« China |
Main
| Debates »
Manufactured failure #2: the press, Obama, Asia
It's not
just me. Two colleagues with different perspectives -- from each other's, and sometimes from my own -- marvel at how badly the mainstream American press distorted the picture of what happened during Barack Obama's just-ended tour of Asia.
First,
Howard French -- long of the NYT, now of the Columbia Journalism School, friend of mine in both Tokyo and Shanghai. He has a new online Q-and-A with the Columbia Journalism Review,
here, in which he says that the traveling press covered Obama's meetings with Asian officials as if this were a bunch of stops in a presidential campaign tour, and as a result missed or misrepresented what was going on. Read the whole thing, but here are two samples:
From the set-up to the interview, by Alexandra Fenwick:
"In almost every analysis of the trip, Chinese officials were portrayed as optimistic and newly emboldened to stand up to American interests and Obama was cast in the role of the meek debtor, standing with hat in hand. The line is that little was achieved and Obama was stifled, literally by state television and figuratively by the Chinese upper hand in the power dynamic."
Howard French goes on to say that these assumptions were flat wrong. He offers many explanations, including this:
"I find that the Washington reporters tend to be typically the most subject to this instant scorekeeping. This is part of the game of Washington reporting. They're at the bleeding edge of this phenomenon that I think is distressing in terms of the approach of the press to serious questions. Everything is shot through this prism of short-term political calculation as opposed to thinking seriously about stuff. You can't be an expert on every question, and so you're part of the Washington press corps and if you're really good and really diligent, you're going to be expert maybe in a few things and one of those things might not be China."
If you have seen Howard French's coverage over the years, including the five years he was based in Shanghai, you will know that no sane reader has ever put him in the category of "soft" on the Chinese leadership or China's faults. Yet his wonderment and exasperation at what he reads is palpable.
Tish Durkin, who
has written for the Atlantic from Iraq and elsewhere, arrived in China recently. The subhead on her new column for
The Week gets across the point:
"Even through a veil of censorship and propaganda, the Chinese
people managed a clearer view of Obama's visit than the US media did."
While I'm at it, here's one more:
a story quoting the new US Ambassador to China, former Republican governor of Utah Jon Huntsman (a Mandarin speaker), to exactly the same effect.
"Washington's ambassador to Beijing hit out on Friday at negative US media coverage of President Barack Obama's visit to China, saying it failed to take into account important progress on many issues...
"The trip was the top news story in China, drawing strong interest from the mainland public who, surveys suggest, are largely positive in their view of the American president.
"However, much of the US media coverage was strongly negative, accusing Obama of failing to gain concessions on key issues such as Iran's nuclear programme and climate change, as well as being weak on human rights."
"I attended all those meetings that President Obama had with Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao," Huntsman said, referring to the Chinese president and premier. "I've got to say some of the reporting I saw afterward was off the mark. I saw sweeping comments about things that apparently weren't talked about, when they were discussed in great detail in the meetings," he said.
I wasn't in touch with Howard French or Tish Durkin (to say nothing of Amb. Jon Huntsman) before we all expressed the same amazed and negative reaction at the way our colleagues had missed the main point of what just happened in America's relations with a very important part of the world. We're all familiar with one "crisis of the press," the business collapse. This is a different kind of crisis, though it makes the business crisis worse: the distortion of reality by compressing every complex issue into the narrative of the DC-based "horse race." As you can tell, this really bothers me.
Apropos of nothing: new Joe Henry album available on NPR
In a feature I hadn't paid attention to while overseas, NPR has over the past year offered "
Exclusive First Listens" to entire new albums on line. Today: an hour's worth of
Blood From Stars by the wonderful bluesy guitarist-singer Joe Henry.
The trick is that the full-length streaming audio is turned off once the album officially goes on sale. Thus the past-events listing includes full-length sessions from Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Moby, etc -- but none of the music is still there. (The oldest still-available entry is from one week ago.) If you click on the older sessions, you're taken to an Amazon or iTunes purchase site. Fair enough: this is one more interesting twist in the vast, varied, and necessary series of experiments now underway to see how "content," from music to movies to news articles, can be "monetized" in the age when so much of it can be copied or used for free.
I mention it for that reason -- and also because anyone who, like me, hadn't known of the feature might find it worthwhile. Certainly this Joe Henry music is great. Check it out while it is there.
If you're in Seattle-land
I will be on KUOW's
Weekday program today, 9am-10am PDT, talking with
Steve Scher about (guess!) China. I was supposed to do this one week ago, but had such a paralyzing case of laryngitis, based on having yelled over the noise of jet engines at the Oshkosh air show earlier that week, that I couldn't say a word and had to bail out.
Update: audio of show is available
here. It was a lot of fun. Got to talk about
my visit to the Shanghai Skin Diseases and Sexually Transmitted Diseases clinic, as a patient.
Side note: again I notice as a recent arrival on American shores the value that NPR public-affairs talk shows around the country bring. When I lived in Seattle, I often listened to Scher's show -- or to Michael Krasny's
Forum on KQED when I was living in Berkeley, or Larry Mantle's
AirTalk on KPCC when I was visiting my parents in southern California, or
Kathleen Dunn on Wisconsin Public Radio when I'm in that part of the country. And of course in many cities you can hear Tom Ashbrook's
On Point from WBUR in Boston and
Diane Rehm on WAMU in DC. I'll stop with the list before getting into the risk of "offense by omission"; the point, again, is that at a moment of justified concern about the chaos and deterioration of the media, it's worth noting that this particular kind of program -- locally-run NPR talk shows -- is an area of increasing quality and strength.
Notes on repatriation (recession, media depts)
It would be too overwhelming to try to list all the things my wife and I miss about three years' immersion in China, and all the things we enjoy about returning to the house where we've lived, off and on, since the early Reagan era. Items in the first category boil down to the daily sense of amazement at some improbability we'd seen on the street in Beijing or Urumqi or Lanzhou. Our standard evening conversation was, "You won't believe it, but..." Items in the second category have a lot to do with the physical comforts of daily life in a rich rather than a poor country. Yes, I mean starting with the air.
But here are three things we can't help but notice.
1)
The service sector. I think the US consumer economy would still be in free-fall if we hadn't come back. We show up from China needing new of
everything. Clothes. Camera. Two computers, plus monitors and backup drives. Housewares. Shoes. At least one fridge, probably a stove. Radios/sound system. TVs. You name the item, and the version we have is road-worn, obsolete, broken, or gone. (Sadly for Detroit, not cars: Our two, vintage 1999 and 2000 respectively and stored with friends, still seem just fine. Sorry!) Our house needs to be repainted-- and re-roofed, and re-drivewayed, and its trees trimmed. That's just a start. Good thing we saved up in those days of 20RMB noodle/dumpling dinners. And, yes, many of the items we're getting were made in China. You just can't buy them there.
Here's the surprise: We call to get service appointments, and people
show up right away. Air conditioning not working in 90-degree DC swelter? We make a call one evening, and the next day it's all fixed. Plumbing clogged and leaky? A few hours later, it's not. Need the car looked at, after three years in the shed? Call the service place and the only question is: do I want to bring it in this afternoon? Or wait till tomorrow? On a Sunday, we see that a tree is dying in the back yard. By Monday afternoon, it is converted into neatly stacked wood.
These are all people and services we'd dealt with before, but in those days we learned to plan weeks in advance for service calls. America still looks incredibly rich and lush. But this little indicator suggests lots of slack in anything considered a discretionary purchase. Not startling in principle, but impressive to encounter first-hand.
Only exception: I call to get an appointment for a physical exam with our doctor -- a good but "normal" doctor, not some fancy physician to the stars. First available slot, mid-November. I have no theory for this anomaly.
2)
The dispensability of TV. The first night we were in our house, three weeks ago, no internet! By the next afternoon, we'd solved that emergency. Phew. (That day I was driving around the neighborhood with a laptop, looking for no-password wifi signals from some neighbor's house.) But that first day, also no TV. Cable, satellite, and TiVo services had all timed out. Of course no broadcast signal, after the digital switch-over. Each day since then, we've looked at the list of next-most-urgent chores for getting re-settled. And each day, getting the TV going -- figuring out the right service, making the appointment calls -- has not quite made the cut for that day's to-do list.
A few times I've thought, It would be nice to turn on the TV. Like, during Obama's evening press conference last month. And I am sure we'll eventually get it going again, before football season and all. Probably the US Open tennis matches will be the trigger. But after many decades of living in a swirl of TV signals, I am surprised by how livable life is without it. For now.
3)
Media. We're getting real paper newspapers and magazines again. NYT and Washington Post, and soon again the WSJ. And all our complement of magazines. Leafing through the papers is a nice ritual in the morning -- even when I've read a lot of the stories the night before online. Don't worry: I'm not even going to start down the road of comparing online/print economics or ergonomics, even though I'm impressed at how differently I read the news on a page versus on a screen.
Instead what I notice is the change within the papers I'd read before. The NYT, for all its travails, is a recognizable version of the publication I'd previously known. Personality, depth, world-view, tone. The poor Washington Post is not. Laying off -- that is, buying out -- so many reporters who knew so much about their topics has had a more profound effect than I would have guessed. (Locus classicus: Tom Ricks on defense.) And the resulting paper seems more obviously desperate to try anything that will draw attention in this new age.
To me, that was the real meaning of the unfortunate recent "
Mouthpiece Theater"
commotion that has accompanied my re-introduction to the Post. (And for which Chris Cillizza wrote a gracious
apology.) Not the flap over the final "bitch"
episode but the existence of the thing at all. Experimentation is great and necessary in journalism, always and especially now; mistakes are a natural price of that; and everyone in every field needs to make his or her work as entertaining and attractive as it can be. But trying to compete for attention on sheer yuks is a step toward the brink. "Real" entertainment will always be more entertaining -- that's how it got the name. Anyone hungry for more on this theme is invited to check out the whole chapter on the death-spiral of infotainment in
Breaking the News. And I think it's why the
parody-reply to "Mouthpiece" on YouTube, below, was so genuinely funny and stinging. It wasn't mocking the segment so much as the paper's overall predicament.
I've thought of the Post as my hometown paper for years and feel as if I've come back to see a family member looking suddenly very ill. I still have good friends doing good work there. Also, good work by people I don't even know! As with two Style-section pieces this morning, on
Thomas Pynchon by Michael Dirda and on the Obama/Joker/Socialism
posters, by Philip Kennicott. But if someone asked, what do you notice that's changed, the Post would be high on the list.
Not death of newspapers but death of advertising
As I mentioned
earlier, there is a lot of response on the "
who's killing the press?" theme. Because the theme has been so very heavily worked over in recent months, I'm not reposting much of this. But here is a note that reflects a theme in a number of messages: that the newspapers are only the first casualties in what will be a more sweeping elimination of ad revenue in general. It is a response from a reader named Hal:
Among my friends, we've had this discussion before. Here's what I said then, edited to fit addressing you directly:
*^*^*
The real problem is, advertising is dying. It's just pulling down newspapers along the way. Next up: TV, radio, and Google.
This is why I was warning anyone who would listen that traditional media's schadenfreude when the internet bubble popped in 2001 was probably misplaced. Because the reason it popped was one finally had the metrics to show Advertising Doesn't Work. Google has forestalled the inevitable by doing the Net equivalent of the "tiny little ads" schtick of a decade or two back, but I think they see the writing on the wall, which is why they keep trying so desperately to find something, anything, other than search that'll make money....
Continue reading "Not death of newspapers but death of advertising" »
Wrapup on papers, Craigslist, etc
Thanks for numerous responses to yesterday's
message from my Google friend about how newspapers could, and presumably still might, take advantage of the shift to web-based advertising. Short version: the need to have the business (as opposed to purely journalistic) swagger of predecessors like William Randolph Hearst:
Hearst, were he
living as a 'Rupert Murdoch' of today, would own Craigslist by now,
would have an industrywide micropayment system, would have recruited
legions of readers as hyper-local bloggers, and otherwise employed the
tools and resources of our day to advance his cause just as he brought
cartoons, drawings, and later photographs and color to his readers in
his.
This is a very thoroughly discussed issue, so only a few reactions -- then back to queued-up reactions on Chinese education!
First, from a reader in Australia, about what brought on the crash and a hoped-for solution:
My wife owns a boutique real estate agency in Sydney, Australia. Every Thursday she'd have to submit the ads for her properties to the Sydney Morning Herald who had a monopoly on real estate advertising -- pre internet. The likelihood of the desired ad appearing in print, in the desired location, on the desired day was about 60%. (Imagine her customers looking through the ads for their house and not finding it!) The service was arrogant as well as unreliable and my wife wouldn't mind seeing the SMH go up in flames. On the news side, the SMH is now about splashing electronic ads right in the middle of a story I might be reading: equally arrogant! This feels very much like a fat monopoly that will be overtaken by something better.
I used to be a print subscriber to the SMH; when their internet site caught up and I upgraded to a decent LCD monitor, it was easier to read online without having to consume and recycle a broadsheet containing 90% unconsumed waste. I am a news junkie and I seriously worry about losing access to good journalism. However, I am willing to pay a few cents per story per day and I am sure that somehow, someday, someone will find a way to aggregate my pennies with everyone else's to give good journalists a good living.
After the jump, another reader's suggestion of a potential opportunity. It begins:
It seems to me there is a huge advertising hole that newspapers could
fill when they are ready to move past the blame game and start thinking
more creatively.
Continue reading "Wrapup on papers, Craigslist, etc " »
More on Google, Craigslist, and who's killing newspapers
A few hours ago I
mentioned that a friend from Google had tipped me to a
new Pew study showing how big a hole Craigslist (and similar services) had blown in the classified-ad portion of newspaper revenue. I signed off by saying that the distinction -- Google's not killing the news business, Craigslist is! -- was "worth bearing in mind for precision in blame-casting."
My friend, who was up in the middle of the night in California, immediately wrote back to say that I'd misunderstood the point. With his stipulation that he is speaking for himself and not the company, and with my clarification that he is not one of the household names at Google who by definition are always speaking for the company, here is his note:
It's not at all about blame-casting. It's about proper diagnosis for
treatment and recovery. If papers are critically ill from classified
revenue woes (Craigslist, eBay, informal email, ...) but they falsely
self-diagnose as being sick from over exposure in Google News, then
they'll end up closing their borders by withdrawing from news
aggregation sites at Google, Yahoo, MSN, and elsewhere. That won't hurt
Internet companies [like Google] at all, but it will leave publishers with fewer new
visitors, less online monetization opportunities, and still obliviously
infected with disappearing classified revenues. They will get sick
faster, and journalism as democracy's conscience will weaken. That will
hurt every other company, every citizen, and nearly every country.
The only blame belongs to the publishers.
Craigslist, like all startups, was originally funded with pennies on the dollar
compared with what media empires spend. It still is! Craigslist has not
been bought/co-opted/copied by any of the major publishers even though
doing so would have been a natural idea. Readers are moving online but
publishers act as though they will go there only if dragged rather than
racing to their only life saving destination. News is valuable, but you
can no longer get it in printed form as it is hours old by the time you
get your paper -- CNN and online news sites had it hours ago! Analysis
is worth waiting for, but that is what magazines like The Atlantic are
all about. Newspapers will never be about selling your old BBQ again.
Ads at random, scattered between unrelated stories, are not part of the
future of shopping.
These are the issues for papers to agonize about;
to wring their hands about; and maybe even to beg money to solve.
Unfortunately, they've been copying the ideas and technologies invented
and introduced by William Randolph Hearst for so long that they forgot
his example of how to innovate for the modern day. Hearst, were he
living as a 'Rupert Murdoch' of today, would own Craigslist by now,
would have an industrywide micropayment system, would have recruited
legions of readers as hyper-local bloggers, and otherwise employed the
tools and resources of our day to advance his cause just as he brought
cartoons, drawings, and later photographs and color to his readers in
his.
Extra thought on my end: if this is what someone not in the writing biz can crank out at 4:40am his time, while up with eye problems and a splitting headache, maybe the publishing industry has even more to worry about from web-based competition than we thought!
Who exactly is killing the press
A friend who works at Google wanted to be sure I'd seen a
new study from the Pew Internet Center* about what exactly is cutting the heart out of advertising revenues for the newspaper business. The headline on a CNET
story about the study gets right to the point:
The Pew study also contains this "story of an industry's decline in one chart" graphic, showing how classified ad revenue for papers has fallen from around $20 billion a year to under $10 billion during the era of Craigslist. (And, yes, the study argues that there's a causal connection here, not just a coincidence of timing.) A ten billion dollar revenue hole says a lot about why all papers -- well run, poorly run, concentrating on local issues, concentrating on national and world affairs, up market, down market -- are in trouble, all at the same time.
To Google, it makes a difference whether the shorthand slogan in people's minds is "Craigslist is killing off newspapers" rather than "Google is doing them in." For the papers themselves, it's a fine distinction -- sort of like dinosaurs spending their last moments arguing whether it was
a giant meteor strike or a bunch of volcanoes that was wiping them out. Still, a distinction worth bearing in mind for precision in blame-casting.
___
* Which is run by another friend, Lee Rainie; my wife has done Pew Internet studies too.
