Posted on 04/06/2007 5:18:01 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
I’ve been reading a fascinating book in the past few weeks. Actually, it’s a trilogy of books by Daniel Boorstin entitled The Americans:Thomas Sowell has recommended this trilogy in his columns on at least three occasions:
- The Colonial Experience (1958)
- The National Experience (1965)
- The Democratic Experience
Jewish World Review - July 14, 2003It will be no surprise to FReepers that what Thomas Sowell says about the books proves to be very well justified. I will just summarize a bit of it to try to give a bit of the flavor of the books.If you want a history focused on social developments, then "The Americans" by Daniel Boorstin is a very readable three-volume treasure. (Click HERE to purchase).Jewish World Review - Dec. 17, 2004For a broader social history of the United States, you cannot do better than "The Americans," a very readable and insightful three-volume work by Daniel J. Boorstin. This is something that can be taken on trips, to read all year long, especially in the paperback edition.Jewish World Review - Dec. 9, 2005Another multi-volume book that I never expected to read all the way through, but did, was The Americans by Daniel Boorstin. It is in three volumes and gives a social history of the United States from colonial times onward. It is a fascinating account of how people lived and the inventions and innovations that changed Americans' way of life from one generation to another.
We have all seen movies in which steamboat captains raced their boats on the Mississippi. It turns out that that was historical - safety valves to limit the pressure of steam in the boilers were routinely defeated by the crew of the boats. Because of that., the safety record of those boats was atrocious. Common sense would seem to militate against owners of expensive boats allowing them to abused and operated outside the safety rules - but that is not what happened. Likewise, the romantic stories of the railroad engineers and their heroic - and disastrous - attempts to make up lost time and make their scheduled arrival time. They were true and representative, too - the safety record of American railroads was atrocious as well. What was going on?
What was going on was - a race. Everyone was in a hurry, because the people heading west were speculators. Their objective was to find a promising place to stake a claim. Not just any place would do; you wanted to select a plot in Chicago rather than in some place which would turn out to be an abandoned ghost town. The trouble was of course that, just as you and I may try to invest our savings in a stock that will rise rapidly but the stock tables are loaded with stocks which will never go up much and many which will actually decline, there was a vast amount of land that would never be highly valuable, and there were “towns” that would never exist at all except on paper.
And just as in the stock market, it is easy to second guess in hindsight. Of course if you were in that land rush you would head straight for Chicago - but you know that Chicago was going to be the biggest city in the mid west; most of them didn't guess it until Chicago had grown substantially and the best claims were already taken. So each “town” on paper was a speculative investment opportunity. Guess right, and make a score; guess wrong and you are an also-ran. But if you realize you guessed wrong, you get going again and head further west to try again. And even if you guessed right, you may want to sell out as soon as you have proved your claim - so you can stake another claim.
But while you are on a claim, you are highly interested in the progress and population growth of your town - you are a booster. You want your town to have a newspaper and a hotel. And so you promote your town and try to attract the printer and the hotelier to provide those promotional features for your town. But suppose you are a printer? How differently would you behave? You want the town you set up shop in to be successful, too. You want your town to turn out to be Chicago and not some ghost town. As Boorstin put it,
As the press moved farther west, the peculiarities of the American situation became more and more marked. The booster spirit called for an ever greater willingness to take risks. The more open, remote, and unsettled the surrounding country, the greater the opportunity to make mistakes. Hovering about every ghost town was the spirit of one or more ghost papers, relics of advertising that had failed. Again and again, ambitious migratory newspapermen aimed not at the known needs of an existing community but at the needs of some future community for which they desperately hoped.Thus, the Green-Bay Intelligencer promoted Green Bay as being more important to Wisconsin than Detroit was to Michigan - at the same time that the Milwaukee newspaper was promoting Milwaukee as being better favored than Chicago. The obvious point being, that none of those papers was anything remotely resembling objective - they were boosters for their towns. I would add that modern journalists are boosters for journalism itself. No wonder that when a journalism outlet jumps the shark, all other journalists look the other way. There is competition among journalistic outlets, to be sure - but at the fundamental level there is cooperation.
No wonder that, in their enthusiasm, they sometimes confused the vision and the reality, that (as one early editor put it) the “sometimes represented things that had not yet gone through the formality of taking place.” “History will never tell how diligently the editors sought for facts to influence home-seekers, and how enthusiastically close they often came to bearing false witness, not against their neighbors, but in behalf of them . . . when they feared they might be prevaricating they were at most only anticipating. The eggs were in the basket all right, and it was only a matter of waiting for them to be hatched. It was permissible to mix visions and prophecies with current and negotiable realities when it was all certain to come true.”
Ping.
Ping.
Thomas Sowell has recommended this trilogy in his columns on at least three occasions.
Not all that is reported is worth reporting, even if it IS fair and balanced.
“On the TV screen, pure drivel tends to drive off ordinary drivel.” — from Murphy’s Law
And printed bilge tends to drive off the front page (and out of mind) real news.
Ping.
Yes, I learned that from reading the Contra Costa Slimes. On any morning that there is a huge photo spread of some 'human interest' story on the front page, I know to look on page 23 for the story on some Democrap misdeeds. Never fails.
Last paragraph BUMP! Link BUMP! Tagline BUMP! Great vanity!
Daniel Boorstin is a wonderful historian and author. Highly recommended.
BTTT
Dan Rather "jumped the shark" in the "Killian Memo" episode of 60 Minutes. Journalists do it every now and then. But when they do, all the other journalists remain in "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" mode. There is no stronger bias in journalism than that.But the reality is that that "professional courtesy" extends not only to other journalists but to everyone who criticizes the doer of deeds rather than trying to do deeds themselves. Those are the people journalists call "progressives."
Bob Garfield's Chaos Scenario 2.0
...
Since "Chaos":
- In December 2005, Viacom spun off CBS, the so-called Tiffany Network, lest the broadcast business impede growth and depress shareholder value.
- Just before Christmas 2005, Time Inc. laid off 100 employees. Just after Christmas, in January 2006, Time Inc. laid off 100 more employees. In April 2006, Time Inc. laid off 250 more employees -- the last round of job cuts, the company said. In January, Time Inc. laid off 300 more employees. No wonder. Since 2001, Time Warner's market capitalization has shrunk to $82 billion from $193 billion.
- Last fall, ostensibly to promote their new seasons, five broadcast networks bypassed their local affiliates and gave away new programs online.
- In October 2006, NBC announced a $750 million cost cutback, including 700 jobs and a moratorium on scripted programs in the first hour of prime time.
- In November 2006, Clear Channel -- the boogeyman of media consolidation -- sold to private-equity owners and declared that it wants to unload its TV and small-market radio stations. The sale fetched $38 a share. In 2000, the stock sold at $100 a share.
- The Minneapolis Star Tribune, acquired by McClatchy in 1998 for $1.2 billion, was sold to private investors in December 2006 for $530 million.
- In 2000, Chicago-based Tribune Co. was valued at $12 billion. It then bought Times-Mirror Co. for more than $8 billion. At this writing, with Tribune Co. for sale as a whole or in part, the value of the merged company is $7.34 billion.
- YouTube. Two years ago, it -- much less Joost and Revver and Brightcove and the online-video industry in general -- did not exist.
Nor does the disruption end there. Since spring 2005, according to Magna Global USA, DVR penetration has doubled to 20% from 10%, and Forrester Research predicts it will reach half of U.S. households within three years -- well beyond the threshold at which 40% of advertisers say they will dramatically reduce their TV buys. Meanwhile, after years of steady growth in spite of steadily declining audiences, the broadcast-upfront market last year was down 5%. Coca-Cola, never a big upfront player, pulled out altogether. So did Johnson & Johnson, which shifted $250 million online. According to TNS, General Motors slashed $600 million from its 2006 ad spend. Is somebody nervous? Half of the 109 national advertisers surveyed by Forrester in 2006 said their ad agencies and media agencies were "ill-equipped" to deal with changes in the TV environment.
What, me worry?
So what's it like to face your economic mortality? There are some clues in a February speech by Timothy Balding, CEO of the Paris-based World Association of Newspapers: "What we are seeing completely contradicts the conventional wisdom that newspapers are in terminal decline. ... The fashion of predicting the death of newspapers should be exposed for what it is -- nothing more than a fashion, based on common assumptions that are belied by the facts."
You've read the Ten Commandments; not one of them is "Thou shalt finance hourlong dramas" -- nor is there a word in there about scale. So why assume that either must transition to the new model? Not only is it economically nonsensical, it squanders the very nature of the digital universe, the ability to speak with -- not to, but with -- the narrowest communities and individuals themselves.Which, of course, is all blindingly obvious. When the yin is shriveling up and dying, this is hardly lost on the yang.
That sounds like an application for Artificial Intelligence - or for a salesman . . .
If it's a real salesman, it isn't marketing, it's sales.
BTTT
Interesting, and I really mean it this time, I’m going to go offline.
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