progressive involvement

Now hold on a minute, Madame Secretary. Without Fox News, we would never have known that palm trees grow in Madison, Wisconsin

 I'm giving thought to the Secretary's remarks, but need to hear a shouting match between Pat Buchanan and one of the Fox News blonds before I can make up my mind.

So far, the Kia ad has been the best, and it wasn't great

A car gets swiped by aliens, goes to another planet, but then goes through a black hole and winds up sliding down an Aztec ziggurat to the cheers of the crowd--a nice technical display, and a smidgen of a story, which makes it the only Super Bowl ad so far that isn't completely unintelligible or lame beyond words.

In fact, through the first quarter, there seemed to be an uninspired over-reliance on the old tried-and-true, which means somebody getting unexpectedly whacked and set on his can, like the Doritos ad, or inexplicably shooting a can of Pepsi at a someone minding their own business, or, Pepsi again, shooting a can of Pepsi into someone's "groin area," as they euphemistically say in the sports business.

I'm not normally very interested in the ads, nor any of the pre-game hoopla.  I don't want to see any exploding scoreboards, or rock bands, or fireworks, or celebrities urging us toward this or that saccharine sentiment.  I just want to watch a football game.

That said, even the average football game is full of commercials, and even more so in the Super Bowl.  You can't avoid them entirely.  Therefore, to look at it philosophically, you tell yourself that you are about to see the new products of the best-and-brightest marketing minds on Madison Avenue.  So far, looks like they're in about the same league as the brainiacs on Wall Street.

Oh yeah, and the movie trailer for something called "Cowboys and Aliens"?  Believe I'll pass.

"Aisle hogs"

Steve Kornacki at salon.com has a post up on "aisle hogs," i.e. the Congressmen or women who position themselves in the aisle at the State of the Union address so they can pump the president's hand, in front of a national audience, as he enters.

Kornacki identified Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) , Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Dale Kildee (D-MI), Eliot Angel (D-NY), and Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL) as his top five "aisle hogs."

The "aisle hog" who first drew my attention to this phenomenon was Scott McInnes when he represented the third district in Colorado during the Clinton administration.  

I'd wonder:  Why is McInnes stationing himself in the aisle and playing like Bill Clinton's long-lost childhood friend for the cameras?  Unlike Kornacki's top five, McInnes wasn't even in the same political party as the president.

Public Broadcasting most trusted news source, by far

Public Policy Polling didn't measure the trust-level of PBS last year so we don't have comparison figures.  Still, 50% of viewers "trust" PBS, while only 30% do not, which is a far better showing than any other network.

Fox news took the biggest dive since last year.  Last year, they were on the positive side of trust, 49/37.  This year, the number who trust Fox fell from 49 to 42, while those who distrust it rose from 37 to 46.

CNN treaded water, while NBC, CBS, and ABC enjoyed a nice bump.

Believe half of what you see, none of what you hear

Gene Lyons reflects upon today's media in an article titled "People, we are in deep trouble."  In the course of arguing his case, he offered up this 1943 quote from George Orwell as he reflected on the Spanish civil war:

"I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed ... I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various 'party lines.' "

Lyons runs through a list of bogus hoaxes perpetrated upon the public by a partisan press--local coverage of a black man's trial in the south, for example, Whitewater, the New York Times and Washington Post trumpeting the case for the war in Iraq.

In the case of Fox news, yet another study released this week confirmed what we already know:  Their viewers are less informed on actual facts than are viewers of other news programs.  

What this misses, however, is that a good-sized demographic--staunch conservatives--wants its own version of the news, its own worldview appearing to be dominant.  Fox news represents its market.  It didn't create it.  

Besides, Fox is not necessarily the only offender here, just the biggest.  Fox's coverage of the 2008 Democratic campaign was, in my view, often more objective than coverage at, say, MSNBC.

In any case, even without Fox, does anyone really think that the public square would not be filled with lies and deceptions?  Billions of dollars are at stake, as well as tons of power.  All the world's religions teach the dangers of both, for multiple reasons, one of which is that lies tend to swirl around both with special vigor.

Keillor on Twain

Garrison Keillor, in today's New York Times, has a rip-roaring review of Mark Twain's autobiography.  The book is "a powerful argument for writers’ burning their papers," says Keillor, who bemoans that good portions of the autobiography are tedious and boring. 

This makes me feel better about looking at this huge tome yesterday at the Tattered Cover and thinking to myself, "I don't want to be a philistine and not properly appreciate the Great Master, but I don't want to read all that."

That gripe strongly registered, Keillor says also that you can't write that much and not have significant portions of the Real Twain show up somewhere:

The reader hikes across the hard, dusty ground of a famous man’s reminiscences and is delighted to come across the occasional water hole. The famous man is in Berlin, hobnobbing with aristocracy at dinner at the ambassador’s, and meets a count: “This nobleman was of long and illustrious descent. Of course I wanted to let out the fact that I had some ancestors, too; but I did not want to pull them out of their graves by the ears, and I never could seem to get a chance to work them in in a way that would look sufficiently casual.”

FB founder the "person of the year," according to Time magazine, but what do they know?

The runners up were Julian Assange, the Tea Party, Hamad Karzai, and the Chilean miners.  The Chilean miners would be everyone's sentimental choice, though the people who really deserved the accolades are those in a second-world government who pulled off the rescue.  Assange won Time's online poll.

Facebook has been a phenomenon, no question about it.  Roughly one in four Americans has an account, and about half a billion people worldwide, which is a sizeable reach and, through FB or its derivatives, we may well have crossed some kind of threshold in how we manuever information.

Still, it also feels a little bit like the first episode after a TV sitcom has "jumped the shark."  Picking FB founder Zuckerman would have been an interesting choice last year or the year before, but now seems a titch past the curve.

Department of the Unintentionally Hilarious

ABC News headline:  Sen. Conrad: Extend All Tax Cuts; Time to Get 'Serious' About Deficit

Has to be one of the more watchable commercials ever made

The video below has gone viral since about Friday.  You'll see why.  It's fun to watch.  It's also a commercial for a Norwegian television show named Gylne Tider.  The title means "Golden Days", or as salon.com puts it, "'I love the 80's" as a travel documentary," whatever that means.  Story here, along with a Cracked magazine parody, which was also pretty good.

 

 

Why does all this sound like a Stieg Larsson novel?

Judge denies bail to Assange, the Wikileaks leaker.