Comments on: Entertainment vs. recession porn

By: Jeff McMahon

Jeff McMahon — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 20:26:29 +0000

You’ve also mastered the blog comment as a form, Vickie. Shifting to journalism, I think you’re quite right, and we can look forward to seeing what emerges when art and journalism mix. Concerning coverage of poverty, this may be more obvious in Chicago–or not–but it seems the establishment media cover what they cover for the dominant culture and neither cover nor circulate in other cultures (other Chicagos, in our case) except in predictable ways. Those ways include covering poverty, if at all, as a problem that “those people” have, an “arm candy issue” as you put it. Also with crime, the coverage is very much for an audience rather than for humanity. And in Chicago at least, that has always been the case, although individual journalists and alternative media sometimes make exceptions to it. So I’m curious whether you think Ehrenreich is on to something new or just has noticed an occasion or a movement that sheds light on something old.

By: Brian In NYC

Brian In NYC — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 19:07:36 +0000

Of course I was glued to set for all three events. I’m am a serious cable news junkie.

By: Vickie Karp

Vickie Karp — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 18:11:59 +0000

Brian, You’re doing the social anthropology, and we need it. I vividly remember the two occasions you cite as the birth of, what, voracious television news coverage — Lady Di and the Gulf War (for me, I became glued to the tv when SCUD missiles were sailing as I watched the monitor, and for Lady Di, I remember the Cinderella wedding thing as well as the end of the story, like tragic inadvertent bookends, on television). As for the news editors and producers, not enough, I think, to talk about how hard the job is to feed the viewers. If we can put a man on the moon, we can get this right, and getting it right means choosing to avoid the loop that repeats all day until the story takes on a fake importance, and the Watergate mentality about the cover-up that makes us turn every complex issue into a ratings race.

By: Vickie Karp

Vickie Karp — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 17:55:06 +0000

Thanks so much for you interest, Jeff. Lots of big issues. Let’s start with what you ask about “surrendering any individual will or desire, including the political, polemical” to make art. Speaking for myself, I surrender nothing. I use whatever I have the courage to use — my own story, my own perspective, my ability to objectify, everything in my experience and daily “view finder,” even what mood I’m in when I write. I then as editor go back and re-shape, re-think, reposition to sharpen what I see as the most important bit of ore in whatever I originally put down. I shape and re-shape and then hold what I’ve done up against what’s out there in my own field and in the wide yet dependable arc of ramifications any new thing creates around it (that’s T.S. Eliot there — “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” an essay in which he suggests that every new things makes everything around it shift and gain new references). That’s backstory on me. Here’s my answer to “do [I] think the political tendency can inhibit the art somehow?” No. I think tendencies and inhibitions become part of the art, which is why I love publishing rather than writing for myself. It’s political issues before they have a name, and then in support of their name, and then in fidelity to whatever they meant to be. Journalism is completely different. In journalism, the individual (journalist) disappears for the sake of the reader. He/she presents in full, calmly, with, as the original exec producer of MacNeil/Lehrer once quoted to me from Ed Murrow, “light, not heat.” What’s happening now is a good problem — art and journalism are sharing attributes. It is producing a lot of bad stuff. But it will also produce the very best.

By: Jeff McMahon

Jeff McMahon — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 16:35:33 +0000

Vickie, this is so important and timely. Thank you for writing on it (and thanks to B.E. too). With McCarthyism all around him, Nelson Algren said, “I submit that literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.” I want to come down on that side of things, too. But isn’t there another side to that idea, that in order to make art, the artist has to surrender any individual will or desire, including the political, polemical, etc.? I’d love to know what you think about that. Certainly there are great political poems (Shine, Perishing Republic!) and artworks (Guernica), but do you think the political tendency can inhibit the art somehow?

I think the problem for journalism is equally firey, but in a different way.

By: Brian In NYC

Brian In NYC — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 15:26:56 +0000

“And it’s inevitable if either activity becomes nothing but entertainment.”

I’m wondering how much the sheer quantity of news that is now pumped to us has to do with it. How news director now look to shape coverage not just to bring us the facts, but to keep us from reaching for the clicker.

“but it’s all about production values”

I’m not sure it’s fair to fault Mr. Lynch for that, it’s what the market place demands. It’s a kind of a build it (well) and they will come. Would Moore’s Sicko have had the impact it did it if weren’t an entertaining piece of work? Probably not. Also Vickie two events came to mind as I read through your piece this morning, the death and funeral of Princess Diana, was in my opinion the coming of age of the 24 hours cable news cycle as entertainment and the start up the Iraq War. The spectacular live and antiseptic images of night time bombings of Baghdad definitely went a long way in the convergence of news and entertainment.

By: Vickie Karp: Third Screen: Entertainment vs. Recession Porn : My Mash Web

Vickie Karp: Third Screen: Entertainment vs. Recession Porn : My Mash Web — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 15:08:28 +0000

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