News and Comedy: That’s a Laugh
First, the late-night comedy writers invaded the Newseum in Washington, courtesy of the Writers Guild of America East. Then, Jason Jones of the Daily Show infiltrated the New York Times. Around the same time, Stephen Colbert shows up as guest editor of Newsweek. Of course, comics have been appearing at news industry functions — Colbert’s past appearance at the White House Correspondents Dinner comes to mind — for a long time. But finally, the mythical line has been crossed and the hilarious critics of the news are taking their rightful place in the actual news media!
After all, a lot of young people get most of their news from Comedy Central anyway, so why not marry the two? It’s a win-win — real-world exposure for the cable comics and a shot in the arm for the ailing news industry, right?
Believe me, I would have thought so. I’ve been a member of the news media for decades, and I love those guys on late night. I use the devastating critiques of the news media by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert in the journalism classes I teach, and they’re real crowd pleasers — the hippest guys ever allowed on the bus.
But, the reality is it’s not good, just not good at all — and mostly for the news media.
I attended the Newseum event, “A Potentially Regrettable Evening with Comedy Writers,” which featured a series of fierce stand-up routines by J.R. Havlan (The Daily Show With Jon Stewart), Bill Scheft (Late Show With David Letterman), Anthony Jeselnick (Late Night With Jimmy Fallon), Matt Goldich (Best Week Ever), Tim Carvell (The Daily Show With Jon Stewart), Opus Moreschi (The Colbert Report), Tom Ruprecht (Late Show With David Letterman), and Allison Abner (The West Wing).
Anthony Jeselnick particularly rocked the packed house on the Newseum’s terrace level with its picture windows facing Pennsylvania Avenue. The event was so hip that I almost forgot I was wearing my best corridors-of-power sensible heels and pearls and sitting high atop the city overlooking the majestic Capitol dome.
But then, the comics overstayed their welcome by agreeing — against their better judgment, I’m sure — to symbolically don their own version of Washington costumery. They sat on a panel at a dais and analyzed what they do and how it relates to news.
The earnest Washington audience — lobbyists, policy types, writers, etc. — picked up on the conventional wisdom that the comics have become the go-to source for America’s news. They kept asking about it in different ways for an hour. The comics took the questions seriously at first, but then they grew more and more uncomfortable with what was starting to sound like a growing social responsibility.
As the crowd marveled at the comics’ ability to skewer the very people those in the audience spent their days courting or covering, the comics essentially said, while shrugging their collective shoulders: “Hey, we’re just doing our jobs. We’re just trying to make people laugh. Sure, we try to be accurate and not make up facts, but that’s as far as it goes. We don’t want people to use us for their main source of news.”
Then it hit me that the people in the audience thought the comics led a glamorous life and the people wanted the comics to bring that glamor to news. But the comics made it clear they work hard at their jobs, similar to journalists perhaps, but they’re not journalists. Their job title is “comic” and they report to their offices early each day with enough on their plates for chrissakes, and that usually entails keeping up with what journalists are reporting.
TVs go static in back rooms across the nation
I guess we’ve made it through the big digital conversion in one piece. Just a couple million people had major problems, apparently, but I keep getting this picture in my mind of millions of little black and white tvs sitting on shelves in garages, workrooms, sewing rooms, and guest rooms, abandoned forever. Not every room in every house could possibly have a cable-ready flat panel.
A little piece of our history is lost with the end of those clunky, metal, and plastic devices that used to open our world to Lucy, Andy Griffith, Gunsmoke, and Lawrence Welk.
We think now in terms of entertainment centers, with our own media at the ready. It’s all about home entertainment, wall screens over the fireplace and friends and family joining in the fun. But that’s a fantasy of privilege. What about working class TV?
What becomes of the stained and dirty sets sitting in break rooms in factories, barber shops, retail outlets, and repair shops across the land? What happened to turning on the set, seeing what’s on, and zoning out for 10 minutes to the moving pictures you had nothing to do with putting there? Sometimes you don’t want choice. You want distraction and to tune in to what other people might be watching right now, this minute, even if it’s to think, “I’d never watch this garbage.”
But perhaps I’m living in the past. Perhaps everyone has gotten rid of those little, grimy tvs already. Perhaps the narrative of TV as a place where other people also “reside” right along with us is as antiquated as the plots on those sitcoms, dramas, and variety shows of old.
(This review was accepted by Journalism, the academic journal, but the book reviews for the issue were cut for space, so I print it here.)
Caryl Rivers
Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women
Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2007. 168 pp.
ISBN 978 1 58465 615 9
Reviewed by Danna Walker, American University, Washington DC, USA
This slim volume of media criticism attempts to make the case that the media
have as their agenda frightening women into believing they will pay dearly
for trying to leave their traditional roles. The author cites as the foundation
for her thesis her work in journalism, her experience as a media observer for
more than 30 years, and specific news stories and events that she says have
become part of the ‘fun house mirror of the news media’ by being endlessly
recycled into a dominant cultural narrative.
With chapter titles such as ‘Superwomen and Twitching Wrecks’, ‘Too
Tired for Sex, Too Late for Babies?’, ‘Hating Hillary, Trashing Teresa, and
Mauling Martha’, and ‘News as Poli-Porn’, Rivers takes an irreverent approach
to highlighting media trends.
Like other books about women’s representation, Selling Anxiety accuses
the media of perpetuating stereotypes, focusing on the negative, and denigrating
feminism. But Rivers distinguishes the media’s past mistreatment
of women – when the nation’s editors thought of women as ‘low-prestige’
and inconsequential – from the current environment in which women are a
highly desirable demographic. This change, she says, has only served to make
women a bigger target of the hyper-competitive, 24-hour news cycle.
As more women than ever earn college degrees, progress in politics, and
advance in the world of business, academia, medicine, law, and economics,
the media message is: ‘Poor dears, the price for your accomplishment will be
unhappiness, regret, failed marriages, wretched children’, writes Rivers (p. 13).
For example, she points out the hyped media coverage of two studies
in the winter of 2005. The studies purportedly showed that men preferred
subordinate women and that women’s likelihood of marrying fell by almost 60 percent for every 15-point increase in their IQ score. Rivers points out what
The New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Toronto Star missed – that
the first tiny study was done on male undergraduates rating the desirability of
a supervisor, peer, or assistant, and the second involved men and women in
their eighties. Numerous other studies debunk these ideas.
Rivers focuses in particular on the now infamous 2003 New York Times
Magazine article, ‘The Opt-Out Revolution’, which she expertly dismisses as
based on a collection of anecdotes from small groups of Princeton graduates
with affluent husbands, many of whom said they weren’t really ‘opting out’
for the long term.
In addition to deconstructing specific stories, Rivers summarizes research
on some of the more dismal statistics about women in media, particularly on
how women are seen or heard mostly as ordinary citizens, crime victims, or
subjects of soft features in television news and in print – not as authorities.
She also is effective when focusing on politics. In a stroke of brilliance,
she perhaps surprisingly characterizes right-wing pundit Ann Coulter as a feminist success story. In doing so, she captures the essence of feminist criticism
by embracing the sometimes unexpected outcomes that can occur with
any robust theory. She notes that what Coulter and other conservative women
who attack feminism don’t understand is that feminism is what has given
them their platform.
Rivers would do well to remember that power and the ambiguities of
feminist and media effects in other parts of the book. Media are an easy target,
which is why it takes deep analysis to give media critique meaning. Many
of the examples Rivers gives are informative, but many are also tired and
dated, including coverage of the death of Jon-Benet Ramsey, the Andrea Yates
child drownings, and the Louise Woodward ‘nanny murder case’.
And, at times, she substitutes short cuts for research. For example, she
cites a word search for ‘selfish’ and ‘parents’ in the Nexis database as evidence
that the media have incorporated these terms into the background of news
discourse, to the detriment of families. But a search for ‘loving’ and ‘parents’
for the same two-year period gets an identical response – more than 1000
documents.
Rivers tackles not only television punditry, but newspapers, op-ed
writers, and virtually every other type of media on countless social subjects
affecting women. While undergraduates in women-and-media classes or
media literacy courses would likely enjoy her irreverence and freewheeling
subject areas, her broad strokes are a shortcoming for those seeking an
in-depth investigation into women and media.
Rivers struggles mightily to make women the chief victims of today’s
problem of profit-driven infotainment and media ‘buzz’. But she says little
about women’s voices as independent journalists, bloggers, and leaders in a
growing media reform movement.
A book about women and media with popular appeal is a welcome
addition to the literature. But while trying to be provocative – including on
the book’s cover, which features the face of a woman anxiously biting the
corner of her heavily glossed red lip – Rivers forgets, perhaps, that there is an
essential difference between selling anxiety and scaring women.
Writing to liberation
I am an academic, of course, and a journalist, so writing is pretty much my life. I teach it. I do it regularly. I even coach other academic writers. But I still struggle with it. Anyone who says writing is easy is a liar.
I’ve had to struggle with some decisions about my career lately, and some of it comes down to my commitment to writing my book, Married to the Media: A History of Women and News, which is under contract with Marquette Books.
I can continue to burn myself out over the next year doing all the stuff I normally do, or I can carve some time to write my book and pay the price in earned income. I’ve actually pretty much made the decision, having dropped several paying gigs and turning down a job because those things would be short-term rewards, while I’m hoping my book will bring the good stuff — the long-term but less tangible and predictable rewards.
My writing, I’m wagering, will get me somewhere — and not just to the end of a sentence, paragraph or chapter.
This idea of writing one’s way to something isn’t new. I’m sure there are lots of amazing quotes and writings about this from writers through history. But the idea is something bigger.
Good writing is about critical analysis — the embodiment of critical thinking, which is one of the things that makes it hard.
bell hooks has written that critical thinking saved her life; she likely would have had a very different future had it not been for the critical thinking she learned as a student.
Another of my favorite writers and intellectuals — Cornel West — expressed his critical thinking as a kid by beating up and robbing his schoolmates and refusing to stand for the pledge of allegiance — a protest against the racial oppression and segregation sanctioned in every area of American life. He, too, learned to express his critical analysis in writing.
When I told a friend recently of my plan to make my writing a priority for the sake of my future, she responded that she had once done the same thing in order to leave a university she found oppressive and closed to intellectual exploration.
“I just couldn’t do it any longer,” she said. “So I made the time. I wrote my way out.”
She did. She wrote about women and media, and did the work and the research, and she landed somewhere much more suited to intellectual challenge and rigor in her chosen field.
hooks, West, and my friend and colleague make this bet seem like a sure thing, indeed.
If only I had Tammy Wynette’s hair!
Sometimes I wear my hair in an up-do with a clip like Sarah Palin did during the presidential campaign but it never gets to the height of the teased-and-sprayed poofs of the early 1960s. A little back combing and hairspray might have helped my rendition of “Stand by Your Man” in Reporting class. I hesitated before I warbled but then thought, “What the heck.” It was brief and off key, but remarkably, an undergraduate broke out in song along with me. I had been trying to practice the notion of “authenticity” in class — the idea that students respond better to professors as people, not authority figures.
Anyway, what precipitated this miscarriage of juke-ness was my playing of a video of the 1992 interview that then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton had with correspondent Steve Croft of CBS News 60 Minutes. At the time, Clinton admitted causing pain in his marriage in response to allegations by Arkansas mini-celebrity Gennifer Flowers that she had had a 12-year affair with Clinton. This occurred prior to the New Hampshire primary.
I use this video when talking about interviewing, specifically the best way to ask a “bomb” question. The bomb is the question that is uncomfortable to ask and can make long-held enemies for reporters. It’s one of the things that differentiates a journalistic interview from a casual conversation.
I tell the class to watch Croft’s body language, and particularly his eyes. They’re like lasers that bore into your soul.
For nine minutes, he is relentless. Some excerpts, in order:
“I’m assuming … that you’re categorically denying that you ever had an affair with Gennifer Flowers.”
“You’ve said that your marriage has had problems, that you’ve had difficulties. What do you mean by that? What does that mean? Is that some kind of, help us break the code. Does that mean you were separated … does it mean adultery?”
“You’ve been saying all week that you’ve got to put this issue behind you. Are you prepared tonight to say that you’ve never had an extramarital affair?”
“You’re trying to put this issue behind you and the problem with the answer is it’s not a denial, and people are sitting out there, voters, and they’re saying, ‘Look, it’s really pretty simple. If he’s never had an extramarital affair, why doesn’t he just say so?'”
And, then the journalistic payoff heard round the world.
Clinton: “You’re looking at two people who love each other. This is not an arrangement or an understanding. This is a marriage. That’s a very different thing.”
Hillary: “You know, I’m not sittin’ here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I’m sittin’ here because I love him and I respect him and I honor what he’s been through and what we’ve been through together. And, you know, if that’s not enough for people, then heck, don’t vote for him.”
The students are riveted by this act of journalistic chutzpah. They’re also taken by Hillary’s pronounced Southern accent. They laugh knowingly at the irony of Clinton’s response considering what followed after he became president. That’s one part of presidential history they all know about, even if only one of them could conjure the most famous words from Tammy’s ode from 40 years ago: “Stand by Your Man.”
A persistent vegetative state is a wake-up call
The wife of a colleague recently complained of a severe headache and before the day was out she was unconscious in the hospital with a burst aneurysm. This couple has been married more than 20 years and has a 12-year-old daughter.
To the doctors’ surprise (these things don’t usually get better), the wife actually regained consciousness and her memory and sense of humor were intact. After a few weeks’ stay, she went home. She was talking normally, getting around and doing things for herself. It was close to miraculous, and her husband, family and friends felt blessed. My one contribution here was to take over a dinner, including cupcakes and a “welcome home” card as part of a coordinated effort by friends and neighbors to provide home-cooked meals every night of the week.
“Well, that was amazing,” I said to myself. “Another great outcome for all the people I know. We — my people — always come out ahead.” And, I helped make it happen with my cooking and cupcakes. We’re all such good folks. Smug smile.
Twenty-four hours after arriving home, my colleague’s wife woke up in the night in distress. She didn’t feel well. Within hours she was back in the hospital, unconscious, where she has remained, with no signs of progress. His insurance company is now making him move her to a “facility” for maintenance care.
The next time I see my colleague, he wears his disbelief on his thin, drawn face and this usually droll and unflappable husband, father and video journalist is floundering and lost.
While the rest of the media world is apoplectic about the economic crisis, the Iranian situation, North Korean nukes, the new Supreme Court appointee and what Obama orders on his hamburgers, my colleague is beginning to understand what none of us yammering away at life want to think about.
He said it to my face, “Everything can change, just like that. You don’t want to believe it but it’s true. In an instant your life is obliterated.”
I know everyone around us heard what he was saying. No one spoke. Maybe they’ve heard it before. It even happened to “my people.”
The mind-body dis/connection
I have the summer “off” from teaching, but, of course, I have projects hanging over my head and I have to prepare for classes in the fall, which takes an endless amount of time. A few weeks in, I haven’t made much progress on these projects, but what I have done is get myself back to the gym. And, it feels good.
Despite my vows not to, I turned doughy during the school year and put on several pounds that pushed me over the edge from acceptable to borderline overweight. My cholesterol and C reactive protein are borderline high; my Vitamin D is borderline low. I’m clearly at some sort of “border” with my health and I’m determined to do something more proactive.
I’ve lost 10 pounds and I’m starting to uncover muscle and bone I haven’t seen in awhile, thanks in large part to a five-foot tall, totally shredded Romanian woman named Lydia who teaches a killer “kwando” and weight-lifting class but with a zen vibe.
At the same time, I’m taking yoga at the local ashram, no kidding. Thanks, Liz Gilbert. Yogi Victor talks a lot about treating the earth well, biodynamic food, and the awful things we do to our bodies in the West.
My biggest life goals are to eat well naturally all the time (thus ridding myself of a lifelong sugar addiction), and write well naturally all the time (thus ridding myself of a lifelong fear of failure and success).
But I’m having trouble concentrating on both my body and my mind at once.
As I write this, it sounds really simple. And, from reading Prochaska and DiClemente’s extensive research on how people change, I just have to keep trying.
Would I rather have a book or a healthy, slim body? Truthfully, the body would make me happier. That’s quite a revelation.
More later…
Sometimes procrastination can be a good thing
Starting when I was a teenager I noticed that I procrastinated. Well, to be more precise, I noticed that other people procrastinated. It bugged me, and I realized I did it, too. Everyone had an excuse.
I was always motivated to utilize my time efficiently for some reason, and I didn’t like excuses. I decided to change, and to start keeping track of everything I needed to do.
I quickly realized I could never keep everything I had to do on a list in my head. I started writing things down — small things I needed to do (buy new sparkly blue eyeshadow at drug store) and longer-range goals (grow up to be pretty and smart).
For 40 years I have written down my to-do lists each day — in tiny writing on small pieces of paper that I could carry with me. I can’t remember when I started carrying a planner but it hasn’t been more than a few feet from my person in decades. Post-it notes were my iPhone beginning in 1979.
Fighting procrastination has become such an obsession that I actually write down the maximum number of things that I think I can accomplish each day.
That worked well for me when my life was controlled by, well, me. I got a lot accomplished. But it really hasn’t worked well for years, and it’s especially not working well right now because my life has become more complicated than I ever could have imagined.
I’m not an astrophysicist or even a Web master, but I am a woman in mid-life with a husband, two teenage children (one of whom is applying to colleges), a home in a densely populated part of the United States, a position as a university academic, a professional journalist, a writing coach, a would-be book author, a Twitterer, a blogger, a member of an extended family, and an active, responsible person and community member. And, I have at least one friend, and she occasionally needs attention.
This Post-it note system, as I say, has served me well in the past. I’m two-thirds of the way through my life goals list, as a matter of fact!
But I find now that I keep frantically writing down my list and quickly running out of Post-it note space. And, so many of the items have sub-activities and involve this technical glitch and that bit of research, that I get lost and confused. I have a lot of electronic organizational tools, too: My e-mail is strategically categorized in folders; my desk is pretty clean; I’ve now begun using Zotero to organize my e-mail and Web sources for my writing and teaching.
But I can’t help thinking that this “do-the-maximum” approach needs to be modified. By trying to do the most each day, I’m burning myself out and failing to enjoy the sunset years on the highway of life — or, if not the sunset years, the dusk years — that time when you’re still energetic and productive (if waning a bit), and you still look pretty good because, well, no one can see that clearly on the road at dusk.
Besides, “do the maximum” used to be do-able. Now, the number of things we can do as individuals armed with a cache of electronic tools that bridge the time/space divide and render geographical boundaries moot, is virtually infinite.
No wonder I’m a bit tattered at the end of a long academic year. And, you should see my poor date book.
Letting go
I’ve never been one who is comfortable with uncertainty but I’m trying to take the measure of myself — without worrying about others who might be taking the measure of me. Truth is no one has time to take anyone else’s measure these days. We’re pretty self-absorbed.
I’m trying to let go of some issues/connections/relations that I’ve been holding on to for awhile.
A few recent incidents have got me thinking this way: A close friend I’ve known for more than 20 years canceled lunch on me three times straight. Another acquaintance who kept saying “let’s get together” just canceled lunch for the second straight time. A family reunion I’ve been planning for several months just got scrapped because my sister and father bailed. My brother had already been pretty iffy about coming.
I just gave up on a couple of jobs I’ve had in conjunction with my teaching position. I’m done with all that striving for someone else’s attention.
With all this canceling and giving up, you might think I’d be depressed or concerned about my lack of social connections. We often joke around our house that Mom and Dad don’t have any friends anymore.
But mostly I think, oh well. I’m feeling that keeping my own company for awhile might be a good thing. I need to prepare for my eldest’s departure to college. I need to do some writing. I need to talk to strangers — people whose agendas aren’t intermingled with mine. As I say in this blog, I need to get out more, and outside myself more, while keeping my own counsel.
It’s time to let go of a few things, and get on with it. Even if “it” is a bit uncertain.
M. Appeal (Mass Appeal) 