Drew Curtis speaks in Atlanta
Saturday night, I went to Manny's to listen to Drew Curtis, creator of Fark, discuss his book. It isn't on my list of Must Read but I found the short talk pretty worthwhile.In the book, he references a Frontline report which concludes that capitalism and Media (journalism) are incompatible. As an example, Drew talks about a friend's yearly review where he was asked, as a journalist, what he had done that day to improve shareholder value. For journalists, it's about truth, not stock price. Compromising for the latter means that you stop being a journalist.
But Drew's working on too narrow of a scope. Capitalism is incompatible with Producers: a Producer sees a need in the community and wants to fill it because he thinks he can improve people's lives. For a Producer, he wants to build a better mouse-trap so that people will have something of value. He wants as many people to have that mouse-trap so that more people can enjoy that value, even if he makes him less money. Revenue and profit are good things so long as they are not the sole objective. For a Businessman, he doesn't care about how good the mouse-trap is or how many people use it; his only concern is the Bottom Line. Profit. One can look at any business and see the deterioration of quality as executives work to maximize profit at the expense of customers and employees. Corporations are created with the explicit objective of maximizing profit; I don't buy the corporate view that this is legal mandate for them to screw employees and customers to turn a buck but it does define the direction of corporations and Capitalism. Capitalism cannot co-exist with any model that is guided by anything other than profit. Capitalism works to the exclusion of all other objectives.
What's the solution for journalism? Drew recommends something akin to the BBC where it is publicly funded and has no "master". While the various public media in the U.S.A. (NPR, PBS) aren't beholden to shareholders or advertisers, I don't think this would scale to become the major form of journalism or media. Dependent upon public (and government) funds, it would constantly be under attack from one group or another and less stable in the face of loss of funds. I think a more realistic answer depends upon individuals calling a spade as a spade: get on blogs, news sites, editorial pages, public media, anywhere that an individual can speak his mind and call the media out for the whores they are and push the truth. Tell people what's going on.
Truth is too important to be left to business.
Even within public media, it's suffering. Drew mentioned how the morning Marketplace segment had one fluff story sandwiched between two meaty stories. Later, he talked about how the BBC wasn't gaining younger viewers and had hired consultants to attract them. What did the consultants say? Make it look like MySpace. As I pointed out and Drew agreed, Marketplace is likely trying to straddle the fence, offering the fluff story to keep the mass appeal while still keeping as much meat as possible. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't.
Drew got onto the topic of security (prolly by discussing Fear Mongering) and someone asked why people fear something unfamiliar and rare, like terrorism, so much more than something very familiar and more likely, like a car wreck. I offer an essay by Bruce Schneier, the Psychology of Security, which explains this fairly well. The short answer is, "People are Dumb".
But, I guess that's why there's a Florida tag.
posted by Lachlan @ 2:00 AM
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