Coming on the heels of his braining of the GOP over its refusal to accept the "no-brainer" budget deal offered to them by President Barack Obama, New York Times columnist David Brooks struck again today with a column that continues his line of accusation that today's Republican Party is not a serious governing party.
Some choice bits:
[Grover] Norquist is the Zelig of Republican catastrophe. His method is always the same. He enforces rigid ultimatums that make governance, or even thinking, impossible. ...
Republicans now have a group of political celebrities who are marvelously uninterested in actually producing results. Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann produce tweets, not laws. ...
All of these groups [components of the GOP] share the same mentality. They do not see politics as the art of the possible. They do not believe in seizing opportunities to make steady, messy progress toward conservative goals. They believe that politics is a cataclysmic struggle. They believe that if they can remain pure in their faith then someday their party will win a total and permanent victory over its foes. They believe they are Gods of the New Dawn.
Mind you, Brooks has not become a liberal. He is an honest conservative writing this, and as such, deserves a hearing.
[B]oth the New Left and the Tea Party movement are radically anticonservative. Conservatism is built on the idea of original sin — on the assumption of human fallibility and uncertainty. To remedy our fallen condition, conservatives believe in civilization — in social structures, permanent institutions and just authorities, which embody the accumulated wisdom of the ages and structure individual longings.
That idea was rejected in the 1960s by people who put their faith in unrestrained passion and zealotry. The New Left then, like the Tea Partiers now, had a legitimate point about the failure of the ruling class. But they ruined it through their own imprudence, self-righteousness and naïve radicalism. The Tea Partiers will not take over the G.O.P., but it seems as though the ’60s political style will always be with us — first on the left, now the right.
Thank you, Mr. Brooks. I've longed for someone to make clear the distinction between real conservatism and the destructive radical version we have masquerading as conservatism today.
The New York Times published a profile of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner titled (and I'm sure the editors are still patting themselves on the back for this) "The Loin in Winter: Hefner Reflects and Grins." It's well worth a read (and Hefner tweeted positively about it).
Still, one thing kept coming back to me. The article's overwhelming focus is on sex and gossip. Only at the end of the article do we get a sense that Hefner himself thinks that there are other aspects of his life -- I'd suggest his pioneering role in supporting gay rights or in confronting racism -- are being overshadowed by a focus on sex.
After all (as perhaps only a gay blogger can still write), Hefner's legacy was not to make sex the be-all and end-all of life or even of Playboy. What he has indicated is that sex is a part of life, is healthy, and shouldn't be excluded it.
He notes at the end of the Times article, "“We just literally live in a very different world and I played a part in making it that way,” he said. “Young people have no idea about that.”
Chalk up another example of media being too ill-informed to tell the story that they should be telling.
Doesn't anyone have consumer education classes in school anymore? Did those die out in the last right-wing attack on education? I'm assuming most high schoolers are no longer learning about how products are marketed toward them, or how articles are written, or how television programs are designed to influence them -- because people are getting very overworked about things that should not surprise them one bit.
The New York Times recently reported on the shocked-yes-shocked reactions of people to the amount of photo retouching that goes on in fashion magazines. The article refers to some egregious examples of cover models who have been Photoshopped to hell and back in attempts to make them look thinner. (Notice how they never Photoshop them to make them look smarter? Now that would be a nice touch. Er, retouch.) But most of the slant of the Times piece seems to be that showing more "real" women, untouched by a redesigner's effort, will enhance women's self-esteem and body-image. Phil Poynter, a photographer and/or designer (hard to tell from the Times' description of his work), said that “the big discussion in the fashion business has always been about should we retouch girls, should we create a portrait of a girl that is not achievable by a real girl.”
Two things:
1) Yep, the fashion (and show-business) magazines present an unrealistic image of women and girls. They do the same for men, of course, but that's usually ignored in the discussion.
2) People flock to the newsstands to buy these magazines. No one that I know of has been forced at gunpoint to purchase Vogue, Elle, or Us Weekly (though that's the only way I'd buy them). I don't write that as a libertarian whatever-the-consumer-wants-must-be-right statement. No, I mean that they could change their approach completely, but women would just start buying different magazines. People buy those magazines because they want to see the perfect, the unachievable, the unattainable, for the same reason people buy car magazines featuring expensive Porsches and Jaguars. Other people may not like that, but it's human nature and fact.
There was another flare-up of this controversy a while back about magazines altering the skin color on its cover images, making African Americans look either darker or lighter. That could, indeed, be a reprehensible practice; one would have to know the exact details of the situation to make a judgment (but when did that stop Americans from making judgments?).
But we should also make the obvious point, at least the obvious point from the perspective of practically anyone who's worked in magazines: All magazine photos are Photoshopped to some degree. Portions of them are made darker or lighter (often for reasons normal readers would never suspect, such as the need to offset the effects of the particular paper they're using or their printer's likelihood of printing darker or lighter than it should). Images are cropped to focus on a portion of the picture. Blemishes are removed, even if they're not trying to make the person look "unattainably beautiful," because if there is a prominent blemish -- a pimple, a scar, a rash, whatever -- on a person's face that is featured on a magazine cover, it doesn't look real so much as it looks like you're trying to feature the blemish. A magazine cover is not a capture of a split-second of reality; it's a framed highlight that focuses the viewer's attention on the cover image and on any noticeable feature on that image.
But then, a little consumer education would have told people how the real world works. An educated viewer/reader/consumer doesn't need to overreact when they are told that Vogue is trying to get them to buy a magazine or that Bank of America wants them to accept a credit card offer. No kidding, Sherlock.
Film industry billionaire David Geffen wants to buy The New York Times. Not a copy here or there; not subscribe so it’ll be delivered to his doorstep every morning. No, Geffen wants to buy The New York Times Company.
That may seem like an odd thing for a successful businessman to desire. With print news organizations suffering from a mix of economic crisis, the loss of their cash-cow classified advertising business, and some poor decision-making, we’ve already seen some major changes in the newspaper landscape in this country, and we can expect to see some more. The Tribune Company, owners of the Chicago Tribune and more recently (and controversially) of the Los Angeles Times, filed for bankruptcy after it was bought in a debt-laden deal by real estate billionaire Sam Zell. The San Francisco Chronicle reportedly just barely escaped being closed or sold for parts, and the Boston Globe is losing more than $80 million a year.
Huge debt overloads, depressed advertising revenue, and still largely unproven online revenue models have driven a number of papers to the brink of insolvency. Newspapers were traditionally very profitable ventures, and in turn they play crucial roles in informing, uncovering, entertaining, and occasionally provoking citizens. Is the for-profit life of papers over? Can citizens get the news and critical information they need from the new wave of journalism ventures?
One such is the brand new East Bay Citizen, a news blog created and just launched by Steven Tavares. It takes its inspiration from the idea that hyperlocal news is not covered well by the aging and money-losing giant news organizations. Tavares predicts the growth of many very localized news sources to fill in the gap.
But Times is a different animal, a local newspaper that has become a national and even international news brand. What can be done with it?
Geffen is planning to turn The New York Times into a nonprofit news organization, according to a report in Newsweek. The idea has been implemented elsewhere, such as the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, which has been run by a nonprofit for decades. Newsweek says that its sources tell it that Geffen "envisions himself as the next Nelson Poynter, the late proprietor of the St. Petersburg Times and a legend in journalistic circles for his fierce independence. The Florida newspaper ... is the widely recognized prototype of the nonprofit structure that is now generating growing interest in some quarters of an industry facing an existential crisis. Poynter, who died in 1978, willed his control to the nonprofit and highly influential Poynter Institute, viewing the mechanism as the optimal way of preserving the St. Petersburg Times' independence and local ownership. Today, under the complex ownership structure, the St. Petersburg Times operates in many respects like a for-profit newspaper."
Would it work for The New York Times? First of all, Geffen's not even assured of gaining control. He failed in a bid to buy a minority interest in the company. And The Financial Times' John Gapper urgesThe New York Times' Ochs-Sulzberger family, which controls ownership of the firm, not to sell until they've returned it to profitability. A May 16 profile in Financial Times suggests that Geffen's outlook and unlikely success just might make the Ochs-Sulzberger clan look kindly upon him.
But the effort is likely to be watched intently, including by northern Californians.
"Here in the Bay Area, a group led by investor Warren Hellman and attorney Bill Coblentz has been discussing how to preserve the Chronicle by changing its business model," Commonwealth Club President and CEO Dr. Gloria Duffy wrote in her May 2009 InSight column in The Commonwealth magazine. "Active consideration has been taking place in the philanthropic community about what donors can do to help preserve media capabilities to inform the public about important societal issues."
"I would make an appeal, to every philanthropy at all levels, and lay it all on the line," journalism legend Jim Lehrer told Duffy during an April 5, 2009, Commonwealth Club program in Lafayette. "This is important. And I would try to figure out a way to create a serious nonprofit major news-gathering organization for everybody. In other words, you would do the Walter Reed [Army Hospital] story, but you wouldn't do it just for the Washington Post -- anybody could run it." He went on to describe a news service that would be available to everybody at no cost. It would have to be constructed in a way that "it has the trust of everybody. But it would have to be serious; you'd have to be willing to break some china every once in a while. Or otherwise, forget it."
Perhaps Geffen and Lehrer will sit down together to discuss the future of news. In the meantime, you can watch the entire Lehrer-Duffy conversation here:
It may sound counterintuitive to be able to increase a magazine's circulation after it raises prices -- even in the best of times, not to mention in a deep recession. But some magazines have found that they are able to do just that, according to an article today in The New York Times.
Titles such as People and The Economist experienced increases in readers even after hiking prices. Meanwhile, I've written here before about the dirt-cheap subscription price for Esquire, which is now cheaper on a per-copy subscription rate than the original cover price of the magazine's first issue more than 75 years ago.
In the Times article, there are some ideas expressed about why raising prices works for some titles and not others. Personally, I suspect it has to do with two things: the readers' income levels (sort of a "duh" answer, but worth noting nonetheless); and whether the magazine in question is a must-buy/first-buy or a secondary title for the reader. Magazines that I read faithfully and that have wormed their way into my heart are largely price-immune to me. But other magazines, the ones I pick up at Borders when I'm just looking for another magazine to purchase, are very price-dependent.
That second point will, I think, also determine which magazines survive this hellish recession.
