My favorite example of handling the loyal audience/new audience divide badly is when NBC decided they wanted to get more women to watch the Olympics, and thus large swaths of their prime-time Olympics coverage were devoted to documentary-style features about the hardships that the athletes had overcome — a seemingly endless cavalcade of relatives with cancer, or car accidents, or brutal injuries, or their dogs getting sick, or the Starbucks barista getting their drink order wrong — suddenly, every athlete’s life was like a country-western song. And the usual audience for the Olympics asked, with greater levels of irritation, “Hey, weren’t we supposed to be watching some actual athletic competitions? Wasn’t some skier supposed to be falling down a mountain by now?”
Jim Geraghty, “Spreading Our Ideas in the Era of Drug-Dealer Journalism”, National Review, 2013-04-29
April 29, 2013
QotD: The critical importance of accurate audience assessment
April 26, 2013
Minnesota introduces new policy for dealing with veterans
You may not hear about this in the mainstream press, but The Duffel Blog digs for the real story:
Officials from the Minnesota Department of Motor Vehicles have confirmed approval of a new policy making it mandatory for all active-duty and military veterans to register their status with the agency. The move will require all veterans to have a special “Vet” designation on their drivers’ licenses and state identification cards.
The Minn. DMV, which hopes to have the policy implemented by 2015, cites an inherent mental health threat by veterans as their main reason for devising the plan.
“We’ve seen what these savages are capable of all over CNN and MSNBC,” says DMV director, Greg Olson. “Out of all the millions of men and women who have deployed to combat zones this past decade, there are literally a dozen, perhaps even two, who have come home and committed atrocious acts. That’s way too big a chance. We can’t risk having these people hidden in our community and will be making sure they’re easily identifiable to law enforcement personnel and citizens in general.”
The new strategy will most likely result in changed police escalation-of-force procedure when dealing with veterans during routine traffic stops.
According to Olson, law enforcement officers will be given more opportunity to defend themselves against a perceived threat.
“Phase One will consist of the officer identifying an individual’s vet status on his or her driver’s license,” he says. “Once the officer realizes what he or she is dealing with, Phase Two will kick in and they will immediately unsheathe their pistol and drawdown on the potential psychopath. Then, at Phase Three, the officer will be given free reign to search the individual’s vehicle for weapons and dead bodies. If, and only if, the officer doesn’t find anything, then he will subsequently release the veteran and thank them for their service.”
April 23, 2013
Seller of fake bomb detectors found guilty of fraud
Back in 2010, I said “There should be a special hell for this scam artist” who mocked up bomb detector kits and sold them for thousands of dollars in Iraq and other areas with a real need for protection against IEDs. It’s taken more than three years, but he’s finally been found guilty:
A Somerset-based businessman has been convicted of three counts of fraud over the sale of bogus bomb detectors after his operation was exposed in a BBC Newsnight investigation in 2010.
This was a scam of global dimensions. James McCormick marketed his fake bomb detectors around the world, selling them in Georgia, Romania, Niger, Thailand, Saudi Arabia and beyond.
But his main market was Iraq, where lives depended on bomb detection and where the bogus devices were, and still are, used at virtually every checkpoint in the capital.
Between 2008 and 2009 alone, more than 1,000 Iraqis were killed in explosions in Baghdad.
How the device was meant to work:
- A small amount of the substance the user wished to detect — such as explosives — was put in a Kilner jar along with a sticker that was intended to absorb the “vapours” of the substance
- The sticker was then placed on a credit-card sized card, which was read by a card reader and inserted into the device
- The user would then hold the device, which had no working electronics, and the swivelling antenna was meant to indicate the location of the sought substance
In other words, a magical dowsing stick that depended on the user to “detect” whatever the device was supposedly seeking. This wasn’t a case of a device that didn’t do what it was designed to do: it was a deliberate fraud with just enough “technological” mumbo-jumbo to appear to be a solution to a real problem:
The court heard that McCormick began his business by buying a batch of novelty “golf ball detectors” from the USA for less than $20 each. In fact they were simply radio aerials, attached by a hinge to a handle. He put the labels of his company, ATSC, on them and sold them as bomb detectors for $5,000 each.
He then made a more advanced-looking version which he was to sell for up to $55,000. The ADE-651 came with cards which he claimed were “programmed” to detect everything from explosives to ivory and even $100 bills. Police say the only genuine part of the kit — and the most expensive — was the carrying case.
To their credit, the police moved to investigate the same day the BBC’s original story broke. Strategy Page explained why the scam had been so easy to sell. Later it was reported that British civil servants and military personnel had been implicated in the fraud.
April 16, 2013
QotD: Media “experts” immediately after a tragedy
Right now, I could write segments on the idiot comments made by the usual suspects … but do you really need another piece of evidence to support the argument that, say, Cynthia McKinney is a lunatic? […] I can’t get all that revved up about it. She is what she is. If you really put much stock in her judgment of what’s “the real story” behind a horrific news event, theories that hear this awful news and immediately jump to elaborate theories of “false flag” operations and the notion that our local and federal law-enforcement ranks are full of men and women willing to set bombs and blow up children in order to score some sort of propaganda victory … well, then I doubt there’s anything anyone can say to dissuade you of that vast worldview you’ve constructed within your mind.
The conspiracy theorist is only a couple of steps away from the person who — often on Twitter — begins discussing who was behind it with way too much certainty. As I said on Twitter yesterday, I suspect that speculation, unhelpful as it is, is a coping mechanism: People attempt to make a sudden unexpected horror fit into pattern of known facts. If we can figure out who did it, we can find someone to feel anger and rage towards and, for some people, that’s a much easier emotion to deal with than shock, horror, fear, and sorrow.
The all-too-confident speculator is only a few steps away from the ordinarily knowledgeable terrorism expert or pundit yanked into a television studio at a moment’s notice and asked to speak, extemporaneously, about what could be behind these awful events based on nothing more than initial reports and the most horrific of images playing on a monitor just beyond the camera.
Jim Geraghty, “The Morning Jolt”, 2013-04-16
April 13, 2013
Jonah Goldberg on Melissa Harris-Perry’s “Lean Forward” ad
In the most recent “Goldberg File” email, Goldberg had this to say about the rather revealing sentiments expressed by Melissa Harris-Perry in an MSNBC “Lean Forward” clip:
Before we get to all that, a word about the ad campaign itself. In one sense these ads are like the question, “You want extra?” from the masseuse at a shady Vietnamese massage parlor — proof that all pretense at propriety is exactly that, pretense. This is supposed to be a news network. Moreover, it is supposed to be a news network that constantly boasts of its professional and philosophical superiority to Fox News (and it’s true; except for ratings, influence, quality, and profit MSNBC kicks Fox’s butt). And yet, they run testimonials to state power with a frequency that rivals North Korean TV.
But in another sense these ads are the “extra” itself — a rather sad and perfunctory attempt to satisfy urges that barely rise above the masturbatory. The self-love oozes from the screen as the hosts’ inner-15-year-olds realize this is their chance to prove they’re as great as their favorite social-studies teacher told them they were!
Thanks to the magic of Hollywood, they preen for the cameras with an almost post-coital glow as they deliver their little sermonettes that amount to pointless verbal onanism. Hey, look. There’s no-necked Ed Schultz at a diner, looking like he’s having one last cup of coffee before he has to work up a sweat burying the corpse of a dissident union official still moldering in the trunk of his ten-year-old Coupe de Ville. And there’s Rachel Maddow (looking a bit like that aforementioned dead union official) trying to give her Stakhanovite commitment to infrastructure projects a romantic hue.
All Your Children Belong to Us
And now there’s Melissa Harris-Perry. By now you’ve heard of or seen the ad, but just in case here it is. In short, she thinks the idea that your kids are, well, yours is outdated and counterproductive.
Rich Lowry, praise be upon him, offers a fine summary of what Harris-Perry is getting at here. Actually, no disrespect to the guy who signs my paycheck (who is not only a powerful man, but a handsome one) but Harris-Perry herself was more than clear enough about what she’s after. The thing is only 30 seconds long, very highly produced, and straight to the point.
This is important because Harris-Perry is now simultaneously insisting she won’t apologize and insisting that she didn’t say what she so obviously said. In the ad she’s talking about the role of government, government investments, and ridiculing the idea of “private” ownership of kids. “We have to break through,” she urged, “our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families.” Now she claims she was talking about civil society and voluntarism?
As the guy who took Obama to his first stable said when the president was about to step in some equine feces, “Oh, that’s horses***.”
April 12, 2013
Conor Friedersdorf: “Why Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s Trial Should Be a Front-Page Story”
In The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf explains why the Philadelphia horror story should be front-page news, but isn’t:
The grand jury report in the case of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 72, is among the most horrifying I’ve read. “This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy — and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors,” it states. “The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels — and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths.”
Charged with seven counts of first-degree murder, Dr. Gosnell is now standing trial in a Philadelphia courtroom. An NBC affiliate’s coverage includes testimony as grisly as you’d expect. “An unlicensed medical school graduate delivered graphic testimony about the chaos at a Philadelphia clinic where he helped perform late-term abortions,” the channel reports. “Stephen Massof described how he snipped the spinal cords of babies, calling it, ‘literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body.’ He testified that at times, when women were given medicine to speed up their deliveries, ‘it would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place.'”
One former employee described hearing a baby screaming after it was delivered during an abortion procedure. “I can’t describe it. It sounded like a little alien,” she testified. Said the Philadelphia Inquirer in its coverage, “Prosecutors have cited the dozens of jars of severed baby feet as an example of Gosnell’s idiosyncratic and illegal practice of providing abortions for cash to poor women pregnant longer than the 24-week cutoff for legal abortions in Pennsylvania.”
April 11, 2013
“Elite Panic” and the media gatekeepers
There’s a pretty horrific tale unfolding in a Philadelphia court room, but most people won’t have heard about it because — while it’s bloody and otherwise eminently newsworthy — it will “send the wrong message” if it gets the traditional full-court press of media attention. At Ace of Spades H.Q., this is noted and explained by Ace:
I think this is how those who imagine themselves to be elite justify their complete embargo on the Kermit Gosnell serial-murder trial.
People who do evil generally don’t imagine they’re doing evil. In fact, some of the worst evils are perpetrated by those who’ve convinced themselves they’re doing good. One’s conscience tends to restrain one from evil; but if one can trick one’s conscience into thinking one’s doing good by doing evil, well. Then you’ve really got something.
I imagine the media believes it’s “doing good” by being so cautious about What Truths the Public Is Capable of Hearing. After all, if this Gosnell trial were publicized, people would Get Angry, and come to All the Wrong Conclusions, and put the allies of those in the media (such as NARAL and Planned Parenthood) on the defensive.
Hell, these maniacs might even get in into their skulls to hurt people!
Well, we can’t have that. We can’t let the Wrong Kind of Information — true information, but the sort of information the non-enlightened may be confused about — passing into the Wrong Kinds of Brains.
Thus, this embargo on the Gosnell story is not just partisan bias, fronting for the Democrats by refusing to mention anything that might be used as a wedge issue against them.
No, this embargo is done for the Public Good, even if the public is too stupid to understand that. If the public heard about these things … Well, that’s not gonna happen. Not on our watch.
It’s been occurring to me lately that much media behavior is explainable by this prism. They don’t want to report certain facts, not because the facts aren’t true (they’re facts by definition), but because they’re Concerned About The Capacity of Non-Journalists to Successfully Interpret These Facts.
April 8, 2013
Words as weapons, words as tools
The agreed meaning of words is critical to communication. Redefinition of meaning can be a useful political tool to shift an argument or to delegitimize an opponent:
A huge quotient of the seemingly endless cultural and ideological wars hinges on how terms are defined. Those who claim authority to declare what words mean are able to shape public thinking like a sculptor molds clay. Although facts — which are what news organizations are supposed to peddle — seem immutable, words are forever in flux. Both “liberal” and “progressive” now mean almost the opposite of what they did a century ago. Such semantic squabbling also leads to absurdities such as how the phrase “colored person” was deemed hateful and replaced with the far more sensitive “person of color.” Terms such as “racist” are almost never applied to nonwhites, and if you dare tell a militant feminist that she’s “sexist,” she may scratch out your eyeballs. And don’t even dare to ask for a quantifiable and consistent definition of “Semite” lest you be deemed “anti-Semitic.”
What’s worse, many of these politically charged terms never seem to achieve stasis. Over the past generation there’s been a ballooning expansion of terms such as “racism,” “sexism,” “white supremacy,” and, the granddaddy (sorry — Earth Mother) that supposedly spawns them all, “hatred.” Yet if you dare to ask anyone for a concrete definition of such terms, they’ll consider you automatically guilty of all the cultural sins these derogatory terms are intended to describe. As US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously explained, although “obscenity” may not be readily defined, you’re supposed to know it when you see it.
And if you persist in claiming that neither do you know it or see it, these words will be used as hammers to pound you into submission. In the sort of foam-flecked hyperbolic insanity that seems to suggest a culture either ready to implode or finally yield to ideological totalitarianism, you will be accused of ranting, slamming, bashing, and scaremongering merely for asking questions — even if you ask them in a timid and sincere voice without a wisp of malice.
April 7, 2013
British police chiefs to conceal the names of arrested from the media
Freedom of the press is taking another battering in Britain:
Britain’s police chiefs are drawing up draconian rules under which the identities of people they arrest will be kept secret from the public.
The move, which follows a recommendation by Lord Justice Leveson in his report into press standards, has been branded an attack on open justice and has led to comparisons with police states such as North Korea and Zimbabwe.
Under current arrangements, police release basic details of a person arrested and in many cases will confirm a name to journalists. But the practice varies from force to force.
Under the new guidance, to be circulated by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), forces will be banned from confirming the names of suspects, even when journalists know the identity of someone who has been arrested.
Without official police confirmation, the legal risks of incorrect identification will prevent the media from publishing the names of suspects.
The police plan for ‘secret arrests’ is being opposed by the Government’s own adviser on law reform, the Law Commission, which believes it is in the interests of justice that the police release the names of everyone who is arrested, except in very exceptional circumstances.
April 6, 2013
An unusual hero for a modern TV show
Virginia Postrel briefly reviews a British show that just made its way across to North America:
When the British drama Mr. Selfridge debuted on PBS this week, American viewers saw two things rarely on display in contemporary popular culture: a businessman hero and, more remarkably, a version of commercial history that includes not just manufacturing but shopping.
The show, which is also streamed on PBS.org, stars Jeremy Piven as Harry Gordon Selfridge, the American-born founder of the London department store. In the first episode, he arrives in 1909, determined to shake up U.K. retailing with the techniques that made him a success as a partner at Chicago’s Marshall Field’s: showmanship, tons of advertising, and displays that let customers easily handle the merchandise. In the second, he puts perfumes and powder on display right by the store’s front door and introduces an affordable house fragrance concocted with new chemical processes.
Ambitions that an American drama might treat as self- centered greed become, in a British context, a bold strike against class privilege. “You show great potential,” Selfridge tells the talented shop girl Agnes Towler (played by Aisling Loftus), the show’s working-class heroine. “You remind me of myself when I started out — grasping for every chance, keen as mustard to learn. You love it, don’t you? The customers, the selling, the feeling of the merchandise under your hands …”
[. . .]
Yet like railroads and telegraphs, the department stores of the late 19th and early 20th century were socially and economically transformative institutions. They pioneered innovations ranging from inventory control and installment credit to ventilation systems, electric lighting and steel construction, along with new merchandising and advertising techniques. They brought together goods from all over the world and lit up city streets with their window displays. They significantly changed the role of women, giving them new career opportunities and respectable places to meet in public. They popularized bicycles, cosmetics, ready-to-wear clothing and electrical appliances. They even invented the ladies’ room.
April 5, 2013
QotD: Warren Ellis explains why he doesn’t get to decide what gets turned into a movie or TV show
FAQ: I don’t get to decide what gets made into a tv series or film. I cannot, I’m afraid, cause people to give me money for things by magic or force of will. Because, let’s face it, if I could, you’d be part of the slave army building my hundred-mile-high golden revolving statue right now.
I’m glad we got that straightened out.
Warren Ellis, “FAQ: I Don’t Get To Decide What Gets Made Into A Movie Or TV Show”, WarrenEllis.com, 2013-04-04
April 3, 2013
El Neil on acting
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith recounts his brief brush with acting:
It takes a particular kind of individual to be an actor.
I first became aware of this phenomenon in high school, when one of the English teachers cast and directed the only play I’ve ever been in (although I’d already had lots of stage experience as a musician), Anastasia.
The young lady the director chose to play the lead, I regret to say, was an utter non-entity of whom none of my friends or I (outcasts ourselves in our own way) had even been aware. You might say she was an ultra-wallflower, rather like the invisible girl in that episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer you may remember. And yet she was so utterly brilliant and appealing in the difficult role that she brought tears to everybody’s eyes, and she earned a long, well-deserved standing ovation.
I have no idea what happened to her afterward.
There are exceptions, but in general, actors are people so empty, so devoid of personality, they need others to fill them up, writers to put words in their mouths, directors to tell them which piece of tape to stand on, when to move and how, specialists to dress them and apply paint to their faces, and a horde of other creatures exactly like them to inform them — through a sort of neural network like the nervous system of a jellyfish — what they should think and say on their own time.
March 29, 2013
If cable company ads were honest, we’d see something very similar to this
H/T to Joey “Accordion Guy” deVilla for the link.
If North American cable-and-internet providers were honest, they’d produce an ad that went like this. Note that there’s some swearing involved, as is often the case with cable-and-internet providers.
March 28, 2013
Paul Wells: They didn’t call it a budget because it isn’t a budget
For example, a budget would actually provide you with comprehensible statements of anticipated revenues and spending for all the big ticket items:
I work in Ottawa and I try to stay on top of things, but this was news to me. In fact, I didn’t even notice it until four days after Finance Minister Jim Flaherty released his — er — plan on March 21. Of course, there was much chortling in the press gallery at the government’s insistence on calling its annual account of revenues and expenses something besides a budget. But the significance of the thing took a while to sink in. Flaherty and his boss, Stephen Harper, do not call their big annual document a “budget” anymore because it is no longer a budget.
A budget, as anyone who has tried to run a household knows, is the moment when you stop telling yourself soothing tales and inject a note of reality into your life. On page 64 of the 1997 budget, for instance, the government of the day gave us an “outlook for program spending” with multi-year projections for spending levels in defence, Aboriginal programs, “business subsidies” and so on. It was that straightforward.
Harper’s Economic Action Plans, by contrast, are carnivals of fantasy. EAP13 — we will use the government-approved hashtag, which I assume is pronounced to sound like a shriek of terror — is 200 pages longer than Budget 1997 but finds no room for a one-page program-spending outlook, nor indeed for a program-spending outlook of any length. Like the best funhouses, this one depends on its volume for much of its amusement value. The decision to merge CIDA into the Foreign Affairs Department is announced on the 31st page of a chapter on “supporting families and communities,” and I can only assume it is there as a reward for perseverance. The morning after Flaherty’s speech, a diplomat asked me how it is possible for a G7 country to release a budget that does not at any point say how much the government will spend on defence next year. I gave the fellow a long answer. I should have said his premise was wrong, because — stop me if you’ve heard this — it’s not a budget.
March 27, 2013
A collaboration that should have happened
I missed this when it was posted last week:
Paul McCartney has revealed how he once asked electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire — creator of the Doctor Who theme music — to remake one of the Beatles’ most famous songs, Yesterday.
The former Beatle said that as a fan of experimental music he wanted the BBC Radiophonic Workshop composer to create a different version of the song.
[. . .]
Derbyshire is hailed as one of the most important figures in the history of electronic music in the UK. As part of the Radiophonic Workshop — the avant-garde wing of the BBC’s sound effects department — she created the distinctive signature tune for new TV series Doctor Who in 1963, using musique concrète techniques and sine- and square-wave oscillators to realise Ron Grainer’s score.
Derbyshire stopped making music in the 1970s, only rekindling her interest after working with Pete Kember (once of the group Spaceman 3) shortly before her death in 2001 at the age of 64.
Yesterday originally appeared on the Beatles’ 1965 album Help!. It is one of the most covered songs in the history of popular music, with more than 2,200 versions thought to exist.
