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Bob Goldfarb on Media


Wednesday, October 29, 2003
    Following the Rules

    A journalist I respect disagreed with my view of the coverage of the Staten Island Ferry disaster.  "Gee," he writes, "piloting a ferry is a bit more like flying an airplane than crossing in the middle of the street.  Airplane pilots I know are pretty thorough even if things go for years without a hitch.  I hear plenty of the sort of unjustified outrage you describe in conversations, the media, and other places, but I don't think you are on the mark with that example.  I do expect them to follow the rules."

    Yes, we expect others to follow the rules, and that's the problem: people don't, unless those rules are reinforced by social cues.  Verlyn Klinkenborg touched on the same subject recently in The New York Times, in a review of a book about the mutiny against Capt. Bligh on The Bounty. "There are rules behind the rules, rules of kinship, fraternization and interest that Bligh himself could not wield," she observes.  Bligh expected his crew to go by the book, but the crew's own rules proved stronger.

    Whether it's jaywalking or flouting regulations on board ship, the pattern is the same.  The formal rules don't matter unless the group culture reinforces them.  That's why it's futile to point to infractions as if they are the real problem.  Whether it's a corporate office or the H.M.S. Bounty or the Staten Island Ferry, it's the culture that needs to shift if the behavior is going to change.

    posted by bob @ 6:45 am | Permanent link
Sunday, October 26, 2003
    The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

    The New York Times, reporting on the findings in the fatal crash of a Staten Island ferry, describes "a system in which tradition and habit often trump formal procedure, where oversight is often limited."  Isn't that the way the world works?

    Every child learns that rules aren't uniformly enforced, and that custom and habit are more reliable guides to getting along in life than following formalities.  If you're thinking about crossing the street in the middle of the block, do you decide according to whether it's against the law?  Most people consider what others do and follow their example, no matter what the law says.

    That's why corporations can develop a culture where advancement, or even keeping one's job, depends on squelching one's knowledge of what's formally permitted in favor of taking cues from the customary behavior of colleagues.  Whether it's Enron or Arthur Andersen or Worldcom or the Staten Island Ferry, employees quickly learn that their personal success depends less on knowing the written rules than on following the unwritten ones.

    The question is, why does the press sound so astonished when this becomes apparent?  On an everyday level we know that this is hardly news.  We wouldn't expect to see a newspaper headline like "Many Motorists Exceed Posted Speed Limit, Study Shows" because we already know that.  Yet the media are shocked, shocked to find that employees respect corporate culture more than rules and regulations.

    Stories like this latest one about the ferry crash are misleading in the end, because they imply that the solution is for employees to follow the rules.  Since people are always selective in following rules, it would be more enlightening to understand what conditions allow this behavior to become dangerous or pathological.  There will always be a gap between written rules and real life, but sometimes this has more serious consequences than others.  That's the real story.  It would be nice to see it reported more often.

    posted by bob @ 3:38 am | Permanent link
Saturday, October 25, 2003
    Vast Social Agenda

    San Francisco Chronicle writer James Sterngold sounds reasonable when he asks, "Can a gleaming temple of symphonic music built on a foundation of wealth and Old World culture pull together a fragmented city of new world immigrants restlessly expanding outward?"  He's talking about L.A.'s new Walt Disney Concert Hall.  He implies his own answer to that question when he reports that "neither the audiences nor the elite who run the Philharmonic and sit on its board are representative of the overall city."

    But why should we expect any private institution to be representative of a huge and disparate population?  By now it's a commonplace that there is no single "public": any city's population encompasses numerous communities that have radically different interests and needs, whether segmented by ethnicity or age or sex or occupation or personal preference.  The premise that a fragmented city can, or should, be "pulled together" by a concert hall makes no sense in contemporary society.

    In assessing the impact of Walt Disney Concert Hall, Sterngold divides up Angelenos into Latinos, Asians, African-Americans, and whites.  He doesn't consider the impact of the hall on non-ethnic population segments such as the handicapped, young people, residents of the downtown L.A. neighborhood where the building is located, or many more.  That seems hardly a coincidence.  In fact, it exposes the hidden underpinnings of his argument.

    Sterngold sets "Old World culture" in opposition to "social cohesion and cross-cultural unity," as if to question whether European-based classical music or its purveyors can transcend ethnic differences.  Of course they can't.  It would have been fatuous to ask whether another new downtown L.A. landmark, Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral, could "pull together" a region that is largely non-Catholic; that's not its purpose.  It is just as silly to suggest that a new concert hall somehow falls short if it fails to unite a region where most people don't like European classical music.

    If Sterngold's true interest is the interplay of the white "elite" and the majority populations, he has not reported on it very well.  He writes that Disney Hall "feels, some here say, like a landmark to a passing, largely white elite."  Who are these mysterious people who say this?  The absence of any actual sources suggests that this unattributed view may simply be Sterngold's own opinion.  Secondly, that description studiously ignores the sea-change within that so-called white elite, from the old-line Protestant establishment to Jewish moguls like Eli Broad.  The idea that they somehow constitute a single "white elite" may be true racially, but certainly not sociologically.

    Ultimately Sterngold has fallen back on an unfortunate but hoary journalistic device: presenting an argument that has never been made, and then marshalling facts to knock it down.  It's our old friend the straw man, used to advance a private opinion as if it were news.  Sterngold is welcome to his opinions about the civic impact of Disney Hall, but it's a disservice to dress them up as fact.

    posted by bob @ 8:08 pm | Permanent link
Monday, October 20, 2003
    Hiatus

    I'm traveling to Southeast Asia this week, so I'll probably have limited time to post.  More later!

    posted by bob @ 9:13 am | Permanent link
Thursday, October 16, 2003
    Totem and Taboo

    A reader has sent some thought-provoking comments on my post about Rush Limbaugh and taboos.  He asks,

    "I wonder whether race and sex are truly social taboos after all.  It seems to me the group of people for whom sex is a taboo is not the same group for whom race is.  Shouldn't a taboo be universal across a given society by definition?"

    I don't think so.  Taboos are felt in public space, which is why some people make comments about sex or race in private that they wouldn't want to be heard publicly.  It's not that everyone agrees that taboo behavior is inherently bad, only that they recognize that it is objectionable to mainstream opinion.

    "It seems the taboos of sex and race are not universal at all.  The "conservative" side wants to discuss race, but not sex, and the "liberal" side wants to discuss sex, but not race.  There are other examples: drugs, prostitution, gambling, guns, movie violence, swearing, and so on.  The opinions held regarding these taboos vary according to the
    group: left, right, or center."

    I'd say those are political positions, not taboos.  There is no liberal/conservative divide about the advocacy of incest, because that's a true societal taboo.

    "Also, I believe the majority of the population actually wish to discuss racial issues openly, but are being held back by the minority of society which will not allow it.  Witness the increasing number of editorials being written about race in the conservative press (Wall Street Journal, City Journal [including John McWhorter, a Berkeley Professor of African ethinicty], and others).  The same may be true, in mirror-image, of the taboo against drugs, and its increasing attention in the "libertarian" press."

    Discussing racial issues is one thing; implying (for instance) that there are significant congenital differences between races is another.  The public dialogue about the value of affirmative action may be uneasy, but it does take place.  The same is true of the discussion of drugs, as in the legal questions about medicinal uses of marijuana.  That's why they're not taboo subjects, only difficult.

    In a follow-up message my correspondent clarified,

    "I was trying to argue that taboos are generally unhealthy, and that we in America are luckily unrestricted by them for the most part, which I find good.

    "It's my feeling that the Information Age will be the end of taboos, that dispassionate judgment will eventually replace superstition.  This is not to say incest will die out as a restriction, but that it will be replaced by a scientific or socioeconomic argument rather than a spiritual one."

    That's just an article of faith, isn't it?  The identical claim was made in the early years of the Enlightenment, but after 250 years the prediction shows no sign of coming true.  It's fine to have an irrational belief that reason will replace cultural biases, despite all the testimony of human history to the contrary, but that represents the triumph of hope over experience.

    Anyway, I don't agree that dispassionate judgment is always best.  The eugenics movement was dispassionate, and it came to the conclusion that certain human beings should be permanently separated from their parents, sterilized, or even destroyed, allegedly for rational reasons.  Taboos are valuable precisely because they are visceral rather than rational.  Revulsion and disgust have proven more effective than "rational" judgment in stopping the killing of people with severe physical defects.  If taboos also make it unacceptable to generalize crudely about race, I'm all for them.

    posted by bob @ 6:00 pm | Permanent link
Friday, October 10, 2003
    Rush to Judgment

    A book review about education, oddly enough, reminded me of the flap over Rush Limbaugh's recent unfortunate ad-lib about race.  The book, "No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning," by Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom, sees the racial gap in academic achievement as "the most important civil rights issue of our time."  Yet, claims the Wall Street Journal's review, this racial gap is not publicly acknowledged by civil-rights leaders, the media, or even scholars.

    Every society has its taboos, things that people think about but can't say out loud.  Part of being acculturated involves recognizing those taboos and outwardly abiding by them.  Other societies are more afraid of sex or blasphemy; one of our strongest taboos is race.  And the price of violating taboos--in modern life as in the ancient world--is ostracism.

    That's a good thing.  Although "taboo" connotes something outdated and superstitious, taboos set a standard for public behavior.  Our discomfort with discussing racial issues helps maintain the dignity of the disadvantaged in our society by making it intolerable for certain disparaging things to be said out loud.

    Tim Rutten's column in the Los Angeles Times last week (subscription required) exemplified our intolerance of crossing that line.  He calls Limbaugh "malicious and wrong" for saying that "the media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well."  And he layers fact upon fact to demonstrate that African-Americans do just fine in the NFL without any racial handicapping.  His is the voice of decency, outraged by the implications of Limbaugh's revealing remark.

    As he reports, public figures also lost no time in condemning Limbaugh's comment.  This is a drama that must be re-enacted whenever a taboo is threatened, a ritual reasserting that the taboo is still in force.  But taboos exact a price.  The reluctance to talk about sex in some societies prevents them from coping with HIV/AIDS.  And our reluctance to talk about race handicaps our ability to close the gap in education.

    The Limbaugh episode has been used to argue that Limbaugh is racist, that ESPN crassly used Limbaugh to boost ratings, that the values of right-wing talk radio are not the values of the mainstream.  To me it reveals that our media, and our culture, still embody a widepsread consensus--on race, at least.  Maybe the ties that bind our society together are not as frayed as we think they are.

    posted by bob @ 7:17 am | Permanent link
Thursday, October 9, 2003
    O'Reilly vs. Gross

    Yesterday's interview with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly on NPR's "Fresh Air" was memorable in several ways, and not just because O'Reilly walked off the show while the interview was in progress.  I was struck by the uncanny connection between O'Reilly's televised pugnacity and an episode that Terry Gross asked him about, where as a boy of 17 he threatened to punch his own father.  And in his behavior on "Fresh Air" he may unwittingly have borne out the old saying that bullies pick on other people because they're thin-skinned themselves, since he couldn't bear to listen to a quote from People Magazine that made fun of him.

    More importantly, the show highlighted the contradictions in the idea of bias-free journalism.  O'Reilly knew that his antagonist Al Franken had been interviewed by Terry Gross recently, and asked her if she had been as hostile to Franken as he felt she had been to him.  "Is NPR fair and balanced?" he taunted.  Gross reasonably responded that Franken's book is satirical and therefore a different case.  But he makes a valid point: that NPR's judgment *is* different from the Fox News Channel's.

    O'Reilly believes that he deals only in fact ("no spin"), and that anyone who disagrees with him is misinformed, lying, or defamatory.  NPR's values, in his mind, reflect bias.  For an NPR listener, on the other hand, O'Reilly probably seems slanted in his choice of topics on "The O'Reilly Factor" and in what he says about them.  All this means is that NPR and the Fox News Channel exist in different cultural envelopes.  I don't doubt that both networks sincerely believe they present the news impartially.  But if impartiality can mean such different things, the concept itself is suspect.

    posted by bob @ 1:52 pm | Permanent link
Tuesday, October 7, 2003
    Selling Out

    NPR's "Morning Edition" reported today on an ostensible controversy over the release of some previously unreleased recordings by Jacques Brel.  In the introduction we are told that "fans and purists are dismayed over the release of the music that Brel asked never be published,"  and a music reporter is quoted as saying that "artistic principle is being sacrificed on the altar of money."  In other words, Brel's apparent wish not to release these recordings has been overridden by the desire to make a buck.  (Or a franc.)

    It's a common journalistic device to cast a story in bipolar terms, but of course that's a reporter's conceit, really an interpretation couched as objective reporting.  This particular dichotomy is one that's near and dear to the baby-boomer generation: the supposed conflict between idealism and "selling out."  It may resonate with NPR's audience, but that doesn't make it any less a narrative imposed artificially on the facts.

    In the classical-music world it's not uncommon for record labels to release unapproved recordings after the artist's death, as the Heifetz and Rubinstein discographies will attest.  Just this week it was announced that the BBC has unearthed a lost recording by the contralto Kathleen Ferrier, and no one seems very concerned about whether she would want it broadcast this week (it will be aired on BBC Radio 3).  So it's hardly a given that the posthumous release of unauthorized recordings is inherently a violation of "artistic principle."  In fact, classical-music fans are often delighted to hear a hitherto-unknown example of a favorite interpreter's work *because* of their high regard for that performer's artistry, not in spite of it.

    It's all too easy to fall into prefabricated "controversies" as a way of presenting the news.  But it can be tendentious as well as lazy.  In France the new Brel collection is flying off the shelves: it's the top-selling title there.  Maybe "fans and purists" aren't so dismayed after all.

    posted by bob @ 12:59 pm | Permanent link
Friday, October 3, 2003
    Only Connect

    NPR likes to cover election campaigns by playing excerpts from the candidates' radio and TV commercials, as they did the other day in a report from California by John McChesney.  His report assessed the strategic direction of the leading campaigns for governor, saying the TV spots have "shifted into attack mode."  Arnold Schwarzenegger positions himself as "the outsider who will clean up Sacramento."  Gov. Grey Davis has new "bare-knuckle ads," but he doesn't appear in his own commercials "because he doesn't want to remind voters of his past slash-and-burn campaigns."

    The same morning, the Los Angeles Times's Calendar section ran a story (subscription required) about a new TV series, "Karen Sisco."  Its thrust was that "struggling ABC is banking on its high-profile 'Karen Sisco' to deliver the ratings hit it so desperately needs."  The report notes that "the show debuts at a crucial time for ABC, which tied for third with relative upstart Fox in last season's ratings race."

    What do these have in common?  Both stories are about management strategies rather than content.  It's as if voters and television viewers were mostly interested in evaluating campaign managers and network executives, rather than in whether a show is worth watching or a candidate is worth voting for.  This is nothing new, of course.  But it makes me wonder about the assumptions underlying that coverage.

    In my experience, people like TV shows if they enjoy the characters, writing, cast, situations, etc.  And they vote for candidates they agree with.  By contrast, journalists often seem to live in a meta-world where office-seekers and television programming are mere "products," and the process of "selling" them is more important than the products themselves.  This disconnect between journalists and the public can't be good for either journalism or its audience.

    posted by bob @ 4:38 pm | Permanent link
Wednesday, October 1, 2003
    Democracy Now

    Can a radio group give management control to its listeners, volunteers, and staff?  The Pacifica Network is going to try.

    The Pacifica Foundation is the original "alternative" broadcaster, created over 50 years ago to air noncommercial radio programming in the San Francisco Bay area, and later in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, and Houston.  The founders wanted to present radio drama, and broadcasts by amateur instrumentalists and choral and orchestral groups, and "creative" programming generally.

    Over the years Pacifica has evolved into an outlet for far-left political advocacy, specialized forms of music, and news coverage that avowedly differs from what's offered by the mainstream media.  It audience may be passionate, but it is also very small, fractionalized by a programming lineup that can change character (and language) from hour to hour.  A management effort to streamline the programming caused a palace revolt, overturning that strategy, the management, and now the whole governance structure.

    Under a new set of by-laws, a quarter of each station's board will be chosen by station personnel, and the rest by listeners.  Overriding the popular choice are specific racial and gender requirements: half of the board members must be members of minority groups, and half must be women.  "We wanted to make absolutely certain that no Pacifica governing body would ever be dominated by white people or by men," says an official statement.

    It's admirable when people put their philosophy into practice, and it will be fascinating to see whether popular democracy is consistent with effective corporate governance.  I wonder, though, if this will lead to better radio and greater impact on behalf of Pacifica's values...or if it will mean a self-absorbed management that is focused more on internal process and politics than on public service.  For any broadcaster the bottom line should be its contribution to the greater good.  Dramatizing ideals internally is not the same thing.

    Public broadcasting's trade paper Current does an excellent job of reporting this story.

    posted by bob @ 2:35 pm | Permanent link

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I'm a consultant in the arts and media, specializing in classical-music radio and recordings. My professional expertise ranges from marketing to management to artists and repertoire, but my enthusiasms embrace just about all the mass media, with a particular emphasis on the arts. More


About Media Res
Society and culture in the age of the Internet are more exposed than ever before, subject to examination and investigation instantaneously and ubiquitously. But we human beings still haven't outgrown our capacity to overlook the obvious, or to believe what we want to believe no matter what the evidence to the contrary, or to mistake our narrow prejudices for high ideals. This blog will look at the interrelationships between the media, culture, and society from different angles, maybe with a few surprises now and then. More

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One of the greatest success stories on the Web must be Jim Romenesko's daily roundup of media industry news, under the aegis of the Poynter Institute.  Crisply written and totally in touch, it's indispensible. 

For news about radio I check the home page of the industry publication "Radio and Records." 

The weekly NPR show "On the Media" takes a consistently fresh look at the media, and the Website makes it easy to listen to segments of the show if you don't find it on your local public radio station.

Among the best media critics around is the Los Angeles Times' Tim Rutten, who writes its "Regarding Media" column twice a week.

And some of the most entertaining and penetrating coverage of the media comes from satirist Harry Shearer on his weekly radio program "Le Show," originating from the fertile ground of KCRW Radio in Santa Monica, California and broadcast nationally.  Current and past shows can be heard online through the Website.

To keep up on current books, performers, and issues in the arts, I listen when I can to Leonard Lopate from New York's WNYC.  The media are not the main focus, but the show is brilliant, always timely and well-researched, and with terrific guests.  As an interviewer, Lopate is in a class by himself: curious, witty, articulate, extraordinarly well-informed, a superb listener.  It's one of life's great mysteries that his show is not broadcast nationally, but at least it's streamed on the Web.

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