To me, the majority of the spectrum of mainstream media spans from Maureen Dowd to Katie Couric. At one end is MoDo, whose addiction to trivialities, I find just painful. I have never once learned anything from her. She, and the jokesters whose lines she steals and prints, simply repeat the insipid cocktail party chatter of the Upper East Side mansions where they accidentally kick their poodles drunk. It’s fine. It’s not worthy of column inches in The New York Times, it insults my intelligence, but it’s not actually insulting.
Katie Couric is insulting. She, and the Right-Wing attack machine whose frames she steals and parrots, repeat the toxic talk radio chatter of the hate-filled fever swamps. It actually is insulting.
When Katie grills Parkinson victim Michael J. Fox for either acting like he had worse Parkinsons than he has, or purposely not taking his medication in order to exaggerate the shaking – using “some say” constructions in her questions, we know that she is speaking on behalf of Rush Limbaugh. It is insulting.
When Katie grills stage four Cancer victim Elizabeth Edwards for apparently having the temerity to fight her cancer – using “some say” questions again to paint her husband as uncaring, incapable of leadership, insane with ambition. It is insulting. Most Americans, actually, Katie, have hearts. And to think that her CBS news chair was once occupied by Edward R. Murrow. God, how insulting!
Frank Rich, one of the only reasons The New York Times deserves to still exist, earned a beer from me for this:
Would it be better if he [Edwards] instead ran the country at the same time he was clearing brush on a ranch? Polio informed rather than crippled the leadership of F.D.R.; Lincoln endured the sickness and death of a beloved 11-year-old son during the Civil War. In the wake of our congenitally insulated incumbent, who has given our troops neither proper armor nor medical care and tried to hide their coffins off camera, surely it can only be a blessing to have a president, whether Mr. Edwards or someone else, who knows intimately what it means to cope daily with the threat of mortality. It’s hard to imagine such a president smiting stem-cell research or skipping the funerals of the fallen.
Indeed, of all the reasons to applaud Elizabeth Edwards’s decision to stay in politics, the most important may be her insistence, by her very action, that we not compartmentalize the harsh reality of death and the imperatives of public policy, both at home and at war. Let the real conversation begin.
This old media is done for. The old media wherein a small clique without any accountability or adjudication of fact decides what news stories are worthy of coverage, and the terms of the debate.
It won’t be a “whoa shit, I’m extinct” evolution, the way it was in 1860 when a letter from Hiram Sibley, the president of Western Union went to Salt Lake City Utah by Pony Express. The letter was an agreement on the last relay station of the Transcontinental Telegraph. Two days later, the Pony Express ceased operations.
Instead, I imagine our moment in media evolution more like a montage of scenes from various World’s Fairs, as reported by newspaper illustrators [my Grandfather being one of the last of this tribe] and engravers.
Picture the montage:
- In the 1840s at booths all across America’s State Fairs, Daguerreotype portraiture is on display, licenses are sold, an industry springs up. Predominantly the work of itinerant practitioners who travel from town to town, people of modest means could now obtain an exact likeness of themselves or their loved ones.
On the rich side of town, their wealthy counterparts continued to commission painted portraits by fine artists, and newspaper illustrators, considering the new photographic portraits inferior in much the same way their ancestors had viewed printed books as inferior to hand-scribed books centuries earlier.
- The first photograph printed in a newspaper captioned, “A Scene in Shantytown, New York” showed crumbling buildings and piles of dirt. The image printed in 1880 by the New York Daily Graphic, was simply part of a set of various printing techniques that were demonstrated by the newspaper. Lucky for the illustrators, this “halftone” technique was too expensive and difficult to use.
- At the New Orleans World’s Fair in 1884, in a small booth overwhelmed by the focus of the fair, King Cotton, George Eastman displays “Kodak,” his company that instantly democratized the Daugerrotype taking pictures by inventing amateur photography. As always, the world’s major newspapers sent reporters and illustrators to cover this cute trick. Eastman’s signage read: “No Licensing Fees” – as free as a blog on blogspot.
- At the World’s Fair of 1890, Bremen, Germany F. E. Ives improved the halftone process technique, displaying the first transparent plastic film. Again, the pencil illustrators of the newspapers covered this quaint technical oddity not understanding the significance that the image’s backing had moved from glass to transparent paper.
It took some time before the halftone process caught on with newspapers because publishers had a large investment with illustrators and engravers. Also, editors and artists had more control over engraved images. Illustrations were much more easily faked. Unscrupulous publishers liked their news that way.
The newspapermen and the illustrators may not have grasped the importance of Ives’ advancement, but suddenly publishers all over the world did.Although the quality of the photo was not very good, this small newspaper was proud of the result: ‘Not one newspaper in Holland or abroad has yet achieved this result, nor did the Daily Graphic.’ 1890.
My Grandfather was born in the 1800s and yet worked as a newspaper pencil and ink illustrator through the 1930s. His trade didn’t end overnight like the Pony Express, but it sure ended.
Couric, Dowd, say “Hi” to Judy Miller and the Dodo for me, and I’ll see you later in hell.
