Nothing here happened today

Jason Jones visits the lady

But see Jay/Dave:

The New York Times has a neighborhood blogging experiment, The Local. This week it extended an invitation to users: be the journalist. "Here is your first assignment: We're looking for someone to go to the 88th Precinct Community Council meeting next Wednesday, the 10th."

A progression? See Mr. Cubeta:

The development of professionals in this field of fields goes like this:

1. Diffident ignorance.
2. Confident siloed expertise, blind and deaf to disciplines beyond the specialist's own.
3. Panic and dread at being exposed to one's own ignorance of all but a narrow band of knowledge.
4. Disdain and contempt for "the dark side," or the "touchy feely types," or "the mixed motives sorts."
5. A growing set of friendships across the sectors
6. Humilty and graciousness; a sense of appreciation for what others bring to the table.
7. Team play.
8. World changing results.

The Times has been at #4 for a while. Is the jocularity and call to neighborhoods a sign of moving past that, or merely another effort to market the seeming of that?

ecrasez l'infame

Media critics, who so often less than fruitfully take issue with what bogus channels like Fox are saying, might consider looking more carefully into what, and whose existence, such channels do not, under any circumstances, acknowledge.

For example, she-whom-the-NewYorkTimes-will-never-do-a-story-about*, Amy Goodman, has Andrea Juhasz, lead author of the True Cost of Chevron report, updating what Bill Keller's dad's old oil buddies are up to.

The interview comes on the eve of Chevron's annual shareholder meeting.



*Apparently also the case at NPR news.

not cheap nor easy

As people in the US struggle in the murk of the economic disaster, the international malaise, the unending Bush bravado, the inklings of the new administration, it would, one supposes, be up to the "fourth estate" to help it reach some stage of self-understanding - at least a couple of steps on the ladder. 

But alas, the thinking, the perspectives and the conceptual systems that people might now turn to to help gain some awareness of, some insight into the current predicament are not folks that are exactly household names. Look for viewpoints from Naomi Klein, Seymour Hersh, Amy Goodman, Andrew Bacevich, Noam Chomsky and the like and you find precious little in the pages of the major newspapers, let alone amid the radio and broadcast television news outlets. 

It's not that these non-mainstreamy folks are entirely right, or can explain everything. But it's that without their side of the picture, part of the picture remains obscure. Now that we're in deep shit, news organizations are having a difficult time explaining how we got here, because they left the conceptual apparatus behind - at the party where subprime mortgages were the toast of the town.

So when NPR and Bill Keller assume that newspapers "tell people what's happening," I have to beg to differ. They don't because they can't. They can't because they are beholden to advertising and marketing and their own industrial interests; it worked for them to ignore a portion of the spectrum of the thinking out there in presenting the world to their readers. 

It worked because times were good, advertising capitalists were happy without Roubini and Goodman and Chomsky and sundry others. As Mr. Keller says, "Good journalism does n0t come cheap." The inexplicability of "what's happening" was less problematic, because house prices were rising -- at least according to the "lights" of the Times (if Mr. Friedman and Mr. Kristol etc. can be so qualified without teh qualifier enjoying an aneurism). 

That home prices were rising and rising was, in fact, inexplicable. So long as the vector pointed up, that seems not to have perplexed the editors. How do they now imagine they can make this story intelligible?

Hit the lights on your way out, Bill.