Obviously, we must save the newspaper industry. There’s no free and robust public debate without reporting, and there’s no reporting without pulping trees, printing stories on them and driving those broadsheets around the country. Websites are no substitute. Okay—they’re a substitute in that they’re putting print news out of business, but that doesn’t mean we could get the same journalism without physical distribution. It’s called the newspaper, not the news writers, and for that reason the paper itself must survive. That’s why the Great Falls Tribune has reorganized its newsroom and laid off John S. Adams, the best political reporter in Montana. It’s also why Gannett—owner of the Tribune and the Newsquest family of papers in the UK—has a new plan to charge journalism students to write for its publications.
Category Archives: Contemporary Media
Tim Kreider on the specious danger of Western art
Ben al-Fowlkes sent me this excellent essay by Tim Kreider, in which the former political cartoonist notes how much more dangerous art seems to be for Islamists and North Koreans than it is for anyone in the West. That’s good: most of the reason we’re not afraid of art is that our civil society is stable and well-developed, and we’re confident enough in our ideologies that we don’t have to silence anyone who suggests they’re flawed. But part of it, as Kreider points out, is that contemporary Western culture has made art frivolous and anodyne:
“In the mature democracies of the West, there’s no longer any need for purges or fatwas or book-burnings. Why waste bullets shooting artists when you can just not pay them? Why bother banning books when nobody reads anyway, and the national literature is so provincial, insular and narcissistic it poses no troublesome questions?”
Kreider is good at the relieved lament, and he finds in the international outrage at the Charlie Hebdo attacks “a small, irrational twinge of guilt that we’re not doing anything worth shooting us over.”
Missoulian blurs line between advertisement and news, again
The Thomas Meaghar Bar is as lively as its namesake, says the headline of this news item in the Missoulian about a new bar downtown. Its namesake died 150 years ago, but whatever. The important thing is that it’s lively—or it will be, once people start coming. “I don’t think everybody knows that we’re completely open,” manager Cory Champney says. He is the only source in this 800-word article about a local business, which makes it less a news story and more an advertorial.
Hey, what’s contemporary racism look like?
Ended slavery, repealed Jim Crow laws, desegregated public schools and drinking fountains—this country has done so much for black people! Yes, You’re Racist brought us this tweet, which in addition to embarrassing some poor woman who can’t think, neatly captures what 21st-century racism looks like. Okay, the two high-profile cases of cops who killed unarmed black men and suffered absolutely no consequences captured what contemporary racism looks like. But this tweet reflects the silent majority that sustains such behavior.
In The Revolt of the Masses, José Ortega y Gasset remarked that for most people, modernity is the condition of using a bunch of technology that you cannot make yourself and consider a natural feature of the world. A liberal reading of his work suggests that social developments—like, say, reduced expression of institutionalized racism against black people—might be considered technology, too. That certainly seems to be the case for Chelsea A. Carlen, who takes as given the prevailing modern attitude that we shouldn’t discriminate against black people and ignores the historical abuses that made that attitude necessary.
She sees scholarships for black kids to go to Harvard, in other words, and ignores the history that starts with slavery and moves through racist admissions policies to get us there. Black people should be grateful that we’re killing them in the streets less than we used to. It’s an understandable perspective, albeit extraordinarily ignorant.
I bet Chelsea Carlen doesn’t even hate black people. She just regards them as a monolithic, protected class that hates America. We’ve done so much to treat you slightly less badly, and this is how you repay us? By freaking out just because cops can still murder you? How long do we have to let you vote and not sell you as chattel before you get over it?
After Ferguson, man frames ex-girlfriend for racism
For the last week or so, one of my favorite Twitter feeds has been Yes, You’re Racist, which retweets racist posts about Ferguson. It’s awesome for several reasons, one of which is the irony of people who want to use a global platform to disseminate their views freaking out when people across the globe read their views. That’s good fun. I’m mostly a believer in shame as an enforcement tool, but it’s important to remember that not everyone on the internet is speaking with her own voice. Consider Brianna Rivera, who became the object of a campaign to get her fired from her job after her ex-boyfriend spoofed her Facebook account to post racist status updates. Props to Willy for the link. Today is December 2, 2014, and you can frame people for racism now.





