There is a lot of talk in the media lately about the amount of sexism that Hillary has been facing. I saw a story about this on Good Morning America. The story really got me thinking.
I think lots of things are going on here. In part lots of the political coverage on 24 hour news networks area about personality and not about policy. When this plays to candidates advantage it is fine. When it does not play to their advantage they call it a social problem. I think that the sexism I have seen in the media is directly related to the idea of personalty.
The media coverage of this election has been more superficial than substantial. It is clear if you look at the 24 hour news networks. First they cover the horse race, second they cover election gaffs, third they cover speeches, forth they cover opinion. They do not get around to covering policy to until about fifth on the list. No wonder they cover things like what Hillary looks like.
The news media is still part of the media. I know in an ideal world the news media would be different that the entertainment media, but it is not. I am so shocked that there is sexism in the presidential election the same year that Sex and the City movie is released. I cannot believe that the same media that comments on Hillary showing her feminine side by crying. I know that people will say that the news media should be above this for a presidential election, but it is still the same media.
In the end the media is reflection of us. It is not separate from us. It is part of our culture. Yes there is still sexism in our culture. Yes when it comes the to the media sexism is front and center. It is not limited to the presidential election but it cannot be excluded from the presidential election either.
The issue with sexism is a tough one. Everyone wants to be treated fairly. The problem is that our culture does not agree what it means to be treated fairly when it comes to sex. You cannot just remove all mention of gender all together from the election. Many people want to see more women elected to office because gender is important. If the news make no mention of gender it will also be seen as too politically correct. This is cause them to lose credibility.
My problem with this election is the other sexism that no one brings up at all. The only way we have a female candidate that has done this well is for her to have been a former First Lady. Someone look at the list of women in the US Senate or female governors and tell me that Hillary is really the best qualified. There is something wrong with that being the only way a woman can become a national political figure in America. I have not heard one person decrying sexism in this election mention that.
Part of the story was about Glenn Beck saying "she's a stereotypical bitch." Later on in the story he talks about what he wants out of a president. He wants a president that will take on all challenges. He wants Hillary Clinton to take the Hillary Clinton Nutcracker on stage, hold it up and say, "Damn straight." The idea is that the world is not a fair place. A good President has to be able to face the world when it is unfair. They are going to have to fight when the chips are down.
What is the right answer? I am not sure. This situation will not change anytime soon. It might change when near 50% of all elected officials are female. Maybe it will change when it is not a news story for a woman to do well in a presidential primary. Right now a woman running for president is still Man Bites Dog.
I have been thinking about how much free media there is out there right now. Between Podcast, Free video websites, blogs, and YouTube you have thousands of hours free programing out there. This is only staying with legal sources also. I spend a lot of money on media every year. Between cable, emusic, going to movies, and all the rest of media I buy that is a lot of coin.
I have been thinking about just not paying for media anymore. I am thinking about going with all free sources. There are sites that give out free mp3s like Daytrotter. I can attach a computer to my big TV. I can watch podcasts, full TV shows on Hulu, clips from TV shows on Comedy Central's Website. There are even some professional podcasts out there.
I am not sure I could do this. I am not sure I could give up my cable television more than anything else. Having a TiVo Series3 makes having digital cable pretty cool. Without digital cable I only get one digital channel with antenna. It sees like a waste.
Maybe 2009, when I am saving up for something special, I will be able to get rid of all my pay media.
I have been thinking about Baseball, The Mitchell Report, Barry Bonds, and Roger Clemens. All I can say is lets retire the phrase "Greatest of All Time."
I have been one of the fans that really got down on the steroids era. I see everyone that did steroids as cheating. Even if baseball was not testing for steroids, they were against the rules since 1991.
They are cheaters, but they do not own the fault, not even most of the fault. The League, the office of the commissioner, and the union all have more fault that the individual players. They did not protect the players. In fact they went the other direction and enabled and encouraged this behavior.
I also blame the media. I am not sure why reporters did not dig into this earlier. The word was going around the clubhouse. No one was on the record, but a good reporter could have found some of the truth. It is like the news media thought it was better to keep the clubhouse code of silence.
I do not have a footnote for this story, I remember when Lenny Dykstra, came back from his plagued seasons of 1991 and 1992. In a clubhouse interview he made a comment about eating his vitamins as a joke. Everyone who heard that that clip knew that Dykstra was talking about steroids. Since there was no testing at that time no one did anything. Gary Cobb did a whole show on WIP in Philadelphia about steroids. I wonder why no one covering baseball full time picked up on this.
In light of how many players took steroids, it is truly a whole generation of players who took part of this. The report was full of All Star players. It was at the heart of the game. I am starting to soften on the idea that these players do not deserve to be in the Hall of Fame. I have gone from no not any them to kind of no.
What I would ask of the media and of sports fans, lets retire the title of "Greatest of All Time." I am not saying that we cannot call a player great or amazing. Lets just not crown them the Greatest of all time in any category. Not the greatest hitter, the greatest pitcher, and not the greatest player. I do not care how many stats they rack up, how any MVPs or Cy Young awards they win. No longer can a new player or a player in the game right now be the greatest of all time.
I am not sure what Tim Kurchin is going to do on baseball tonight if he can no longer say a player is the greatest of all time. He might not know what do with himself, but he will find another way to say a player is great.
From here on out I think Willie Mays is the greatest player of all time. He was the best player in the best era of baseball. Lets leave it at that.
A few weeks ago I was part of the Green Is Universal. The whole thing seems a little silly to me. I know that NBC is trying to raise the media visibility of being more green to people. They want to show us more ways to save energy and not be wasteful.
The reason I think this is silly is because NBC is going to still run ads for just about anything. Most of the car company ads they ran for Hybrids, but they still ran a Lincoln SUV ad. If NBC going to turn down ads for products because they are not green enough? Are they going to make judgements about their major advertisers? To be honest I am not expecting them to.
What is the standard for a Green television network. There are people who will say that TV networks can never be green. The art of adverting stands against the very idea of being green. Right now they are trying to cash in on being green. If that is the case, we should hold them to some standards.
My idea is that there should be a CAFE standard for television networks and automobile advertising. The CAFE standard is the rules for fleet fuel milage for cars. From the NHTSA website:
What is CAFE?
Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) is the sales weighted average fuel economy, expressed in miles per gallon (mpg), of a manufacturer’s fleet of passenger cars or light trucks with a gross vehicle weight rating (GVWR) of 8,500 lbs. or less, manufactured for sale in the United States, for any given model year. Fuel economy is defined as the average mileage traveled by an automobile per gallon of gasoline (or equivalent amount of other fuel) consumed as measured in accordance with the testing and evaluation protocol set forth by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
This standard should apply to Networks. There should be a one to one standard. This way the cars with the best MPG will get more ads. I think this would go a log way for what people drive.
There are lots of people walking around comic con making movies. It is some kind of sport or something. I have never seen one of these movies. I want there to be a "shot at comic con" film fest.
I am not sure if most people know or not, but I am a huge NPR fan. My guess is that most of my friends already know that. My favorite show on NPR is On the Media. I like this show because it looks at the news and how it is covered. In a world of spin and counter spin looking at the way the news is covered is very important.
People on both the left and the right thing that the media is the enemy. People on the center left and center right are cynical about the media. People in the center wonder why the media is not doing a better job. I do not think anyone is happy with the media, maybe for maybe some of the people in the media.
It is not enough to just complain about the media and throw your hands up. It is easy to just let the Daily Show be the only place you get your news. The problem is that will not make anything better. It will just let the people who watch To Catch a Predator decide what is on the news.
I think that listening to On The Media is doing something about it. It is at least a start in the right direction. There is also a lot of good blog material on this show.
Not only can you hear this show on your local NPR station. You can also hear it via podcast. That is how I have been listening to it.
I love the daily show. I love them because they make me laugh at the media when I might want to break my TV. On an recent episode John Stewart looked at the way the media played the blame game after the Virginia Tech shooting. John Stewart does a good job at pointing out how stupid most of the media event like this. Everyone lines up their favorite target starts attacking. The media is all too happy to give a platform to people who want to blame guns, current lack of gun control, violent media, movies, video games and anything else they are already against. It makes me sick. I want to thank the Daily Show for pointing out how sad the media is.
On a friend's flickr post I saw a link to San Francisco Zine Fest. I have been thinking about zines for a while now. I wonder if zines still matter. Part of me think that zines are nostalgia or an anachronism for the most part. I get the feeling that the time for zines are past.
I am not usually someone who thinks that the internet has killed print media. I think that that it has changed the place in the world for some print media. Newspapers seem to be the most displaced. I think it has to do with the timeliness of the information. Newspapers seem old by the end of the day.
I feel that zines have been displaced by Blogs and Websites. When I was reading and writing zines (yes it was much more reading than writing) back in the early 1990's it felt like zines were the only way to get these messages out. There was no other way for people making zines to be published to the world.
Zines were a whole world of people expressing themselves that you have to look for. People had to put effort into finding zines they liked. It was not something like TV which is there no matter what you do. Zines seemed to be about finding voices like your own is a world that was filled with people who are not like you.
With blogs I guess I am not sure why people still make zines. I think it is much easier to connect with people who are not right around you. With the effort and money it takes to make a zine, is it really worth it. Are the people who wrote the good zines writing good blogs now?
When I went to the Seattle Central Library they had zines in the Teen area. Seeing these zines made me think about doing a zine. The problem is I am not sure how a zine would be different that just a mash-up of my blog and my flickr account. Could I make a zine that is worth reading? I am not sure what I would make a zine about.
I have been thinking about the new internet radio fee structure. I think the Copyright Royalty Board is making a mistake by change. I am not saying that the fees cannot go up, but I think it is really early in the life of internet radio for the fee structure to change to radically. This is not the case where there are internet radio companies that are just raking in the revenue and the copyright royalty holder and being left out in the cold.
I am not sure who is lobbying for this change, but my guess is that there will be few winners here. I think that the record companies might win, but individual royalty holder might lose. Increasing the fee structure is likely to send small internet broadcasters out of business. There is a good chance that the increase payment from the other broadcasters will not make up for the revenue that will be lost by sending smaller companies out of business. It will be bad for smaller record labels and smaller artists. They will be losing the venue to be heard and the revenue from being played on smaller internet broadcasters.
If internet radio stations go away, I think this will encourage people to pirate music. A lot of these internet radio stations free to listen to. If they are not around many of those listeners will find other no cost ways to find music. What little money is going the the royalty holder would go away.
I find this to be a little funny in the light of the XM and Sirius merger. One of the arguments for why the merger would be fine is because there is so much internet broadcasting out there. My guess is the XM/Sirius will not change their stance.
I do not listen to much internet radio. I have way too much music to listen to already. I want there to be internet radio to be out there. The promise of the internet is that size does not matter. I will be able to find very specific niches out there. This change is designed to kill off some of those niches out there. That is a bad thing. In the end internet broadcasters will set up outside the US. In the US there is no door on the internet to block them. It is bad for business. That is reason enough for the US not to make this mistake.
I was listening to the publishers of Bitch Magazine on KQED Forum this morning. I did not catch the whole show. They talked about fashion magazines and TV shows. They were talking about how important pop culture is. The idea that the O.C. is more important to high school kids than the evening news is a powerful idea.
I have read Bitch in the past, but it has been a few years. I am not a huge fan of Feminist Cultural Criticism in general. Like many disciplines it can let agenda and dogma get in the way of what is really happening in the world. The last time I picked up Bitch I did not find it to be different.
I listened to how they railed against pop culture. I wanted to call the show and pull out the old into The old Pogo quote "We have met the enemy... and he is us". The reason that fashion magazines make women feel bad about themselves is because it seems to work. The reason that sitcoms do not have deep female characters is because they do not have deep characters at all. The reason we sell a culture of celebrity of to our kids is because we do not have the discipline to keep it away from ourselves.
Don't get me wrong, I do not like fashion magazines either. I find them to be repugnant for the most part. I think it feeds many of the ills of society. I find magazines like Maxim and Stuff to be much worse that porno mags. Maxim and Stuff are selling a whole lifestyle of sexism and shallowness.
I cannot say I am proud of what the media presents to us. Like any other business the people in the media want to make the most money for their investment. Many times this comes down to appalling the the least common denominator, using ideas that have already been shown as safe, and showing people things they have already seen.
I think the media is just a mirror of who we are. It is a distorted mirror, but a mirror we are happy to look into. If we stopped watching it would go away. They talked about a few woman's magazines that did not make women feel bad about themselves, but those magazines always go out of business. I guess there is not a market there. We might not feel this way, but the people have the power when it comes to the media. It really is our fault for what the media shows us.
Maybe I should give Bitch another try. I might not agree what they say but I should be happy that someone is saying something.
I just heard of the idea of Hunting for Bambi. When I first saw this story I was ashamed of what was happening. I thought the people that want all women to wear a Niqab might be right. America would be pressing a boundary that is not good.
After looking at the footage for a few minutes, there was something that was not right. I searched google for "Hunting for Bambi." All of the stories link back to a story from Vegas TV story from KLAS. I wonder if it is a media hoax. Is sounds like something Joey Skaggs would pull.
