Worst and best
: David (yawn) Shaw of the LA Times lists his worst media moments of 2003. What are your worst — and best?
4 responses to “Worst and best”
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Shaw’s column is far and away my worst media moment, and my best would have to be any episode of “Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica.”
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Shawn’s column was indeed pretty lame, though a couple of the picks were accurate. It seemed he had a pretty narrow interpretation of “media moment” (whatever that means exactly anyway). Everything he picked had to do with news reporting. What about movies, TV, books, music, video games, and the internet? Aren’t they “media” too? I’m confused.
Anyway, some news reporting moments that sucked: I’m a grump about this but the overhyping of weather reporting on the hurricane and on the snowstorms really annoyed me. I know, I know, the hurricane was serious in some areas, but the way it was reported I thought the entire east coast was headed for apocalypse. Practically every flake of the most recent snowstorm in the NYC area was documented. I get it, it’s snowing. Also, the non-stop tabloid trial coverage on the “news” networks. I know there’s an audience for this stuff but can anyone possibly want this much of it.
As for media construed more generally, where to begin: the recording industry suing 12-year-olds and grandfathers, the MPAA’s sanctimonious and condescending ads which seem to imply that union electricians are more worried about illegal downloading than movie stars and executives, whose compensation is actually based on the profits of the film. (Sorry Roger Simon. For me at least, these ads have the absolute opposite of the intended effect) Then there’s the UN attempting to take over the internet.
All the anti-war media personalities were a colossal bad media moment. It didn’t have to be so, but they were just so strident, angry, uninformed, and anti-American about it.
The popularity of all the extreme rigth and left wing screeds (Coulter, O’Reilly, and Moore’s books) is a disturbing media trend.
The decision to hold and air all 373 (or whatever) democratic presidential primary debates was a horrible use of media. Nothing that inane and trivial should be televised, anywhere.
K-Street, ’nuff said.
But really, it was a great, great year for media, as long as you don’t define it needlessly narrowly like this Shawn guy does: Return of the King, Lost in Translation, American Splendor, Spellbound, Capturing the Friedmans, Shattered Glass, Carnivale, The Wire, the Outkast double album, the Daily Show, the Office on DVD. The media were good to us overall. And of course, the blogosphere thing just kept growing and growing. -
Fascinating. After excoriating media companies for killing bad reviews for business purposes and similar crimes, he omits any bad media moments from the L. A. Times.
That’s just too easy. -
Here’s my nomination for (among the) worst: New York magazine media critic Michael Wolff’s infamous Big Fat Question at a CENTCOM briefing in Doha. Here’s why:
First, I should say that there were indeed valid criticisms of the way those briefings were held. THey were clearly too heavy on spin and short on substance, and for that, the military bears a lot of responsibility for the “bogged down” stories that appeared in the last week of March. There was a complete news blackout in Qatar during the first 48 hours of the war, and even after that, CENTCOM simply failed to provide adequate context to the “soda straw” reports coming from the embeds.
That said, Wolff did very little to articulate these problems, preferring instead to grandstand. His “why are we here” question was clearly designed to both insult BGEN Vincent Brooks personally, and cast himself as the protagonist in his own story. It was not designed to shed light on the issue.
Wolff’s subsequent actions confirm this. He continued to play the martyr card for all it was worth and then some, lying about Rush Limbaugh giving out his e-mail address (when it appears on his friggin’ columns on line), as well as falsely accusing Fox News of questioning his patriotism.
I’ve always thought it to be a cardinal rule in journalism that the reporter is not to become the story, but Wolff clearly through that out the window, and in a decidedly dishonest way. His behavior was utterly shameful, and apart from the obvious cases (Jayson Blair, Rick Bragg, etc.), he truly deserves a place among the worst.
