So Much Nicer to Be George Will Before the Internet
Perhaps you’ve seen that on Sunday George Will made things up so he can claim global warming isn’t happening. And two days later, Will and Fred Hiatt, the editor of the Washington Post op-ed page, still won’t explain their behavior.
It must be unpleasant for Will to get used to blogs, because he’s spent his entire career with total impunity. Here’s a funny story of Noam Chomsky’s from the book Understanding Power about a column Will wrote in 1982:
CHOMSKY: [A] few years ago George Will wrote a column in Newsweek called “Mideast Truth and Falsehood,” about how peace activists are lying about the Middle East, everything they say is a lie. And in the article, there was one statement that had a vague relation to fact: he said that Sadat had refused to deal with Israel until 1977. So I wrote them a letter, the kind of letter you write to Newsweek—you know, four lines—in which I said, “Will has one statement of fact, it’s false; Sadat made a peace offer in 1971, and Israel and the United States turned it down.” Well, a couple days later I got a call from a research editor who checks facts for the Newsweek “Letters” column. She said: “We’re kind of interested in your letter, where did you get those facts?” So I told her, “Well, they’re published in Newsweek, on February 8, 1971″—which is true, because it was a big proposal, it just happened to go down the memory hole in the United States because it was the wrong story. So she looked it up and called me back, and said, “Yeah, you’re right, we found it there; okay, we’ll run your letter.” An hour later she called again and said, “Gee, I’m sorry, but we can’t run the letter.” I said, “What’s the problem?” She said, “Well the editor mentioned it to Will and he’s having a tantrum; they decided they can’t run it.” Well, okay.
I’ve stuck the Understanding Power footnotes, with references and excerpts, over at my site.
about the death of my profession, reports of which I do hope are premature. But this caught my eye:
What are you saving (by dropping comics)? I asked him. He said, “If you added it all up? Jeez, a few thousand dollars.”
Well, there you have it.
See, the thing is, a few thousand dollars is a big deal for a household budget, for a young family trying to figure out how to pay the mortgage. A few thousand dollars is not a significant amount for a large newspaper chain whose advertising income, whose very existence, depends on readers who are in the habit of picking up the paper every week to read their favorite features. In the latter case, a few thousand dollars is about the cheapest fucking investment you can make, if it brings back readers week after week.
I would prefer to continue doing TMW, but everything goes to hell, I’ll move on to other things. (That’s the problem with the overused “buggy whip” metaphor — buggy whip makers didn’t just roll over and die, they moved to to make other things out of the materials with which they worked.) The question here is if the altweekly cartoons, which have contributed significantly to the papers in which they run, can really be tossed aside like yesterday’s garbage when the moment comes to save a few thousand dollars. I would like to imagine that this is not the case, but to paraphrase my earlier posts, consistent, ongoing and increasingly annoyed reader feedback is the only way to prove it. You people are all we’ve got here, if by “we” you mean “beleaguered, disrespected cartoonists.” Which I do.
Despite the nuclear first strike launched at my career by the corporate honchos at VVM — I kid, of course! I’m sure the economy will rebound any moment now and they’ll once again be able to afford the literally tens of dollars it costs to run my work! — at any rate, despite the late unpleasantness, I am momentarily swamped with deadlines. The usual weekly cartoon, of course, but also a couple of other longer-term projects about which I’ll be able to announce at least a little bit of good news sometime soon. But the point is, everything’s happening at once, so for the time being, this blog will continue to suck. My apologies for that, and for any unanswered email.
Newsweek also plans to lean even more heavily on the appeal of big-name writers like Christopher Hitchens, Fareed Zakaria and George Will.
Starting in May, articles will be reorganized under four broad, new sections — one each for short takes, columnists and commentary, long reporting pieces like the cover articles, and culture — each with less compulsion to touch on the week’s biggest events. A new graphic feature on the last page, “The Bluffer’s Guide,” will tell readers how to sound as if they are knowledgeable on a current topic, whether they are or not.
You might as well buy some stock in the Washington Post Company right now, because I don’t see any way this plan could fail!
Donations lately from Iceland, Finland, and Ireland. Not sure what this means, exactly. But thank you, of course.
(… not an oblique suggestion that you hit the donation button, by the way. To be honest, over the next few weeks blogging will probably lag — I have a number of other obligations demanding my attention …)
If you work in print media, at least: read Walter Isaacson’s cover story in Time Magazine, “How to Save Your Newspaper.”
See, it’s the cover story in Time Magazine., written by the former managing editor of Time. And after a fairly promising start summarizing the importance of journalism and how we got into this mess, the solution proferred is, essentially, that somebody should figure out a way to make micropayments work.
To put it another way, Time magazine’s cover story solution to the crisis in journalism: somebody should do something!
This is not an industry in crisis. This is an industry in its death throes.
* * *
In the same article, we learn:
One of history’s ironies is that hypertext — an embedded Web link that refers you to another page or site — had been invented by Ted Nelson in the early 1960s with the goal of enabling micropayments for content. He wanted to make sure that the people who created good stuff got rewarded for it. In his vision, all links on a page would facilitate the accrual of small, automatic payments for whatever content was accessed.
File that under Things That Did Not Work Out as Planned.
Looks like I wasn’t the only person who noted the sheer head-exploding inappropriateness of KFC’s Battlestar Galacta tie-in Frak Pak Sweepstakes. Because this week it has morphed into what the announcer describes as the “can’t say that word on TV sweepstakes,” as this graphic appears:
I’m guessing this is the work of an ad agency that didn’t really understand what it was doing in the first place, and is now trying to use “humor” (complete with waggle-finger air quotes) to cover their fuckup. Or frakup, as the case may be. The problem with this follow up is, well — those of you who watch the show, or have followed the link to my previous post are way ahead of me here I’m sure — you CAN say the word on tv. That’s the point of the entirely made-up word — to serve as a stand-in for the word you can’t say on TV.
[/geekout]
…. except can you really signal the end of a geekout with fake html?
Screen grab of a comment from a Fox News article about the stimulus. Caught this last week, but didn’t get around to posting it. Kind of speaks for itself.
