By Steve Rhodes
An (almost) weekly look at the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Change Bank
* “America wants change,” the Economist says from overseas. “It just can’t work out what sort of change . . . and who can deliver it?”
Which is just about right, but the Economist buys into a bit of clever, disingenuous and divisive Obama spin when it posits that change might not come without a break from “Bush-Clinton partisan politics.”
Since when was the Clinton Administration anything like the Bush Administration? And who were the divisive, partisan forces of the 90s – the accommodationist, centrist president or the right-wing loonies whose wild and lunatic attacks seem to have been internalized by Democrats?
* “The policy differences between the two leading Democrats are slight,” the Economist says elsewhere, even while noting that “Mrs. Clinton promises universal health insurance; Mr. Obama would make it nearly universal.”
(In fact, Paul Krugman in the New York Times says that Obama is the least progressive – would make the least change – of the three leading Democratic contenders. So the question is really whether voters want a change in style or a change in substance, although many Obama supporters, to make a generalization, don’t seem to know what his positions are to begin with.
(The Economist, for example, illustrates this phenomenon by quoting a graphic designer who says “he would feel more ‘positive’ about America if Mr. Obama won the presidency” but admits that “I don’t know what he wants to do.”)
* “Mr. Obama now faces two big problems. The first is that his rhetoric is a waning asset. Everyone now knows that he is a wonderful speaker. But can he produce anything but golden words?” the magazine asks in yet another article about the campaign. “It is striking how many people turned turned up to his meetings in New Hampshire and came away moved but not converted. They admired his talent but did not think that he addressed their problems.”
* The magazine states, without evidence, that Obama “thrived in the world of Illinois politics,” which isn’t exactly true. It’s hard for any legislator to thrive under the authoritarian rule of the Illinois legislatures leaders, known commonly as The Four Tops; Obama did no better than anyone else.
“In the [U.S.] Senate, he concentrated on building political capital for a presidential run rather than on accumulating a legislative record (which frankly looks a little thin).”
In other words, what has he done?
Google Plex
Google is probably the most fascinating company on the planet right now. In The New Yorker, veteran media writer Ken Auletta writes ostensibly about their lobbying on Capitol Hill, but really much, much more, including the fact that Google is in the advertising business, not the search engine business, something the oldstream media has taken a long time to figure out. A fascinating account.
Sciencefictionology
I mean, look, you have to be an Operating Thetan to read the secret scriptures. Apparently Tom Cruise is one.
At any rate, The New Yorker takes a look at Scientology’s creepy Celebrity Centre in Hollywood.
Junk Mail
“The U.S. steel industry is not the world leader it was once, but no one produces more junk that we do – scrap metal was among our most valuable exports last year,” The New Yorker says elsewhere.
Vast Hypocrisy
So it turns out, almost predictably, that Richard Mellon Scaife, the man behind the vast right-wing conspiracy that Barack Obama is now exploiting in his characterizations of Hillary Clinton, is a drunk and a philanderer.
The Reporter
“In contrast to the attitude at the Saigon headquarters, the military advisers in the field took a particular liking to David [Halberstam],” Neil Sheehan wrote in the New York Times Sunday Magazine’s annual remembrance of those lost in the last year.
“His physical courage in action matched his moral courage, and professional soldiers respect that. The advisers in the southern Mekong Delta initiated him into the exclusive ‘Blackfoot Club.’ Membership was confined to those who spent enough time in the rice paddies so that the mud soaked through their boots and turned their feet black. The officers in the field in Vietnam, unlike some who were to command in Iraq, were a generation of military men who did not believe in waiting until they retired to tell us what was wrong. David was a good student.
“His dispatches on the fighting in the Mekong Delta, then the cockpit of the war, grew remarkably sophisticated. Had President Kennedy relied on David’s reports, and not on those he was receiving from the Pentagon and the CIA, he would have been a well-informed man.”
Less Is Less
“A smaller staff means a lesser paper,” Spokane Spokesman-Review editor Steven Smith says. “Doing more with less is corporate-speak BS and you won’t hear it from me. There is now way to make this pig look like anything other than a pig.”
By the way, notes American Journalism Review editor Rem Rieder, “Newspapers are not exactly charity cases. The average profit margin of publicly traded newspaper companies was 16 percent in the first half of 2007, a number that would be Nirvana (if not Pearl Jam) for many industries.”
Poker Craze Unabated
Things I didn’t know but The Economist told me a little while ago:
* A 19-year-old won the World Series of Poker in September.
* “Popular websites such as Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars enjoy peak traffic of tens of thousands of visitors at any given time, occasionally over 100,000 . . . One recent discussion had more than 1,600 participants. No wonder it is often said that poker has done more than anything apart from pornography to develop the web.” And yet, newspapers still have bridge columns. Poker social networking, anyone?
* “Today poker is the third-most watched sport on cable television in the United States, after car racing and American football, trumping even NBA basketball.”
* “Harrah’s, the casino operator that runs WSOP, has brought in Jeffrey Pollack, a former NASCAR executive, to smooth its image and entice in corporate money. He has revamped the website, wrung more money out of ESPN and put poker on the radio (where it works surprisingly well).”
Who knew?
Posted on January 17, 2008