April 18, 2001

11:35 AM

Memo to NY media elite:While you would love if we all sat back sipping lattes while we listened to NPR, watched PBS, and thumbed through The New Yorker - America likes Britney Spears, Survivor, People magazine and Jim Carrey. Get over yourselves.
posted by owillis (61 comments total)

Red vs. Blue.
posted by aaron at 11:40 AM on April 18, 2001

define "media elite"
posted by Outlawyr at 11:41 AM on April 18, 2001

Define America, is more like it. Cause I sure don't own a Britney Spears CD.....and I have never even watched Survivor....
posted by bradth27 at 11:46 AM on April 18, 2001

I kinda like ny media elite, they're my buddies. America? Who's america?
posted by tiaka at 11:48 AM on April 18, 2001

Memo to NY media elite

Hey! That's me!

The article is a fine collection of truths that are a) well known to all journalists and b) will continue to be ignored. It's one of those highly enlightened pieces that will be picked apart for years at journalism conferences nationwide during which conferences resumes will continue to be slipped into the hands of New York editors from media nationwide.

Which leads me to emphasize a small rebuttal: Where do you think these New York journalists come from? Answer: elsewhere.
posted by Mo Nickels at 11:48 AM on April 18, 2001

Yes, but they go to New York and start a big 'ole circle jerk.

The beginning of a solution is to stop pointing to the New York Times and their ilk and realizing that other sources have important things to say.
posted by owillis at 11:52 AM on April 18, 2001

there's a difference between media like "People magazine, Survivor, and Britney" and the New York Times. For a pop fix People Magazine can't be beat, but if I really want to find out what is happening in the world I'll turn to the Times...

...or better yet, MeFi...

it's got a happy medium of the popular and the serious. (not that the two are mutually exclusive)
posted by treedream at 11:54 AM on April 18, 2001

owillis: We should start pointing at, perhaps, Washington, D.C.?

I say that with a big smile. It's my hometown, after all. I left it to go someplace a lot more like the real America: the San Francisco Bay Area. < / bigger smile >
posted by allaboutgeorge at 11:56 AM on April 18, 2001

Yeah, People magazine and Survivor have a lot to say.
posted by Doug at 12:00 PM on April 18, 2001

no, this is america.
posted by mathowie at 12:03 PM on April 18, 2001

owillis: Chicago, possibly?

(Though I think it's a self-defeating exercise: any place with sufficient clout to have media influence is changed as that influence grows. Journalism is a cabal, because it can't work any other way.)
posted by holgate at 12:03 PM on April 18, 2001

Manhattan-bashing stopped being fun for me about 5 years ago. I mean, it's just so damn easy. Des Moines-bashing, or Albequerque-bashing, on the other hand, is more of a creative challenge.
posted by varmint at 12:04 PM on April 18, 2001

Andwhere does article appear? Columbia University, upper West Side, New York City
posted by Postroad at 12:07 PM on April 18, 2001

That said, the NYC/USA division is nothing compared to the ones between London and the rest of the UK, or Paris and the rest of France. Try centralising media, culture, government, finance and technology in one city, and see where you end up.

(Interestingly, Germany doesn't seem to have this problem: you have strong media voices coming out of most of the major cities. Are there any German MeFites to set me right on this one?)
posted by holgate at 12:07 PM on April 18, 2001

you know, not to defend 'elitism' as it's defined in this particular context, but isn't self-aggrandizement and myopia a sort of hallmark of this era? (see, for reference, the number of references to the web standards project, etc around here.) could this piece be, in part, brought to you by the sour grape growing commission?

just a thought.

signed,
i work at a so-called 'media company' that wants us to nonstop push what 'the people' like, but you know what, i DON'T like it, and i DON'T feel like writing copy that is dumber than lucky standards, and why should i have to be phony and pandering? isn't that worse? i think it is. i'd much rather listen to people trying to educate and instruct than parroting whatever the market dictates. because it's not like there aren't other, behind the scenes forces influencing said dictation.
posted by maura at 12:08 PM on April 18, 2001

I at least like Pamela Anderson's kittens.

Anyway. My argument is with the New York mindset of automatically having an antagonistic attitude towards ideas put forth by the rest of the country. On a wider scale, journalists need to step down from their high horses and understand the masses a little better.
posted by owillis at 12:12 PM on April 18, 2001

Someone has been listening to Pat Buchanon's Populist notions. Us against Them sort of silliness. Identify with Just-plain-folks...all other things "elistist." Nonsense.
And the taling guys on Tv are the Pundits; and the thinking and writing people are The Chattering Class.
Read what you will. Like what you like. You don't need some twit at school of Journalism to direct you to The Real America.
posted by Postroad at 12:24 PM on April 18, 2001

You can find a similar thing in many circles ... even here. Whenever there are Internet or Blog related discussions, some MeFi posts do not take into account the average internet user. We are the Internet Elite.
posted by quirked at 12:24 PM on April 18, 2001

The point is not to write about intelligent things, but to write intelligently about things. I think.
posted by freakytrigger at 12:26 PM on April 18, 2001

freakytrigger: exactly.
posted by owillis at 12:32 PM on April 18, 2001

Being an NPR-listening, PBS-lovin', New Yorker quotin' Elite Media Type is great, especially since I'm even more elite with my really, really cheap rent. I only hang out with other Elites, natch. Hot diggety dog, I can't wait to go all smug on my Manhattan-based brother on how much better it is in the outer borough of Milwaukee.

posted by mimi at 12:33 PM on April 18, 2001

The Real America will never be captured accurately by journalists. I can say this because I was a small town newspaper journalist, covering "the real america" on a daily basis, and I got it wrong all the time. It's the paradox of "summary" - you can't essentialize a mass - you'll always get distortions based on the point of view of the editor. In this case, NYC functions as the nation's editor. I agree with Holgate to some extent. Journalism is and will be a cabal until we all start seeking out alternative news sources as our primary point of reference. But that'll never happen.
posted by amoeba at 12:34 PM on April 18, 2001

I wish to point out the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle again. I think it's appropo. One cannot merely observe something without affecting it, and inevitably becoming a part of it.

I'm generalizing here of course, as usual. Otherwise this diatribe would be painfully longer. Let's say a group of relatively like-minded people (perhaps a century or so ago) start a newspaper. As the city grows so do they, and they become the establishment of media for that city. As other forms of media come into play through that city's history, they offer alternatives, but eventually despite their attempts at objective journalism that offers a view different from the establishment, they eventually become a cog in the wheel of the machine. Want to work within the system to change it? It changes you.

Then one cog in the machine looks at another and balks at it. Makes wisecracks. Yet all the cogs in the machine eventually have to cater to what's fueling that machine: money. They try to convince the public to buy into things that fuel the machine, and turn away things that might threaten the machine. They become a part of what they were originally trying to offer as an alternative.

I hear Star Trek BORG music in the background. The New York Media Elite are all close enough to feed on one another's ideas, like a collective. But this is not limited to New York. It happens in every community. It is a societal condition. Nationally. Perhaps Internationally. One goes with the crowd and perpetuates the cogs already in existence, or rebels and tries to buck the system, perhaps creating something new which will eventually only become another cog.

The Roman Republic/Empire defeated Greece, and incorporated their culture, religion, everything, into themselves. Jupiter instead of Zeus. Neptune instead of Poseidon. They did the same with every culture that came in their path. Then Christianity eventually triumphed, but became the Roman Catholic Church which was just as tyrannical. Be you Christian or not you gotta dig Ecclesiastes: "It is like chasing the wind".

America has done the same thing. If you can't beat them, join them. And in so doing, you beat them. The Media Elite is assimilation. You're either a part of the ongoing perpetuating solution, or you're part of the problem. Other alternatives come along but are either squashed by the establishment machine, or the machine absorbs them; makes them yet another cog. Even the silly catchphrase All Your Base Are Belong To Us fell victum to it. It was cute until I saw the local media doing reports about it. Sigh. I'm getting an ulcer. Think I'm gonna have a lie down...

Resistance is futile.
posted by ZachsMind at 12:41 PM on April 18, 2001 [1 favorite has favorites]

You can find a similar thing in many circles ... even here. Whenever there are Internet or Blog related discussions, some MeFi posts do not take into account the average internet user. We are the Internet Elite.

Touche, quirked!

owillis's lead paragraph somewhat misstates the overall scope of the article. The article's point is that the media is too concentrated in New York City, and thus does not do as good a job covering issues of importance beyond Manhattan. This was not "the media elite are a bunch of snobs", it was "these guys need to get out of the city once in a while" or better yet "the news media should decentralize its staff."
posted by briank at 12:43 PM on April 18, 2001

owillis... For your information, I drink mochas, not lattes.
posted by thebigpoop at 12:47 PM on April 18, 2001

lattes are so....five years ago...
posted by bradth27 at 12:49 PM on April 18, 2001

no, this is america.

pamlea anderson is canadian. but she's doing a fine job of assimilating.

ok, so that cat might be american.
posted by donkeysuck at 12:55 PM on April 18, 2001

holgate,
I'm not German but I would guess that this is a product of German history. Germany was decentralized for far longer than it has been unified so it makes sense that the nation doesn't revolve around Berlin the way that France revolves around Paris (at least in the minds of Parisians)
Any Germans want to answer this one now? (After all, the question was directed to you)
posted by Octaviuz at 12:55 PM on April 18, 2001

first of all 'the news media' is not one entity, although it might seem like one given the outright encouragement of mergers between mediaglomerates these days.

second of all, couching points against concentration of reporting in a slam against 'media elites' really hurts the core of the argument -- an argument that i think is important. many foreign bureaus have closed over the past few years, and more and more papers, owned by companies like gannett, etc, are relying on the same two or three sources for their news. while people around here might say, well, i can go read the guardian, etc online, not everyone has access to that information, and a glance at any paper that isn't (sorry) the new york times or the washington post, or the nightly news, should reveal a lot about the utter lack of coverage given to stories that aren't about the us. (see also.) with the call of globalization constantly being heralded, isn't it important for people to at least have access to different perspectives from around the globe?

and the answer is that it might be good for the readers, but it affects the bottom line negatively. which means that it's gone, baby, gone. (but hey, then there's more room to run good ol' bob greene's column!)

it would have been a lot more interesting if the article had focused on that point, instead of raising the new york straw man for the eighty bazillionth time.
posted by maura at 1:00 PM on April 18, 2001

I think this whole 'elite' vs 'the people' thing is ridiculously overstated and out of date. That is to say, I don't think "taste" has to break down along such lines. I mean, I'm as much of a hyper-intellectual part of the New York elite as anyone (well, I grew up in New York, though I don't live anywhere near there any more), but I like Survivor and Jim Carrey and Destiny's Child as much as I do films by Jean-Luc Godard and Abbas Kiarostami, or abstruse French literary theory. I think we are always redefining ourselves when we make choices or declare preferences or tastes; but there is too much weird and interesting stuff going on out there to have to divide things up in this one way.
posted by Rebis at 1:06 PM on April 18, 2001

yes, this article is a bit self-evident. but don't simplify the matter. the media may be a cog, but the nytimes is a really big cog, and so it has power independent of its own money-fueled interests such as being pro-advertising. the nytimes does function as a national editor of the news, and it is biased, but has a sometimes staggering diversity of biases that are inherent in the media. The diversity of opinions and the occasional highly significant and high quality articles are what make it relevant.

if other papers pick up a giuliani or mccain article from the nyt, so what? ny rules because it is, after all, the New York times.

outside of those trivial issues (giuliani, mccain's temper), it's good to have a media source that is constantly critical of fiscal and foreign policy that actually wields some power. power means trade-offs. so therefore, re:briank, i would say that a centralized media, allows the more respected players in that media have all the more clout on actually affecting government policy, and all the other parts of society that the nyt keeps tabs on.

pop culture and all of the clone newspapers that don't dig deep for news are a whole different story. in those cases, the cabal is certainly a hindrance to people's getting alternative information. that's where MeFi comes in for me.
posted by benjamin at 1:07 PM on April 18, 2001

owillis - I usually agree with out (sometimes quietly), but you lost me on this one. I get nothing out of Survivor, People or most of what come out of Lost Angeles (except owillis). I live near DC and work in DC, which is why I use the Web to escape (usually back to San Francisco, which is close to the New York view of America and why I like New York also).

The pop culture is like eating rice cakes: not much there, you go through the motions, and you are never satisfied.

*span class=jest*It seems like Robert Reed has taken over for owillis the past few days as owillis has taken a turn right. Maybe it is allergies */span*
posted by vanderwal at 1:24 PM on April 18, 2001

Every time I agree with a conservative, I shudder.

So here's the dilly-o. My biggest enemy is dismissal. That happens on both side of the left/right spectrum.

Maybe its because of the fact that they set the tone for media coverage why my axe to grind is with New York media types.

It's like "within this sphere of intellectualism, we won't give any attention to anything out of whack with our viewpoints. Especially not if the masses like it, because if those brutes don't like it, it must be ass".

My point is, decide that something is crap based on its own inherent crappiness rather than its perceived crappiness or its tendency to be liked by those that are crappy.
posted by owillis at 1:37 PM on April 18, 2001

It is a bad mistake to posit People, Britney Spears, "Survivor", etc., as in opposition to some New York-centric media conception. After all, all three of these products emerge from a district bounded by 44th Street (south) and 52nd Street (north) and 5th Avenue (east) and 8th Avenue (west) in Mahattan. Any Paramount or Warner movie also emerges from that little district; 3 blocks north and one block east and you get in any Sony or Tri-Star movie.
posted by MattD at 2:11 PM on April 18, 2001

... Pamela Anderson may be Canadian, but I'm betting that her boobs were Made In The U.S.A.

Sorry, couldn't help myself. Feel free now to continue with the actual topic at hand :)
posted by Sapphireblue at 2:17 PM on April 18, 2001

Try centralising media, culture, government, finance and technology in one city, and see where you end up.

Add a fifth of the country's population and you have . . . Metro Toronto!

Which explains the tone of voice that [us] western Canadians use to say "Toronto" and "Ontario". (flame avoidance: my Mom grew up in Scarborough).
posted by iceberg273 at 2:18 PM on April 18, 2001

Albequerque-bashing, on the other hand, is more of a creative challenge.

not if you live here!

that is all.

:)
posted by sugarfish at 4:14 PM on April 18, 2001

Look. People Magazine is a white trash institution, and it's edited in NYC by Yale history majors.
posted by ParisParamus at 4:46 PM on April 18, 2001

Be a loyal plastic robot
For a world that doesn't care

The whole bullshit "us" versus "them" thing is stupid.

The point is to be your own guide, don't read the culture as a guide to life. It sucks as a design for living. Be a whole human, think about the life you lead, rather than just following some trend. And be sure to question even those who seem to be talking sense.

What do I know though -- I dig Christina, Survivor, PBS, and NPR.

Of course, did you just decide who I am and what I'm about based on that factlet?
posted by artlung at 7:18 PM on April 18, 2001

I don't live in NY anymore, but I'm a New Yorker, and I could not care less what "America" (whatever is meant by that) sips, watches, reads, or thumbs through...I do know that PEOPLE is pure dreck, Britney Spears is a nonentity and Jim Carrey was funny at one time but is now only embarrassing; I sort of like SURVIVOR, though. ...I think I'd feel the same if I came from Dubuque (inside joke for NEW YORKER readers).
posted by perdido at 10:24 PM on April 18, 2001

> While you would love if we all sat back sipping lattes
> while we listened to NPR, watched PBS, and thumbed
> through The New Yorker - America likes Britney Spears,
> Survivor, People magazine and Jim Carrey.

If the rest of the world winds up thinking America is even just a little bit smarter than it really is, lowbrow America should be thankful for the camouflage offered them by the New York media 'elite'.
posted by pracowity at 11:23 PM on April 18, 2001

I actually think the rest of the world perceives us as worse than we are. But screw 'em, it's only Europe :)
posted by owillis at 11:30 PM on April 18, 2001

Maura said: "first of all 'the news media' is not one entity, although it might seem like one given the outright encouragement of mergers between mediaglomerates these days."

It's because of the mergers and buyouts and behind-closed-doors wheeling and dealing that "the news media" is one entity. The news media is in fact presently in a similar state to a fifth or sixth generation child endproduct of inbreeding. It's a deformed Hydra-Dragon, in desperate need of having a few heads chopped off, but when someone successfully does, three more just grow in its place. It is a grotesque monstrous thing that no longer successfully accomplishes its original goal: to offer accurate and objective reporting of events that the average human being needs to know to be a well informed human being on this spinning rock in space. If brain surgeons did their jobs with the lack of thorough research and mental focus that most journalists today do their jobs, the mortality rate would plummet. They announce something loud and attention getting only to retract it quietly and briefly a week later. Truth and Knowledge are no longer important. The object is to get the consumers to keep consuming. If someone happens to learn something along the way? Icing on the cake.
posted by ZachsMind at 4:22 AM on April 19, 2001

owillis, don't forget Asia -- don't forget what we could do to you if we all jumped at the same time...
posted by lia at 4:38 AM on April 19, 2001

It is a grotesque monstrous thing that no longer successfully accomplishes its original goal: to offer accurate and objective reporting of events that the average human being needs to know to be a well informed human being on this spinning rock in space.

Was that the original goal? Because newspapers used to -- back in the 19th-century -- be much more unabashedly partisan than they are today; I'm not sure whether the idea of objective reporting comes from Adolph Ochs' Times or from Hearst or Scripps (or, as the link above suggests, rural papers), but it came after the institution of the newspaper.
posted by snarkout at 7:13 AM on April 19, 2001

beginsarcasm: hey man, don't pigeon-hole us media-elite loving, white-trash-down-looking, internet elites. i just hate it when people do that. can't you look at us individually? some of us even have very bourgeois guilty-pleasures: endsarcasm
posted by Sean Meade at 7:33 AM on April 19, 2001

Snarkout -- the notion of "objective reporting" (as oxymoronic as it is), was really a post-WWI phenomenon that came out of the Progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Walter Lippmann and others championed the idea as they began to critically appraise the new media industries that were coming to prominence.

Newspapers as such were really an 18th century concept, and were entirely intended as a means of advancing the political ends of the publisher. The newspaper owners of the 19th century discovered that you could sell a lot more papers with lurid stories than political treatises. On some level it seems all we've done is come back full circle to the days of Hearst and Pulitzer.
posted by briank at 7:45 AM on April 19, 2001

There is scant evidence for the proposition that the Internet will decentralize the (US) media from New York. Just as always, some great media products and personalities will emerge from the provinces, and, just as always, most of them will end up migrating to New York.

In the 1970s, it was Rolling Stone, emerging from San Francisco, and long since moved to New York. Earlier this year The Onion moving from Madison, WI to New York.

Most of my media buddies predict that Salon will move to New York within a year (whether through an acquisition or otherwise), and some of the biggest (by traffic) sources of content on the Internet (America Online and CNN) are headed for some New York focused consolidation as well. (AOL Time Warner is building a giant headquarters on Columbus Circle and it won't just be all bean pushers.)
posted by MattD at 7:55 AM on April 19, 2001

Aaron--great self-parody, man. Good to see you're learning to laugh at yourself.
posted by rodii at 7:55 AM on April 19, 2001

If the rest of the world winds up thinking America is even just a little bit smarter than it really is, lowbrow America should be thankful for the camouflage offered them by the New York media 'elite'.

Yes, because, you know, smart people know better than to enjoy popular things. Only stupid people enjoy mass marketed entertainers and watch network tv. Only stupid people go to movies or sporting events. Those brilliant writers and other media gliterrati couldn't possibly be suckered into such folly, which is why their writing is just so many lightyears ahead of all of us flyoverland folks.

Whatever. Could you be a little more snobbish?
posted by Dreama at 10:08 AM on April 19, 2001

my hope is that over time, the sheer amount of journalistic choice offered by various groups (and even individuals) on the net will slowly degrade their overwhelming influence

You would think that this would have already happened at least a little, since the Cable Revolution of the 1980s, but the event horizon of the black hole is the brightest spot.
posted by briank at 1:39 PM on April 19, 2001

A tip: next time you hear about a story that isn't set in New York, see if the local paper's online. Read the IHT. It's like the line a few weeks ago that there's "no good music out there". You're just not looking.
posted by holgate at 2:41 PM on April 19, 2001

Oh, please.

Aaron: first of all, you've established a persona here that (for example) rakes anyone over the coals for "Bush-bashing" for statements attacking the Bush administration in ways that you consider unfair. That's fine; we may draw the line in different places, but it's important to distinguish between fair and unfair opposition. The point is that you are accustomed to drawing lines about what is and isn't a fair argument.

Now here comes Pracowity, who characterizes Americans as "lowbrow"&8212;surely a statement that reasonable people may differ on, and one that's been made in the past by people like Thorstein Veblen, H. L. Mencken and Allan Bloom, nary a one of whom was a wild-eyed radical. Your response?

Wow, that's a hateful statement. Burn any US flags lately? Or perhaps an effigy of Bush while surrounded by several hundred of your closest friends screaming "Allah Akbar, Down with Devilish USA!"?

You're telling me that this completely unwarranted escalation of the argument--"hateful", playing the "Bush card," allusions to flag-burning and Islamic mobs--is anything but shameful, irrational Pracowity-baiting? Well, of course it is! Because you are the fair-minded guardian of rational argument in MF. Surely I can be forgiven for concluding that you must be kidding--that you must be light-heartedly alluding to some of your earlier conversational follies.

Now, if you had something that was actually responsive to say to Pracowity's original claim, I assume you would have said it. But this way you get to boo-hoo about those nasty personal attacks, conveniently ignoring your own aggressiveness. I guess it's one of those "I'm a gadfly, you're a contrarian, he's an asshole" things--only all of us can play that game.

So to summarize: your response to Pracowity was a "personal attack." My response to you was, well, let's call it "fond contempt."
posted by rodii at 4:00 PM on April 19, 2001

In a probably futile attempt to head off the flame war I sense a-comin', let me seize on something in Rodii's comment. Complaining about the decline and fall of American culture is something that's certainly not exclusive to the political left -- think of Bork's Slouching Towards Babylon or Allan Bloom's book on the contemporary American university. (Was that Tenured Radicals?) Aaron and Dreama, as representatives of the Mefi Conservative Cabal, do you see any real difference between liberal Manhattanite bitching about flyover-land and the Bork/Bennett posture about the coarsening of American culture?
posted by snarkout at 4:17 PM on April 19, 2001

My apologies -- that's Slouching Towards Gomorrah; I've read Tenured Radicals, but I haven't read Bork's book, so my impression is based on reviews. And Bloom's book was The Closing of the American Mind; I was confusing it with a book by Roger Kimball that I read about the same time.
posted by snarkout at 4:22 PM on April 19, 2001

No flame war intended. I botched the link I embedded above, by the way--it wasn't supposed to go to Aaron's profile page--but let it stay botched in the interest of not amping up the conflict.

And you know how I wrote &8212; above? Sorry about that. I meant to write —. :)

But aaron, really, the poor-me act is too much.
posted by rodii at 6:08 PM on April 19, 2001

snarkout: I think both of those books are just as bad. I hate the thought of anyone from "up on high" telling "the plebeians" what is the "right" way to think
posted by owillis at 7:16 PM on April 19, 2001

Oh come on folks, it's all the same bullshit. Let's not split hairs...
posted by johnb at 10:46 AM on April 20, 2001