BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis

December 02, 2002

Why Republicans are such fun (and Democrats are such fun fall guys)
: Michael Wolff has (another) brilliant column. Skip past the West Wing stuff and get to the marrow of the matter: Why is FoxNews (a) such fun and (b) so successful? (The answer to both questions is the same.):

But then there’s Roger Ailes.
There’s something incredibly creepy about Ailes. He looks the way you imagine the man behind the curtain looking: That is, he doesn’t care about how he looks (which is, as it happens, gray and corpulent). He understands it’s all manipulation.
When he got found out giving the president ex parte advice on handling the war, he didn’t for a second whinge or show remorse. Let others pretend—he’s too old and too good at his job to start making believe the world works any other way than the way it works. The rap on Ailes is, of course, that he’s a hopeless partisan, a true believer, a Republican agent. But that deeply misses the point. Ailes is a television guy. He’s been doing television practically as long as anyone. His digressions into politics (for Nixon and for Reagan) have always been more about television craft than about Republican craft. His is the singular obsession of any television guy: to stay on the air.
Fox really isn’t in the service of the Republicans. Ailes can say this baldly and confidently. (The Republicans, more and more, follow the Fox line.) Fox isn’t in any conventional sense ideological media. It’s just that being anti-Democrat, anti-Clinton, anti-yuppie, anti-wonk turns out to be great television. Great ratings make for convenient ideology.

You see, it is all an entertainment equation:
First: Republicans love to complain. Complaining is fun to watch.
Second: Democrats love to be serious. Serious is dull.
Third: You don't have to out of power to act like the outsider, the underdog freedom fighter. Even though you're in charge of all three branches of government and all of business and the No. 1 news network, you can still act like you're the avenging hero because Democrats and yuppies run the New York Times and other things you don't like. You make them into the enemy and yourself into the hero. If it works for WWE wrestling, it can work for any branch of entertainment.
Fourth: All good entertainment has a strong voice. Fox has a strong voice. It's Ailes' voice.
The result: Fox wins.

I watch FoxNews. It's far more entertaining -- that is, compelling, which means addictive -- than any of its competitors. It's maddening, of course. But then, remember that scene from Howard Stern's Private Parts, in which one befuddled network executive explains the results of an audience survey to another befuddled network executive: The people who love Stern listen because they want to hear what he says next. The people who hate him listen even more. Why? To hear what he says next.
That is FoxNews.
That is Stern.

That is also weblogs, eh?
Wolff's equation fits weblogs well. Why are they so conservative? Because that's more fun, more entertaining. And besides, everybody loves kicking the serious, wimpy, 98-pound-weakling, do-gooder, simp (read: Al Gore), especially when he's down. It's sport.
And I don't say any of that to denegrate any of these media beasts. Remember: I watch Fox; I listen to Stern; I love weblogs. I may be to the left of all those things (which is to say, at the center) but I know a good show when I see one. I'm a professional at it.

Wolff has more wise insight on the Fox formula:

Fox has cultivated a fast-talking garrulousness. Traditional news is rendered slowly, at a deadly, fatherly pace. Fox gunned the engine....
Fox, too, is about arguing—rather than the argument. It’s a Jesuit thing. Thesis. Antithesis....
It’s the tweak.
This is really the Fox narrative device.
The entire presentation is about tweaking Democrats and boomer culture.
The Fox message is not about proving its own virtue, or the virtue of aging Republicans (except, of course, for Ronald Reagan), or even of the Bushes, but about ridiculing the virtues of Democrats and their yuppie partisans.
Pull their strings.
Push their buttons.
Build the straw man, knock it down. Night after night.
Here’s the way not to get labeled a phony: Accuse the other guy of being one.
Always attack, never defend.
And have fun doing it.

It's not "fair and balanced." It's fun.

Sounds like weblogs, still, eh? Weblogs are fast-talking; they're argumentative; they love the tweak.
That's because weblogs, like FoxNews and like Stern, position themselves as the outsiders (even if they're not) and it all works because Americans love outsiders. Americans also love people who are sure of themselves (and that description, too, fits all these media beasts).

Read Wolff's entire column (especially his Ann Coulter and Al Gore punchlines); you'll be glad you did.

: Note, too, this column by the editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal suggesting that the way to turn around "this great, lumbering ship of journalism" is to abandon objectivity. He recounts saying this at one of those terribly boring industry conferences:

I pointed to marketing surveys by all the big media corporations that startlingly discover the public has little appetite for political news, resulting in suggestions the news media cut back on its coverage of politics. To which I reply, maybe it isn't that the public doesn't care for politics. Maybe it is that you cover politics in such a boring, middle-of-the-road, noncommittal fashion that it induces yawns instead of yelps.
Why not come out swinging from an unabashed point of view? Use judgment. Take a stance. Challenge preconceptions.

If it works for Rupert Murdoch -- at the Post as well as at FoxNews -- it can work for you. It works in Britain, too. We're the ones who hold onto this objectivity fetish.
Granted, it's easier to have a chorus of discordant voices when you have a nation served by national media -- as in Britain, Germany, France, and much of the world; it's much harder in U.S. cities served by one paper each. Still, a little opinion never killed anyone. It just led to longer dinners.

Republicans are fun (except for Andrew Sullivan)
: Sullivan is just so damned predictable. He is to dull what Al Gore is to dull: just dull.
Today, he complains about a Yale professor who wants the Yale Daily News to take down its forums because they are attacking her.
Right on, Andy.
Except then he just can't stop himself and he calls this typical liberal behavior.
Preditable. Stupid. Wrong. Dull.
I run lots and lots of forums and I can tell you that most of the people I hear from -- and I do hear from them -- who hate and fear the audience having its own voice in online forums are conservative.
Typical liberal behavior is defined as anything Sullivan doesn't like. Predictable. Ergo, dull.

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Smells like a weblog
: The Independent [via IWantMedia] predicts a future of disconnected media.

The concept of "a publication" may be obsolete in the ubiquitous information age. The current model assumes you pick your favourite newspaper, buy a small selection of regular magazines, tune in to a favourite station. But technology is going to make it easier to assemble your newspaper from multiple sources, or plan a video viewing sequence that is unpredictable. The mass market may soon be impossible to locate.

Familiar, eh?

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I was just thinking that....
: But Pete Rojas said it first at Gizmodo: When is somebody going to create a TiVo for radio?
It can be damned cheap: doesn't need lots of disk-space, for audio takes up less space -- and radio has less worth recording.
My list:
1. Howard Stern every day.
2. Kurt Anderson's Studio 360.
And that's about that.
Can some smart geek just create simple radio tuner that can record and convert signals at given times and given frequencies to MP3s so I can take them on the road?
That's what I want for Christmas.

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Smart (though half-naked) mobs
: Germans used the Internet to start a grass-roots campaign (or national practical joke) with thousands set to send the shirt of their back to Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Katja Riefler at Poynter translates for us (though Poynter has no permanlinks). The movement's site.

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