I’m just watching last night’s Daily Show, and yet again I’m in awe of the way this programme tears apart the hypocrisies present in the media nowadays.
Jon Stewart destroys Fox News’ midday host Megyn Kelly and her one-sided portrayal of what is supposedly “fair and balanced” news. It was stunning how unfairly the “news” is actually broadcast. Is it really “fair and balanced” to only pick four random members of the public who all (coincidentally!) were against the healthcare bill?
Is it fuck.
There’s a great little montage of talking heads who all use the phrase “cram down the throats” of the American public, in terms of the healthcare bill, and then Stewart just rips apart Fox’s reliance on polls which support its position, whilst handily ignoring those that disagree.
Kelly is particularly in favour, it seems, of quoting poll numbers at those who disagree with her/Fox News. Well, until the final clip, which shows her in October 2008, discussing the latest polls which put Obama well ahead of McCain. Her opinion? To paraphrase, “we shouldn’t trust polls and pollsters anyway.”
The hypocrisy is just mind-blowing, and I don’t see how anyone can not notice it.
The Daily Star
The Sun
Just to illustrate the complete nonsense that is the fashion of slapping ‘Exclusive’ onto a newspaper story, both the Sun and the Star had that word on their identical front-page stories today.
As it happens, the Star is actually a bit more forthcoming about what happened. In their story, they say that Cole shouted at fans from a balcony at the clinic in France where he is receiving treatment for a broken ankle. The entire story is based around a single quote, one paragraph in length.
The Sun, however, uses the same quote, but nonsensically claims that he was “telling The Sun”. Using the word ‘exclusive’ also makes it sound like they got a sit-down interview, something you can tell they didn’t by the lack of any other fresh material/quotes later in the article.
Well, save for the obligatory “source” who says something that sounds exactly like what the writer wanted to hear. Funny coincidence, that.
Ah, there’s nothing quite like a bit of hypocrisy to start the week. Classic Daily Fail.
The Observer newspaper relaunched itself yesterday, with a new design, and apparently a new mentality. Its TV ads spell out its intention to take a wider, deeper look at the week’s news, seeing as we now live in a headline-driven 24/7 media world that often fails to do anything more than scratch the surface.
I’ve been an Observer reader for many years, and buy it probably twice a month, on average. I’m a big fan of its reporting, and it had a simply fantastic sport section in its old guise. I also read its weekday sister, The Guardian, when I pick up a physical newspaper, although more often I’m a website reader instead. It’s with that in mind that I want to make a few points on the re-design and the new direction.
The paper wants to give the reader an opportunity to really get into a story that they’ve probably heard a little about already over the course of the week, without having had a chance to “Pause. Review. Reflect”, as the tagline has it. And how does it do this?
To put it in simple terms, it does this by carrying barely any news whatsoever. Seriously. In the 60-page main paper, I count about 7 pages of news, and that’s being a bit generous to the science and arts news pages. The other 53 pages could’ve been written a week ago (and in this case probably were, given that it’s a full re-launch) and not have been altered by the week’s subsequent events.
I know that Saturday is a pretty slow news day, but stuff does happen. Christ, Monday’s newspapers are usually pretty full of news. The old Observer had easily twice as much actual news in a reduced page-count, and was very clear in its split between British and international news. This new Observer is a bit of a mish-mash on that front, with domestic NIBs (News In Brief) coming five pages after the pair of pages on bigger domestic stories.
I can see what the Observer is trying to do, I really can: longer-form journalism, more reflective and insightful. But still, some sense of organisation in the actual news pages would be nice.
One particular highlight is the Dispatches report on page 2, which is usually where crappy non-stories are buried. The big picture and some great writing, detailing the drug trade in Argentinian slums, was a fantastic introduction, and I hope it holds its place in coming weeks.
The re-launch was given some oomph with exclusive extracts from Observer columnist Andrew Rawnsley’s new book, detailing the fall and fall of the Brown government in recent years. The front-page story, concerning accusations of bullying within 10 Downing Street, did lead the news agenda yesterday and today, so kudos on that.
But to fill eight (count ‘em!) pages with extracts, as well as the front-page story and follow-up inside? That’s a sixth of the entire newspaper! Apparently next week has a similar number of pages devoted to extracts, and I wonder whether the page-count will dip a little in coming weeks when there’s not so many easy column inches to be had.
I enjoyed the expanded In Focus section, which used to be just a 2-page spread on one story, and then maybe another half-page on something else. That now covers a much broader range of subjects, and is definitely the centre-piece of the Pause. Reflect. Review mantra. I couldn’t help but feel a little bit that it was telling me things I already knew, though.
On a similar line, a new section (well, competely revamped so as to be unrecognisable as its predecessor with the same name) is Seven Days, which is the newspaper’s “Review of the Week”. It highlights some of the biggest stories of the week, with extracts from various other media to pull the stories together.
Again though, the International Dispatches section within this, erm, section, is surely just news?! Yes, there’s a nice little globe graphic in the middle of the page, but these are just news stories by the Observer’s own journalists. Not really a “review of the week”, for me.
Extracts from non-news media are welcome though: this week we had the New Scientist, New York magazine, El Pais, and the New Yorker. Always nice to see a slightly different take on matters, even if the section reminded me of, well, The Week magazine.
Thankfully, the Observer Profile has survived the re-design, although this week’s was a bit of a hatchet job on Vanessa Redgrave. Equally, I’m glad that Victoria Coren still has a column, and that Peter Preston’s media column hasn’t bitten the dust.
The latter (and the entire Business section) has been brought into the main paper, albeit at the back. It’s still pretty thorough, but this week there was sod-all news, really. I had that recurring feeling of reading something written at any time between Christmas and now. Hopefully that will improve as time passes.
The front page of the business section was a large interview, a trick repeated in the (separate) Sport section. A three-page interview with Alex Ferguson, which is admittedly a bit of a scoop, but only once did it mention the result of the game his team played on Saturday lunchtime. They lost, a fact which could’ve been used a lot more throughout the write-up of the interview. As it was, it seemed a little ass-kissy.
I’ve no complaints about the rest of the sport section, which seems to have come through pretty much unscathed. I still love that for each Premiership and Championship match they get fans to give their opinions on the performance, because fans will be a lot more honest than the typical football player/manager, and will feel safe in saying something other than “it was a team performance”, “just glad to get the three points”, etc.
A couple of minor style issues: I know that the Observer is the sister paper of the Guardian, and that the latter has the bigger online presence, but does every URL to further reading online really need to be guardian.co.uk/thestoryname? The Observer is an important, historical brand and needs to be kept that way.
If you believe all of the media reports, it sounds like the Observer will soon be the Sunday Guardian to all intents and purposes anyway, but they’re doing it a little stealthily for the time being.
I’m just about to delve into the Observer Magazine (please still have Jay Rayner’s restaurant reviews!) and the new New Review arts section, which has swallowed up the TV listings among other things.
A quick word though for those sections that have fallen by the wayside: no longer will we have Sport Monthly, Music Monthly and Woman Monthly, although Food Monthly has somehow survived that cull. I’m going to miss Sport Monthly in particular, because it was great long-form sports journalism that you just don’t see nowadays. Surely that would’ve fitted in nicely to the Pause. Review. Reflect mentality?
Also, goodbye Escape, the travel section. That’s now a poor little half-page at the back of the main paper, which is essentially a series of paragraphs urging people to go read it online (at the Guardian’s site!). Oh, and three pages in the Magazine.
Overall, it’s a good re-design. I like that the business/media section is now in the main paper, and the expansion of the In Focus articles is a good sign. Familiar columnists are retained, as have been the excellent sport team.
And I like where it’s heading, in terms of providing a chance to do that Pause. Review. Reflect they would so love us to do when we’re not absorbing headlines and blogs 24/7 from the Guardian’s website.
I just wonder how they’re going to fill the pages after Rawnsley’s book extracts…
Man, News In Briefs gets better and better…
DANNI, 23, from Coventry
DANNI was thrilled to discover that Prince Charles had read her views on modern buildings. She said: “Architecture’s place in the metropolitan sprawl is a fascinating topic. I’m a deconstructivist at heart and Frank Gehry’s design of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is a triumph. There’s something about curves we all love.”
Non-brits might not be aware of the concept of Page 3 girls in our newspapers. In our red-tops, the bottom end of the newspaper market commonly called tabloids, there is a tradition of having a topless girl on page 3, so it’s the first thing(s) you see when you open it up. The Sun is the most famous for doing this, but the Daily Star does it too. I think this whole tradition started in the 70s, and it’s made a few celebrities out of the readers’ favourites over the years. It’s a bit of an anachronism nowadays, but who doesn’t want to start the day with a nice pair of boobs in front of them?! What has started appearing recently, though, is the little ‘News In Briefs’ paragraph attached to the page 3 photo. In this micro-column, the girl of the day gives her opinion on one of the bigger stories of the day. Well, it’s supposedly her opinion… It’s pretty obvious that it’s just a hastily written blurb by some journalist on The Sun, and handily it always reflects the Sun’s latest editorial position. Usually they contain some godawful pun too. I’ve always been amused by them, and thankfully some random soul is creating an archive of them all online. It’s funny to see them all in one place and revel in their awfulness. AMII, 23, from Birmingham AMII hopes ranting President Ahmadinedjad’s boast that Iran is a nuclear power will blow up in his face. She said: “It’s one thing to brag to an adoring mob about having produced your first weapons-grade enriched uranium. But to have achieved perfect composition of uranium-235 through isotope separation is quite a different kettle of nuclear fish in my book. Sanctions will show he’s not a big beast – just an atomic kitten.” Epic.
I discovered this column in the New York Times Sunday Magazine whilst I was over there last September. We were hanging out in Central Park, flicking through the paper and just soaking up the city. I have to admit that the usual writing style in the NYTimes grates on me; almost every news story is written as if it were a feature, and it takes until about the umpteenth paragraph before you can figure out what the hell is going on. This little column, however, grabbed me. I like words, and I like etymology, plus I like to ramble about nothing in particular, so this was right up my alley. Since returning to London, I found the RSS feed for it and popped it into my reader, so that every Monday I have something fresh to peruse. It’s usually quite amusing, but I particularly liked this week’s column, detailing how headlines can be (deliberately) misleading for the reader, if different words are emphasised as they read it than the writer intended. A little 2-minute distraction, at any rate.
picture, books, review, tldr, columbine, history, violence, psychology, media,
Columbine, by Dave Cullen, is the defining narrative of what happened on April 20, 1999 in that school, the events leading up to it, and the aftermath. It is stunning in what it achieves, both in terms of the detail in which it delves into the events and the people, and in terms of the thoroughness of the research.
Cullen starts with a second-by-second, shot-by-shot walkthrough of the day itself, then jumps back and forwards in time to show how the killers developed their plan (and there was a plan), and then the police investigated the massacre.
Relying on the huge volume of documentation amassed by the police investigation, extensive interviews with the survivors, investigators and just about anyone connected with the shooting, and most dramatically using Harris and Klebold’s own words from their journals and videos, Cullen is able to reconstruct the entire sequence of events.
He does so in a clinical, unemotional way, but not so distant from the subject as to appear cold and disconnected. Indeed, it’s pretty easy to spot which people he feels the most sympathy for, usually those he has interviewed over and over again in the decade since the shooting. Sometimes he gets a bit too close to these people, and I couldn’t help but feel that they were given a touch too sentimental a going-over, but that’s a minor gripe.
Perhaps the most important part of the book is the debunking of the most commonly held myths surrounding Columbine, and particularly the killers’ motives. They weren’t Nazi-sympathisers, they weren’t outcasts, they weren’t bullied, they weren’t Jock-haters, they weren’t gay, they weren’t part of ‘The Trenchcoat Mafia’, they weren’t Marilyn Manson fans, and they weren’t warped by violent films and video games.
Cullen perhaps lets his mask slip a little when calling out the media for jumping to such conclusions and repeating them ad infinitum until we can no longer think of Columbine without the above mistruths clouding our judgement. He explains why this occurred, but criticises the media for failing to correct themselves as quickly as they spread the rumours.
There was no single cause, nothing on which to hang blame for the massacre, other than the killers themselves. Harris and Klebold, particularly Harris, were fucked up. For want of a better way of describing it, they were born evil. Harris was probably a psychopath, in the clinical sense, and Klebold’s depression manifested itself in fits of rage.
Cullen strains to make the point that the parents aren’t to blame, and nor is anything else. He fully subscribes to the idea that some people are mentally ill in this manner, and some of those people act on their psychopathic impulses with horrifying results.
And the horrors at Columbine could’ve been worse. A lot worse.
I was completely unaware that the entire plan was to blow up the school, and everyone inside it. The guns were to shoot those fleeing the burning building. There were even extra bombs timed to go off in the car park when the police and media arrived.
It was only through the (relative) ineptitude of Harris and Klebold’s bomb-making skills that no more than the 13 died. The plan was to make McVeigh’s exploits look mild in comparison.
And the killing was designed to be indiscriminate. Harris just wanted to kill humans, no matter who they were. They didn’t target jocks, the religious or anyone else. They only targeted everyone.
As Cullen points out, “of course, Eric would enjoy killing jocks, too, along with niggers, spics, fags, and every other group he railed against.” This is probably the most disturbing aspect of the book, that someone can wish death upon every single other person on the planet.
The investigators and the media wanted to leap upon a why for the massacre, but for many years this couldn’t be provided. So many other theories were put forward, as listed above. Maybe the fact that it was indiscriminate killing was too horrifying a theory to put in print, to put into the public consciousness.
Because if it’s indiscriminate, how can we protect against it? That’s a real fear for many people.
I think we forget just how much this event, this massacre, changed society. Yes, something like 9/11 changed air travel and international relations forever, but Columbine created a complete distrust of the younger generation, which has yet to fade. Parents and the elder generation actively fear the young, the teenagers, nowadays.
But if this book does nothing else, it says that you can’t fear a generation, no more than you can fear a race, a kinsfolk, a religion. Certain people are just fucked up, and as much as we try to help them, or to protect against their impact, we can’t do so 100%.
The survivors whose stories are detailed in this book are its saving grace, in terms of a positive message. Almost every single one has grown beyond the effects of the shooting, and not it let define their lives. It brings a tear to your eye to read passages describing someone learning to talk, to walk, to feel again, but they do it.
They do it because they must, because they won’t let the actions of a mad-man dictate their lives for them.
Some do fall into the trap of letting it rule them. One father who lost his son has become a relentless campaigner for not forgiving, for not forgetting, and for pretty much seeking vengeance. His story is sad, to be honest, because he’s lost some of his humanity.
I can’t begin to fully describe the detail that this book goes into, as it is exhaustive. Journals are laid bare, videos are transcribed, police reports are pored over. I doubt that any line in the book hasn’t been fact-checked a hundred times over, and it’s this level of research that gives it its authority.
This is how every single-subject book should be: scholarly, yet journalistic. Detached, yet so vivid in its descriptions and eye for detail that you’re practically inside the heads of each person on the page.
It’s beautiful, but horrifying.
Langer has written a great post detailing why he is still in love with old media, and in particular with the idea of reading a newspaper. Essentially, he likes it because it makes him more informed about the world in general, but also because it gives him the odd occasion to feel superior for already knowing a story, or for knowing more than the journalist does. I have to admit to feeling the same way. I still love reading newspapers, and absorbing TV news, because they tell me things I didn’t know. And yes, there is also that feeling of mild ego-boost when you are in a position to criticise a story through prior knowledge. I beat on the media, a lot, particularly newspapers, but I do it out of love. You know when you have to be really, really close to someone before you can criticise them? That’s how I feel with the media. I used to write for a business-to-business magazine, so have done journalism from the inside, and now I’m an absolutely avid consumer of media in pretty much all forms. Plus the girlfriend is a reporter for a local newspaper, so there’s that connection too. For me, this means that I’m in a position to criticise, because I know that the whole industry can perform better. Better meaning more accurately, more openly, more fairly, and more completely. It’ll get there, eventually. But in the meantime, I’m still a fan of old media, of reading every page in a newspaper. I figure that if someone has taken the time to write it, someone to edit it, and someone to lay it out on the page, then the least I can do is to read it. To get back to the original point, I have to agree with Langer that the old media is still worth looking after, and celebrating. New media’s time will come, but not just yet.
Reblogged from: langer
Originally posted on: Matt Langer
