have just messed themselves in public, and the entire business smells like a soiled diaper. First Eliot Spitzer, now Geraldine Ferraro. Two politicians once above reproach, and now deep in manure because of their respective impulse control problems.

Spitzer's problem, like Bill Clinton's and so many other male politicians before him, was the inability to keep his plumbing to himself and his pants zipped while he was busy rooting out fraud and corruption, with a righteousness and rough arrogance that made voters proud but won him few friends among Republicans and Democrats alike. Ferraro's was, in the heat of a tight race, the inability to resist saying something controversial and find a less inflammatory way of making her point. And because of their intemperance and bad judgment, both Democrats had to resign their positions today; in so doing, they've damaged some of their party colleagues by proxy as well, and their Republican opponents must be thrilled.

Defeating the destructive Republican agenda
posted 3-18-2008 - 7:55 pm

 
A colleague and I have been having an on-again, off-again e-mail conversation as the Democratic primary process staggers on. Mostly, it's been about the policy topics that haven't been discussed in any detail and the relative merits of the remaining candidates. But it's also been about the need to press forward the progressive agenda and, more to the point, derail the Republican agenda, which has been harmful to the average American and destructive to the long-term economic health of the nation ever since Jimmy Carter left office. We and the economy got a brief respite during the Clinton years, but the damage done since by the Bush family Know-Nothing probably wouldn't allow another such respite, even if the other Clinton got elected with a decisive majority in both houses of Congress.

The need to press forward with that progressive agenda at all costs and begin to undo the ultraconservative Republican damage seems to be temporarily lost on Senators Clinton and Obama, as is the importance of their spending much more time and effort criticizing Dubya Bush and John McCain, seeing how the latter will get a free ride for five months if Hillary and Barack dump on each other instead. Still, what seems to grab Democrats the most at the moment is the extreme polarization between Clinton partisans and apologists on one side and Obama partisans and apologists on the other. The fact that both candidates have issues they have yet to fully address appears only to have sharpened this bitterness between the two Democrats' supporters — at a time when both candidates can least afford it.

SnarkAttack debuts:  Why another blog?
posted 3-4-2008 - 4:37 pm

 
People seem to understand the need for more than one website. More than one blog, tho, may seem to some to be overdoing it. Egotism, even.

Fear not, friends. My ego doesn't require more than one blog — only my career does. PoliticalEye, a blog I began elsewhere nearly three years ago and moved to Blogspot when it seemed opportune, is a timely op-ed portfolio of sorts. A comparatively civilized venue for ideas, it's also meant to show other op-ed writers and editors what I can do. The essays and commentaries are often longer than the standard 650-750-word column allowed in most newspaper or magazine op-ed sections. Online opinion blogs get to be longer, but that print version has a pretty solid size restriction. Which is why I started my own opinion blog: to publish the longer essays I couldn't place in the op-ed pages.

Snark Attack, however, is a lot less formal. Sassier, off the cuff, more impromptu; less circumspect, perhaps, but I'd like to think just as defensible in its opinions. I belong to a few listservs, and folks on those lists noticed after a while that my list comments often seemed like blog entries. When a few of my colleagues suggested that I lift those comments wholesale and put them on my blog PoliticalEye, I hesitated at first; those sober or snippy remarks aren't quite on a par with my op-ed essays. The obvious solution (once I really thought about it — duh!) was to start a new blog.

And here it is.

I'm hoping it will be even better read than PoliticalEye and enjoyable to those who read it. I'm sure you'll let me know one way or the other, right? I look forward to those replies. Until your next visit, then. Ciao, ragazzi!