BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis

December 08, 2004

A new anti-Semitism

: I'm watching a most frightening Scarborough Country with guest hotheadhost Pat Buchanan as he and most of his guests attack Hollywood for not bowing down to Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic Passion of the Christ because -- in the words of William Donohue of the Catholic League -- "Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews." Buchanan doesn't scold him but instead talks about how good movies 50 years ago were mde by "Jewish folks." The only -- the token -- Jew on the show is Rabbi Smuley Boteach, who replies to Buchanan's talk about how the Oscars will surely honor Michael Moore and not Mel Gibson and says that Moore and Gibson commit the same sin: "they both whitewash tyrants." The attacks on "the Jews" continue until another guest starts attacking homosexuals. Scary people. Scary show.

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Media on media

: Just got a call to be on Anderson Cooper's show tonight to talk about the FCC.

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Pissy pols

: I ended up on the same Continental flight from Newark to Washington with Sen. Frank Lautenberg. When you fly to D.C., you are not allowed to stand up in the last half-hour of the flight, and so the Senator took a pitstop in the back before we took off.

"At my age and in my profession," the senator said, "you never pass up a men's room."

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Remainders

: At National Airport's newsstands, they're selling Kerry/Edwards bumper stickers and souvenir notepads for 75 percent off.

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Veterans

: At The Week's event yesterday, I was lucky to sit next to Garrick Utley, legendary NBC News correspondent, and Myron Kandel of CNN. They need no introductions. I introduce myself as an internet exec and also a blogger.

So Utley asks what impact blogs are having on big media. I stick in the sound cart you'll expect me to play: I say that they are turning news into a conversation. And he grabs onto that like a dog on a steak: He says he gave a commentary after the '92 election that said that politics is forever changed into a new kind of conversation.

We talked about how it's too bad there are no commentaries from network anchors anymore (or I said that because I think it's part of meeting the need for transparency).

Utley talked about his father's career in radio, which used to be filled with commentary: They read the news and then they told you what they thought about it, from one side or the other. Talk radio today is no different, he said, only they talk longer.

I asked about the fate of network news. Utley said the jig was up a decade ago.

I asked what they'd advise students trying to go into journalism today. They each shrugged, regretfully. Utley wondered whether anyone could make a living in this new medium (and you can guess the other sound cart I played on that topic).

Here's the point: Utley (whom I spoke with more than with Kandel) really gets it. He is, in all sense of the word, an old media guy. But he gets it. Even from a brief conversation at a crowded table, it's clear that he understands exactly where the news business is today. And well he should; he has seen it all and done it all.

It made me once again want to get big media and citizens' media people together to see that the other guys are smart and care.

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A fine mess

: Yesterday, I went to 21 to attend the latest lunch thrown by The Week magazine, this time -- appropriate to the venue -- a debate about the economy with former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and rich smart guy PEter G. Peterson and then with CNBC's Lawrence Kudlow, Yale's Michael Graetz, and the irritating tax nudge with the Sesame Street name, Grover Norquist.

Peterson stole the show. He argued convincingly (not that sane souls need much convincing) that we are in a budget crisis that is being handed to our children with an $11 trillion shortfall in Social Security ("one of the oxymorons of our time -- the trust fund; it shouldn't be trusted and it's not funded") and a coming Medicare crisis that's "three to four times more difficult than Social Security and harder to solve." He also said we're in a savings crisis with the U.S. savings rate falling from 8 percent of GDP 12 years ago to .2 percent today.

Peterson proposed mandated savings (a la Chile, Singapore, and now Australia) in global index funds and fixed income bonds. He didn't get much disagreement from Rubin or even from Kudlow.

Rubin and Petersen also agreed that our real problem is that we don't sense the crisis. Witness Kudlow, who goes on about how peachy things are in the economy now; no need to worry; no need to upset anything.

"What we need is a massive dose of truth-telling," Petersen said. He suggested following the example of the 9/11 Commission to get high-level brains (e.g., Rubin, Voelker, Nunn) to come up with the tough solutions the pols are unwilling or afraid to propose. Added Rubin: "The fundamental problem is our political system is no longer for the most part willing to make decisions that are difficult."

Amen. And I, too, have wanted to see 9/11-Commission-like groups tackling health care and insurance. But isn't that what our legislatures are supposed to do? Isn't that why we elect them? Isn't it a bit frightening that we need to set up shadow legislatures -- which is what these commissions really are -- to separate themselves from politics and get real work done? Whatever it takes....

Rubin added that media holds a lot of the responsibility for the problem and the solution and I agree. We need to be part of that massive truth-telling. We need to find the ways to raise the alarms. Said Rubin: "Public officials need to feel as if they are going to be held accountable by an informed electorate."

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Chicken Little, reporting from Kabul

: Yesterday, I listen to NPR on the installation of the first democractically elected leader in the history of Afghanistan and the reporter -- from the BCC, of course -- ends all the good news by adding: But, Afghanistan's people are amongst the poorest in the world. Yeah? And your point? The implication, of course, is that we shouldn't be celebrating so fast. But, of course, we should be, for we got rid of the tyrants who made them among the poorest people in the world. I can only hope that that reporter was among the many the BBC laid off yesterday.

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Airborne

: Traveling today. Blogging when wi-fi allows.

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