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Holiday Reprint: Ready for your Close up?

Editors Note: I'm still enjoying some time off and this is the last day of it but I've just realized all the things I didnt get done during this little break. I'll be back on regular blogging duty tommorrow, but heres a little something I wrote back last Febuary that is timely...

Were living in a time of great transition. The human world is changing before our eyes in ways our grandfathers could never have imagined. Some of us adjust and sit back and marvel at the majesty of it all, while others cling to a hopeful return to the righteousness of the past like a wet cat locked inside a running shower stall loudly craves a return to dryness.

I’ve been through technology transitions before, so this is nothing new. To me, all technology has the life span of a green banana. It doesn’t surprise me to see change anymore. In fact I’m so jaded that I’m only surprised when I don’t see change. I like change. Most of the time, it works out pretty good. I do have my issues with cell phones, but that’s a rant for another time.

Like I said, things are changing, and changing big. I really hesitated writing this piece because it involves picking on a soft and easy target. This target is a person, but she’s actually more of a totem for a lifestyle that is dying before my eyes.

That lifestyle is “Activist Journalism”, and it’s fading into the past fast and with it fades the career of a particular baby-boomer-Pulitzer-prize-winning-columnist.

Once, long ago, to be a journalist meant having the same prestige as a used car salesman. Respectable men didn’t work as “reporters”, just scam artists and men just this side of the law. Sure, there were a few “writers” as such, but as a rule, kids didn’t go to college saying they wanted to go into the “news” business. It was a knuckle-busting, hard drinking, make no money, all for a little bit of ego stroke kind of business. It was a man’s business, specifically an old mans business a two fisted drinking, smoking, whoring mans business.

She wondered what to do with yourself.

A few years go by. Then one day, a couple of kids just like her who worked at the Washington Post exposed a popular and powerful President in a crime. They became famous. They became more important than the stories they covered. They mattered.

People of her generation began to talk of their role of “Speaking Truth to Power”, exposing corruption and “making to world a better place”. It became intoxicating. She could become famous she told herself, just by writing a few little stories.

She could become an “authority”. She could change government policy, all because you could get hired by a newspaper to write stories. There was no competition; she had the consumer and the publisher right where she wanted them.

She used to march in protests in college, she wanted to change the world, now through the new found world of “Activist Journalism”, she could.

Now she mattered. Now she were important. The world listened to her. They watched her breathlessly help make policy on Sunday morning Political Shows, where the “old men” asked her to appear to give your opinion. She was “speaking truth to power”.

People bought her books. She made up cute names about important people and they had to take it, because she worked for a newspaper, and they didn’t. It was sweet revenge for all the wrongs against her and all of the agrieved "sisterhood".

The people she worked for paid her well, because just by her being associated with them, they made money. It was a great little system they had.

Once upon a time, A person could go to the best schools, get the connections, take a journalism class or two, get out of college, go to work for a newspaper, write a few articles and become famous.

And powerful. That was the best part, Power. In your own hands...

Once upon a time way back when, a person could join a profession who had as one of its goals “Changing the world” and you could. And she did!

She lives in a din of Champaign bubbles, camera lights and the loud hum of stereo speakers at parties. It dulls her to the sound of little feet. The little feet of competition, scuttling across the floor of her finely ordered world where she sits safely at the top.

Once, while she was busy entertaining at a posh party in the Hampton’s, someone across the room said a word she didn’t understand in a sentence she couldn’t comprehend.

“ I read it in a blog…” They said about something that she couldn’t care less about because it wasn’t about her, so how important could it be... she thought to yourself. She kept hearing how your friends were on the “Internet”, but she resisted, it was all so pedestrian. Her admin assistant could do that for her at work, why should she get into the dirty side of it all.

“It gets in the way of my writing”; she said whenever someone asked. Her favorite politcal candidate in the election started to make money off all the little people on this thing called “the internet”. She decided that whatever it was, it was a good thing, but basically, she ignored it.

Her newspaper started an “online edition”. They set up an email so your readers could correspond with her on a story. As long as the checks came in, she didn’t care. She had no more idea what “internet edition” was any more than what the letters “WIC” meant in the milk section of the grocery store. She never checked her email, she had people to do that for her.

Then she heard it again, that little “blog” word. She thought it so passé, but there it was again. Then one day, her editor lost his job because of the effect of this little word she didn’t understand. Apparently, some "blog" caught her boss in a little lie, and told everyone. How could they? and who were they anyway? “This must be the work of the corporate power brokers”. She decided to investigate this "internet thing". She asked her admin about the email account that the paper had set up for her.

“You wont like it” said the admin.

“How can that be? I am loved by one and all!” The admin then explained how readers wrote to tell how often she, the writer, the reporter, the journalist were wrong on so many issues. The admin explained that her fine crafted pieces of journalism were often linked on websites all over the world.

“Well, see, I told you they like me” she said with glee. The admin looked across the top of her glasses at you with a sour persimmon look and shook her face from side to side.

“You don’t understand, they don’t like you, they hate you, they make fun of you every chance they get, and you don’t help with some of the pieces you write, all those cutesy names, its so infantile”.

“Well, it’s the right wing talk radio whackos, of course they hate me!” she said back in angry retort with balled up fists.

“No, its pretty much everyone. I hate to tell you this, but on the Internet, you are a considered a sad joke”.

There, right in the office on that day, she realized something for the first time. She wasn't driving the fastest car in the race, she had just been lapped. The world had passed her by. She were living her life thinking she was Katherine Hepburn, but it turns out, she was really just Norma Desmond.

Joe Gillis: You're Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.

Norma Desmond: I am big. It's the pictures that got small.

In the end, it wasn’t about journalism, it wasn’t about the writing, it was all about her. All that mattered was the satisfaction of her ego. That was her morphine, and when she heard the word "blog" the first time, that was the end of her fix, only she didnt know it at the time.

Like Nora Desmond, Main Stream Media is living in a sad reflective world that no longer exists. They live in the narcotic haze of nostalgia, “for the days gone by” when the world rotated around what they thought. Now, they will start the “death rattle” that occurs when all former authorities and celebrities feel their grip on power falling away from them like a drug addict who cant quite keep their buzz going.

They will sue, berate, belittle, crack and claw. it will get mean and petty. And claw though they might, they will lose, for they have lost already. Main Stream Media can no more hold onto their non-existent authority than the cardinals of Europe could maintain their place after Gutenberg made the press. The world has changed. It's conspired against them. The bill has come due.

The smart ones will adapt. The dumb ones will fade sadly into obscurity, dimly holding out hope for better times,colliding with the sharp corners of reality on the way down the cold cement staircase of life. Some will go sad and pathetically like Walter Winchell did in his last days,after no one would hire him, handing out “newsletters” for 10 cents a piece at Manhattan bars,basking in the reflective glory that was his past or like Nora Desmond, acting only to a room full of shadows as the world has cast its gaze somewhere else.

Joe Gillis: There's nothing tragic about being fifty. Not unless you're trying to be twenty-five.

So true.

Oh but Weep not fellow blogger for the fading baby-boomer-Pulitzer-prize-winning-columnist who once mattered, but does no longer. For someday, in the not too distant future, we too will meet our ego-doom at the hands of an unseen competitive force who is even now scuttling across our floors unheard through the din of our current excitement. Meet it with grace and dignity, because has history has clearly shown us, it happens to everyone.

It will happen to us. Just wait and see.

Be ready for your close up. It will be over before you know it.

Posted @ January 02, 2006 10:29 AM | Current Affairs

Posted by: OhBloodyHell at January 5, 2006 07:23 PM