Sustainability

I have to call a swing-and-a-miss for Peggy Noonan's OpinionJournal column today.

She appreciates the variety of new media and the freedom from liberal media oligopoly but she credits the competition with increased partisanship and lack of tone.

I spoke with a network producer a few weeks ago, an old warhorse who was trying to explain his frustration at the current ratings race. He wrestled around the subject, and I cut with rude words to what I thought he was saying. "You mean it's gone from the dictatorship of a liberal elite to the dictatorship of the retarded."

Yes, he said. And it's not progress.

When liberals miss something in the media, that's what they should be missing. Not a unity that never existed but standards that were high. When conservatives say there's nothing to miss, they're wrong. We lost some bias, but we lost some standards, too.

An emailer inquires whether one of my favorite writers is dissing the long tail. Read closely, she's against truth, justice and the American way.

You encounter these pockets of excellence and quality in any media or artistic endeavor. Rather than looking back at Uncle Walter, I always wonder about the superb runs from NPR, PBS and the BBC. Were these supra-market phenomena high quality because they were outside the market?

Sting certainly thinks so. While I usually don't just take the bass player's word on anything, he is a serious fellow. BBC America used to run a PSA with the former Policeman saying that the view of the BBC news would not be jaundiced to appeal to a Corporation or Oil company. He hoped, the spot poignantly closed. He hoped.

I'm a market fan and I'll toe the line here. Yes the BBC delivered awesome TV programs for decades on microscopic budgets. Before I saw "Buffy," I held "Red Dwarf" to be the best show ever. Joss Whedon, studying over there, likely absorbed some of that quality. In the end, however, these organizations do great work because they have great people. They can sustain it only as long as they can attract and fund similar talent.

This is an opinion post but I have no compunction saying that BBC, PBS and NPR are all in a state of decline. And that without a market component, there is no mechanism to rectify their slide. The BBCAmerica satellite channel has some good programming, but it is usually ten or 20 years old.

NPR keeps the standards up but they have attracted a generation of activist listeners to take over and I think the inbreeding weakens. PBS? Oh man, is that still on? I watch every fourth of July...

Noonan misses the integrity and quality from Newsmen (pretty much all men) who cared about their craft. I think with 500 channels and the Internet, you get just as much quality and integrity, you just have to look a little harder sometimes. Yes, that's part of the Long Tail.

Media and Blogging Posted by jk at September 29, 2006 5:49 PM