A Tradition Unlike Any Other

Kudos to Bob Costas, NBC Sports omnipresent host, for going where truly none of his high-profile, lavishly remunerated peers dare to go. On a phone interview with Dan Patrick, Costas discussed The Masters — the Holy of Holies of pro golf — and the coverage of said event, by CBS.

“What no CBS commentator has ever alluded to, even in passing, even during a rain delay, even when there was time to do so, is Augusta’s history of racism and sexism,” Costas said. “Even when people were protesting just outside the grounds — forget about taking a side — never acknowledging it. So not only will I never work the Masters because I’m not at CBS, but I’d have to say something and then I would be ejected.”

That this fairly objective observation has been considered news worthy and even provocative gives insight into the degree to which marketing, i.e. the buy-off of all forms of criticism and conflict, trumps basic journalism in major arenas of public “entertainment”. Costas, who freely took on a similar taboo by commenting on our national gun insanity during half time of a (gasp!) Sunday Night Football game last December, has precious little company when it comes to speaking his mind on matters of obvious relevance and/or performing the basic responsibilities of journalism. And in case his more PR-minded brethren have forgotten, “journalism” doesn’t have a lot to do with keeping “the client” happy and insulated from the realities of an interactive world.

To those who say, “Costas is an established superstar. He’s immune to executive blowback. He isn’t risking anything,” I say if that were all it is where are the likes of Al Michaels, Joe Buck, Jim Nantz and on and on in the context of dipping their toes in topics that pose problematic career scenarios? At an essential point, journalism requires courage. The profession is not about gilding the lilies of those paying bills, it’s about getting the whole story and telling that story come what may.

Friend of The Same Rowdy Crowd, John Reinan, (an ex-Stribber now making a living in the PR world), recently wrote about the startling imbalance between those marketing a story (i.e. “a message”) and those still in the game of straining slickly-produced bullshit for the truth of a personality, product or event.

Said Reinan,

“Consider:

• During the last decade, revenue of PR organizations nearly tripled while revenue of news organizations was cut in half.
• Over roughly the same period, employment in the PR business grew by 30 percent while the number of paid journalists dropped by more 25 percent.
• Thirty years ago, there was about one PR person for every journalist. Today, PR pros outnumber journalists by better than a 3-to-1 ratio.”

And those are the numbers for those clearly identified with each profession. The problem with CBS — and their fawning, hyper-reverential Masters coverage is just a prime example — is that we are also living in a period when self-professed journalists, mainly in TV newsrooms, are merrily committing a form of “service journalism” essentially no different from PR houses.  Unpleasant backstories are ignored and avoided. Stories with unavoidable partisan facets, especially where one “side” could only be painted as flagrantly wrong or reckless were the full context reported, are massaged into something with broader digestibility. All, you understand, in the interests of serving “the client”, which is to say the ad revenue of advertisers who don’t like being associated with controversy.

But to confess: I say this as a guy whose antennae are always up for the classicist stench emitted by pro golf, The Masters in particular. How an event encumbered by the kind of racial and sexual attitudes it has maintained continues to be embraced for its embodiment of “achievement” and “grandeur” is a vivid testament to salesmanship over journalism.

My opinion of The Masters was confirmed a few years while talking to a “business friend” of Denny Hecker’s. (Hecker was dropping a ton of advertising coin on the guy’s business, and in turn the guy happily played Denny’s best buddy.) The two had just returned from Augusta. First class the whole way, baby. Corporate jet. Cocktails with a few of the pros. VIP privileges. The guy was beyond thrilled. The American Dream.

What sort of jerk would throw a wrench into that kind of action?

Who You Calling “Nixonian”, Pal?

There is much to love about the secret taping of a Mitch McConnell strategy session, and I’m not just talking about Mitch himself referring to it as “Nixonian”.

The story, briefly, is that back on Ground Hog Day someone recorded Team McConnell huddled to discuss the points of attack they’d likely take against various Kentucky Democrats positioning to run against their man, Sen. Do Nothing Ever, Oppose Everything Always. Whether the whole meeting was taped we don’t know. But the first eleven and a half minutes, where the team rattled off actress Ashley Judd’s vulnerabilities was and it was given to Mother Jones’ David Corn, the guy who also received the video of Mitt Romney’s now-legendary 47% comments.

The Mitch Machine immediately made a big show of calling in the FBI … the FBI! … to root out the criminal low-life who would make such a nefarious assault on the Senator’s precious constitutional freedoms. (The FBI is required to consider investigating, but hasn’t exactly jumped on it yet.)

Another Tragedy at a School…

Today’s news is dominated by yet another attack at a school; a still-unidentified assailant for reasons unknown crosses paths with 14 victims.  We used to count the interval between these events in years.  Now, it seems like months or even days.

The $1,500 Question: Why Am I Paying Google to Beta Glass?

Let’s start with the obvious.  I am a hopeless technophile and I need help.  I’m not a role model, I’m a cautionary tale.  I’m the people your parents would have warned you about if they had any idea how the future turned out.

The most recent proof of these truths is my – successful – application to be a “Glass Explorer” in Google’s project – Glass - to develop a wearable device that resembles a pair of glasses without lenses that projects a tiny image into the user’s right eyeball.  Think of it as computer that can be controlled with voice, gestures and taps with a display that sits in your field of vision. This project has been talked about for years and Google has offered various glimpses of the technology as it has developed.

It’s Nerd-TV, and I Like It

I really didn’t need that annual “State of the News Media” Pew survey a couple of weeks ago to tell me how badly TV has fallen out of the news business.

If you missed it, the gist is this: “In local TV, our special content report reveals, sports, weather and traffic now account on average for 40% of the content produced on the newscasts studied while story lengths shrink. On CNN, the cable channel that has branded itself around deep reporting, produced story packages were cut nearly in half from 2007 to 2012. Across the three cable channels, coverage of live events during the day, which often require a crew and correspondent, fell 30% from 2007 to 2012 while interview segments, which tend to take fewer resources and can be scheduled in advance, were up 31%.”

Like I said. Pretty much what you already know. Only with hard-edged percentages.

Local TV news was particularly notable for a substantial reduction in government reporting and a heightened emphasis on “live reports” which translates into “stuff we can shoot this afternoon and have on the air tonight”. What has been sacrificed is dissection and analyses of what government and business news actually means to viewers.  (No wonder you thought that Vikings stadium funding package was such a wonderful idea, if all you know about it came from TV).

To follow this devolution in “community service” to its natural conclusion, restaurant reviews and Lindsay Lohan sideboob will soon replace what is left of relevant civic issue coverage.

The cable story was notable for MSNBC being declared the clear leading perpetrator in the cheap and easy “interview” segments that have replaced what we used to think of as “news”. Why? Because actual reporting, international style, requires reporters and crews on airplanes and in faraway hotels running up a tab that diminishes shareholder value.

The shot at MSNBC is legitimate … as far as it goes. Never mind that MSNBC never was much a competitor to CNN, much less NBC News, (which seems to spend more money on medical segments for geezers and women than rattling cages on Capitol Hill).

But the Pew survey played in the same cycle as MSNBC was rearranging its primetime line-up (again), and this time for the (much) better.

Let’s Check our Stadium Chump-dom on the Replay

The decent thing to say would be that since all of us blunder from time to time we shouldn’t get all fiery righteous when our elected leaders screw the pooch, even in a really big, major league way.

But I won’t go there. Decency is above me. There were enough of us a year ago screaming that the NFL and the Wilf family were playing us and our top-tier politicians for provincial chumps that we get this moment. We get to screw the phony compassion and tolerance bit and enjoy a moment of sweet, sweet vindication.

Over the past week it has been revealed first by Jean Hopfensperger at the Strib and then amplified by Tim Nelson at MPR (who has followed the Vikings stadium financing saga better than anyone else in the local institutional media) that the state took it’s patently absurd estimates of likely revenue from expanded, electronic gambling … from the gambling industry intent on selling them the iPad-like machines needed to play. As you may have followed, the Dayton administration first said it was unaware of the source of the numbers that showed the state raking in an easy $67 million a year from a new feeding frenzy among barflys and rubes.  More than enough to cover the $348 million “share” the state (i.e. you and me) agreed to kick in to build the Vikings/NFL a new Xanadu-like football palace. Hell, Revenue Commissioner Myron Frans, an otherwise bright enough guy, even called those numbers “conservative”.

Ignore the fact no one had ever attempted to close a $348 million hole in a $970 million deal with this gimmick before.

After Dayton’s office offered that unfortunate “unaware of the source” explanation, Nelson checked the files and re-discovered a two year-old statement … by the Dayton administration … acknowledging that the aforementioned (absurd) numbers were coming from some gambling outpost in Florida. At which point the Team Dayton story switched to something like … “Well there were so many numbers flying around back then who could possibly keep them all straight?”

(And I ask you for chrissakes, Florida? Gambling experts? … in Florida? Mullets, dead manatees, shirtless hillbilly meth-heads hiding under double-wides? And no one was suspicious enough to get a second opinion? What if I said a Russian guy I know has a trunk full of Rolecks watches? Do you start lining up in the parking lot with rolls of Twenties?)

No Non-biological Parents Need Apply

Marriage is about procreation.

That’s what advocates of Proposition 8 said before the Supreme Court to support their case against gay marriage. And that’s what Chief Justice John Roberts seemed to be saying in the questioning at the Supreme Court yesterday. As The New York Times reported: “Chief Justice Roberts said history was on the side of traditional marriage. ‘The institution developed,’ he said, ‘to serve purposes that, by their nature, didn’t include homosexual couples.’”

Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan pointed out that sterile opposite-sex couples get married and couples beyond child-bearing years get married (the always-tasteful Justice Antonin Scalia joked about Strom Thurmond, who fathered a child in his 70s, but Scalia and Thurmond are exceptions in way too many ways). The questions and answers became quite tortured — not surprising on an issue so emotional and so reflective of people’s values and beliefs.

I have respect for people who feel earnestly on either side of this issue. My own thoughts have changed on gay issues in the past decades.

But two forces cry out here — history, and babies.

Dismissing history as a reason not to allow gay marriage is easy for me. History was on the side of slavery. History was on the side of denying equality to women — history is still there, as we see in the rapes in Egypt, where traditional religious leaders are blaming rapes on women becoming involved in the world outside their homes. History was on the side of Jim Crow and is still on the side of racial, ethnic, religious and gender discrimination.

History is a brute. We shouldn’t be ruled by it. Escaping history is a high calling of leaders and legislatures and courts.

Now, babies. Everybody loves babies. But making babies is not the only reason for committing to a relationship, and asserting that making babies is the only or the most-important reason for marrying is ludicrous and harmful, seems to me.

The presumption that women will create babies can eclipse women’s rights and aspirations and potential. Society has traditionally denied women equal standing in most of human endeavor — governing; running or even participating in the institutions of commercial, civic and social life; working outside the home; being taken seriously — so that women can bear and raise children.

Creating and raising children is holy and admirable. But it is not the only reason women exist.

And — seven billion isn’t enough?

Liberals often complain that conservatives are pro-life until the baby is born. Many of us liberals feel that conservative policies are harmful to children now, and harmful to the future, therefore harmful to our children’s children. (I know, conservatives believe this about our mounting debt, and they are right; we disagree on what to do about it.) But it does seem hypocritical to me to be so selectively concerned about children. Let’s stop debating marriage equality and address instead the devastating and growing income disparity in the U.S. and the world. That’s far more harmful to humanity old and young.

Seven billion isn’t enough? Do we need more kids? I don’t want to sound like Jonathan Swift here, but a modest proposal would say let’s not make growing the world’s population a central goal of our policies.

People get married for many reasons, not just for adding the seven-billion-and-first child to this groaning planet. They get married, mostly, to show love and commitment.

I’ve been married three times. That will disqualify what I say here in some people’s eyes. I get that. But here I go anyway. My first wife and I were too young to be ready for kids, and I wasn’t sure the marriage would last. Good thing we didn’t have kids. My second wife already had children, and I was privileged to be part of their raising. We didn’t need “our own.” My current and last wife, like me, has never felt that having biological children was central to her life. We’ve had the privilege to be involved in raising a niece — not the same as growing a kid from the ground up, but rewarding and challenging and wild.

I’ve entered into each of these marriages with joy and hope and commitment. The first two marriages eroded, and the commitment didn’t last. The divorces were sad and painful. In none of my marriages was the main purpose to create children and raise them to adults. Perhaps that’s why the first two didn’t last, one could argue. But that’s a narrow view of the purpose of marriage, which is my point. Marriage is about two people saying they want to live and grow together, and believing, even if wrongly, that they will do so forever. Marriage strengthens the couple, and strengthens society. And having parents who are in a strong marriage helps kids, no doubt about it. Gay or straight.

But marriage’s sole purpose, even its most important purpose, is not to grow children, seems to me.

And that’s just one of many reasons that gays should be allowed to marry. Period. End of story.

– Bruce Benidt

(Image from babycentre.co.uk)