I have almost the same reaction to two utterly separate kinds of mainstream media decisions over the last two weeks: both decisions drive me to the brink of ending my consumption of that media.
The first is the New York Times announcement that they’ve added Bill Kristol to their stable of op-ed columnists. It’s a stupid move, and not because of Kristol’s politics. I have no issue with that aspect of the decision. What I object to is that it is yet another draw out of the narrow, incestuous pool of fetid stillwater that breeds the columnist class. I could sit down right now and write every column that Kristol, Krugman, Kristof, Friedman, Brooks and Dowd will write over the next year. You easily could design a specialist AI that could spit out a column by any of them in response to a given issue or event.
The newspaper world is full of talk about the menace of the new media, about plummeting circulation, about the challenges of the 21st Century. If this is what passes for adaptation to changing conditions, the sooner the stinking corpse of newspaper journalism is buried, the better. “Hey! There’s lots of commentary available online in alternative formats, lots of new voices and ideas and approaches that are drawing our readers away! What shall we do?” “I know, let’s hire Bill Kristol. There’s a fresh voice saying new things.”
I have a dream. I dream of waking up and picking up the New York Times and seeing on the op-ed pages a columnist who reacts to changing events in unpredictable ways, who isn’t just a convincing automaton simulating human response along preordained political lines, who doesn’t just consult some paymaster at party headquarters to find out what the fresh spin of the day might be, who challenges me to think in new ways. Someone who provokes me, delights me, puzzles me, but all in good ways, rather than some feeble re-enactment of dance steps that were old when the waltz was a sparkling new invention. You know, a columnist who justifies the physical effort of turning the pages to the end of the A section. Style and wit optional but preferred. JUST ONE. That’s all. I can find plenty of people like that online. Surely there’s at least one that the Times could bring into a new format, to a new audience.
It’s a small dream. As far as the mainstream media is concerned, evidently an impossible dream. I’ve never been so close to giving up newspapers entirely, a feeling which stuns me, given that at times in my life, I’ve regularly bought and read as many as six dailies.
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The other experience that almost drives me away from a popular media form that I have consumed loyally for most of my life? It’s considerably more trivial, but equally a case of people operating inside some kind of editorial bubble that is floating a million miles away from audiences and creative integrity, of the fouling of a nest. The current editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics decided that the character of Spider-Man, having been married in some versions of his comic to Mary Jane Watson since 1987, is not “interesting” as a married person. That already strikes me as a failure of the imagination as a whole: a good writer can make good stories from any situation. Marriage is not the end of life or drama. It’s also a failure to understand the arc of this specific character: the story of Peter Parker in the comics is a struggle to achieve and hold onto maturity. There’s always a new challenge around the corner in that story, trust me. You think you’ve got life figured out and then something happens to disabuse you of that notion. You don’t have to stick Peter Parker in his first year of college eternally to tell that bigger story.
I might also point out that Marvel publishes several very good titles that feature unmarried “alternate” Spider-Man characters: it’s possible to have it both ways here.
But ok. So that’s what the editor-in-chief, Joe Quesada, wants to do with the character he oversees. There are ways to make these kinds of changes in serial shared-universe fictions, whether they’re comics or soap operas. Divorce the character, or make him separate for a while from his wife. Give him amnesia for a while. Kill Mary Jane Watson off. (You can always undo a death in comic books or soap operas.) Trap him in an alternate reality for a while where he never got married and let him explore that life. Whatever.
What did they actually do? Spider-Man makes a deal with the devil to eliminate not just his marriage but everything about how his life has changed and he has grown over the last twenty years of storytelling in Marvel Comics in order to save the life of his frail and elderly aunt.
I dunno what the rest of you might call someone who would give up being happily married to a supermodel and erase the existence of their own child (Parker is also given a vision of the loving, beautiful daughter he was otherwise going to have) as well as about ten rich, complex years of adult experience in order to keep an eighty-year old mother-figure alive for a few years more. “Norman Bates” is the first name that comes to mind.
I’m supposed to like this character now? Sympathize with him? A dude who agreed to have Satan kill his unborn child and destroy his happy marriage for an elderly mommy-figure to whom he has an unhealthy attachment?
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Some bad decisions by cultural managers only make you feel bad about their own immediate properties. I thought the second two Pirates of the Caribbean films were a lame waste of potential, but what the heck, that happens. Sometimes, though, they make you question the entire cultural form, and to see all its flaws and self-destructive tendencies magnified.
You would really include Krugman with the rest? He strikes me as intellectually independent and morally serious. That, plus the limits of 700 words, twice a week might make him predictable and tedious sometimes, but that doesn’t seem like a really worthwhile criticism of him.
Also, who are the really unpredictable political bloggers you would prefer to see as op-ed columnists? And do you think they would they retain their charms if forced to write self-contained 700 word op-ed’s twice a week?
Yeah, I’d include him to some extent. I can’t recall when I last read him and thought that he was thinking through something new and unfamiliar step by step rather than just running through a checklist. I do think he’s got way, way more intellectual wattage than any of the other Times columnists, however. In an ideal world, I think he’d still be on the page. Hell, I might even think Brooks could belong, predictable and intellectually lazy as he often is. Friedman, Kristof, Dowd are a total waste of space.
Unpredictability might just mean people who come at familiar issues with a very different toolkit of material than any of the other columnists. It might mean people drawn to a very different suite of regular issues and concerns. It could mean people whose cultural and social touchstones are located somewhere else besides “inside the Beltway”.
Imagine Cosma Shalizi, John Rogers, Margaret Soltan, Jim Henley, Phil Nugent, Belle Waring as an NY Times op-ed writer, for some examples. Almost any of the CT bloggers. I don’t often comment at Michael Bowen’s blog because I barely know where to begin in my disagreement with much of what he writes, but I think he’d add a lot to an op-ed page. Imagine Scott McLemee: he’d be great. The key here isn’t political position, exactly–it’s an eye for issues other than the ones being served up by the waitstaffs at political campaigns and think tanks, and an ability to think with other tools and reference points than the ones that dominate the axis of boredom that the Grey Lady sees fit to serve up.
Seconded. I’d rather read Krugman at 4000 words in the Magazine every few months than twice a week at 750 words on the Op-Ed page (which, in fairness to Krugman and all his compadres, is a truly grinding regimen).
“the story of Peter Parker in the comics is a struggle to achieve and hold onto maturity. . . (You can always undo a death in comic books or soap operas.)”
Would it not also be possible to undo pacts with a devil in comic books? Perhaps it could be part of “a struggle to achieve and hold onto maturity”. Big lesson. You could write it, or at least pitch it.
If Cosma wrote for NYT I’d be interested. But then, he wouldn’t be Cosma, so maybe not. I suspect that you do have an impossible dream and will have to make do with boiler plate agenda wank crap like Krugman and Kristol deliver.
Sure, they can undo a deal with the devil. But a death strikes me as a less insulting Rube Goldberg machine. About the only problem really is that they’ve already killed Mary Jane that way once, but what the heck. The deal with the devil seems to me to be far more like “it was only a dream” on Dallas: a fundamental breach of faith with your audience.