Modern PR campaigns are often constructed as intensely as a political race, and you can see a lot of the same techniques, notably the construction and manipulation of talking points that stress the angles that make the subject look good and deftly avoid the ones that don’t.

Whatever else can be said of Katie Couric, the News Anchor That Nobody Watches™, she and her network have a PR department that doesn’t give up. They continue to generate an astonishing number of major stories about her, and even seem to have the NY Times and the Washington Post playing a kinky game of Couric-inspired one-upsmanship. Howard Kurtz was riding high for a while with a blizzard of upbeat, Katie-friendly missives, culminating entirely unnecessarily with a massive story for the Post in August that answered the journalistic question, “What did the fourth- or fifth-most-watched news anchor do during the Democratic convention?” The Times’ David Carr did his own piece on Couric last month.

(Hitsville’s comments on Kurtz are here and here.)

And now Friday, for no discerable reason, the Times weighs in again, retreading for the third time the news that Katie has a webcam, or something.

The subject is purportedly about how Couric, despite her lagging ratings on the CBS Evening News, is rebounding, helped along by her much-You-Tubed Sarah Palin interviews and a webcast she’s been doing. Indeed, “Couric rebounds with web and Palin” is the helpful headline. A few grafs into the story, Jacques Steinberg writes this:

In an interview this week in her CBS News office, Ms. Couric spoke of the satisfaction she has found in the fresh set of metrics that of late have collectively served as a reminder that she and her program still matter.

The problem is that we never hear what those metrics are*.

… but Couric is satisfied, so they must be good!

But if they are so good… why don’t we get to hear what they are? The status of her broadcast ratings are never detailed… and we never hear how many people actually watch her newfangled webcast.

And the story contains an awful lot of passages like this:

And yet Ms. Couric and Mr. Kaplan have done much to make their own luck. For months they have been giving over an increasing portion of the “CBS Evening News” to political coverage.

Emphasis added, here and throughout. Do they really get credit for thinking that up? Couldn’t, you know, a hamster that didn’t get paid $15 million, sucking up a hobbled network’s resources, have made that call?

Here’s another one:

Those features also served to introduce many of the show’s producers to the senior advisers of the various campaigns. In the case of the McCain campaign, those contacts were further solidified in July when Ms. Couric and Mr. Kaplan sought to provide a counterbalance to an interview she did in Jordan with Senator Barack Obama, his first with a network anchor during a highly publicized international tour. By satellite from the Middle East, Ms. Couric conducted a separate interview with Mr. McCain that was then shown on the same broadcast.

It was a gesture the McCain campaign would remember…

Giving Couric and her production team credit for having contacts with political campaigns is what President Bush would call the soft bigotry of low expectations. What’s next? “Upon taking the job, Couric leaped into action, immediately sending out change-of-address notices and ensuring that her news operation was on the email lists of the major figures vying for the presidency.”

And of course, CBS did the McCain interview because there was criticism from the right that the network news anchors were all following Obama’s European tour like a bunch of Rolling Stones groupies.

But such PR-heavy material doesn’t just demand that you take the subjects on their own terms. You also have to not ask them the hard questions.

If you were interviewing Katie Couric, wouldn’t you ask her a) What she thought of Sarah Palin; b) What the fallout from the McCain campaign had been (If nothing else, they must have had something to say about CBS’s having spread the agony out over a week); c) What her plan was to revive her newscast’s stagnant ratings; d)  … and those are the ones I thought of off the top of my head. None was broached in the story.

The prospect of her leaving the position, which the WSJ said was being discussed back in April, is brought up only tangentially, and the Journal wasn’t given credit for the scoop. In this way, too, the Times was following Howard Kurtz. He didn’t give the Journal credit either.

* Ironically, Couric had been improving in the ratings, hitting almost six million viewers even before her Palin bump from the doldrums in the low five millions she’d been in. But it was still lower than where she’d been the year before. Too bad there hasn’t been much big news around to boost the ratings!

In the premiere of ABC’s Life on Mars Thursday, our hero, Jason O’Mara, finds himself living in 1973. (Don’t ask.) He’s wandering around in a latter-day hippie era in Manhattan with his love interest, Gretchen Mol; they go into one of those old-fashioned record stores.

Still marveling at his time-travel experience, he tells her:

“What you see here, all of this, vinyl albums, they all become obsolete. Replaced with CDs, and digital music that you listen to on MP3 players this big. And the sound, it’s… well, it’s much worse.”

The last line is played for a laugh. As this idea grows into general thinking, the labels (with iTunes) will be poised to sell us all our digital music again–in a superior compression format, and suddenly audio quality will be all the rage. Look for a compliant media to excitedly put this on their agenda as well.

As for the show, you can see the whole episode here, though it requires a lot of screwing around with a dedicated ABC video player.

The player is buggy; it appears not to be optimized for Firefox on Vista–one of those signs a certain company (Disney) is doing things for the benefit of another big company (Microsoft) and not consumers.

(And would it kill them to use standardized controls, like hitting the space bar for pause?)

I haven’t seen the BBC version of Life on Mars, which I assume is better, but the U.S. version isn’t without a sense of humor. If the frenetic scene constructions, steel-blue lighting and CSI-style patois seem a little hyperreal, it’s because they are. The intro goes on a little too long, but it’s all worth it for the transition, which includes a very nice use of the Bowie tune that gives the show its title.

I’m as happy to nihil nisi as the next guy, but a new story in the latest Rolling Stone reminds me about a previous time the magazine took a deep look at John McCain. The piece was written by the late David Foster Wallace.

It was a classic example of “celebrity-on-celebrity” journalism, in which a bad magazine calls up one celebrity to write—or, more frequently, just interview—another celebrity. Rolling Stone once let Carrie Fisher interview Madonna and the result was somewhat horrifying. (”She will answer any question because she is genuinely interested in her own reply,” Fisher wrote, creating new dimensions of solipsism between interviewer and interviewee.) But mags love this arrangement: The magazine gets exponentially more PR out of the deal, and readers, of course get the square root of the substance.

Wallace’s 2000 McCain piece, it should be noted in fairness, may be the worst thing Wallace ever wrote, but also in fairness it should be noted that even in the context of celebrity-on-celebrity journalism it is not only one of the most superficial and hackneyed accretions of blowjobby pontification ever published, it is an insidious piece of propaganda urging “Young Voters,” as DFW calls them, to support a right-wing nut job. Over many pages, Wallace nattered on about McCain’s heroism, and how Young Folks were just gonna go crazy for him once they overcame their cynicism, and—my favorite part—how, like the wise old cabbies and barbers of old, the cameramen for all the big TV networks knew so much more about politics than the on-air commentators:

Leaving aside their coolness and esprit de corps, be advised that Rolling Stone’s single luckiest journalistic accident this week was his bumbling into hanging around with these camera and sound guys. This is because network-news techs—who all have worked countless campaigns, and who have neither the raging egos of journalists nor the self-interested agenda of the McCain2000 staff to muddy their perspective—turn out to be way more acute and sensible political analysts than anybody you’ll read or see on TV, and their assessment of to-day’s Negativity developments is so extraordinarily nuanced and sophisticated that only a small portion of it can be ripped off and summarized here.

DFW could do no wrong at the time, and I took no little flak for my essay on the piece in Salon.

Now comes Tim Dickinson’s contrarian look at McCain’s personal mythology, “Make Believe Maverick,” an effective and persuasive portrait of a first-class scumbag.

Questions: Why did Rolling Stone ever run DFW’s tongue-bath? Which writer, do you think, got more money? Which one got edited harder? Why didn’t Wallace do the reporting back then about McCain’s crummy service record or his despicable behavior toward his first wife?

Wired says Congress has passed a law creating a Copyright Czar, who will presumably help beleaguered Big Content in its crazy fight against piracy. But the Bush administration doesn’t like it:

The proposed copyright czar, a position which requires Senate confirmation, “constitutes a legislative intrusion into the internal structure and composition of the president’s administration. This provision is therefore objectionable on constitutional separation of powers grounds,” the White House wrote lawmakers.

That was code for the Bush administration being in no mood to commence another war, this one the War on Piracy. The government is too busy battling the War on Terror and the War on Drugs.

Hard to see why the czar of this particular war doesn’t fit right in.

From Cnet:

ABC found that rather than cannibalizing TV viewership, giving away the shows online instead enhances it.  

The article is about how the network has seen the light about making its shows available almost anywhere—complete with commercials.*  The revelation in that sentence is something digital advocates have always contended, that new technologies always end up turbocharging the media industries. (Besides the fact that it’s pointless, these days, not to make the stuff available digitally because it de facto already is.)

As I think this through it occurs to me that TV is a special case in the digital realm. We’re used to seeing the stuff with commercials, and people will presumably accept relatively benign interruptions, particularly if the material is easy to manipulate. (Though I personally am finding the unnecessarily proprietary ABC player difficult to set up**.) Music is a lot different, because listeners will not tolerate ads, and the medium is consumed in a much different way. (Experienced hundreds of times, in some cases, rather than an average of once or twice.) Beyond that, the horse is long out of the barn.

For TV, however, there are not yet the ubiquitous players for the medium that made unauthorized music distribution so irresistible. Right now, amidst the ineluctable decaying of CD sales, it’s hard to imagine it, but it certainly seems that if all the networks followed ABC’s lead, and managed to make the players easy, and allowed embedding, and permitted distribution on the social network services, before illegal downloading becomes the norm, the medium could weather the digital conversion relatively unscathed, right?

The only question is whether it can make the economics work—i.e., will the per-viewer rates they derive from online viewing match the big sums they’ve been getting from broadcast. In this context, the money quote above in the end maybe still represent the networks’ whistling past the graveyard. Over time, broadcast viewership will continue an overall decline, and online, as viewing there becomes the norm, the broadcast shows will inevitably face more competition. Besides the lack of control of distribution the media companies are exasperated with, they still have to contend with the way the internet can arbitraily create cultural phenomena—without big marketing budgets.

* Also from the article:

ABC intends to give viewers control of their viewing experience on any platform, Cheng said. The network is already showing its shows on everything from Facebook to AOL and Veoh, and plans soon to launch a new video player on its own site. This month ABC launched its “Open ABC” initiative, giving access to developers who will “innovate and give access to our shows (in ways) we haven’t even thought of yet,” such as new forms of 3D visual search and other applications for blogs, fan sites, and social networks.

“ABC isn’t just a television brand,” he said. “It’s a content brand living on any device, and tailored specifically to the consumer and advertiser needs, and optimized for each specific use case and digital platform.”

And:

Cheng said the network had been the first on iTunes, the first to stream entire shows online, the first to stream in a “720p” format in HD, had the most views of its shows of any network online and continues to lead in attracting unique users, in pageviews and time spent per user, compared to other networks’ sites. 

** Once I did, I saw some of the Jimmy Kimmel show—an episode that began with a advertising skit, complete with a racist Hispanic character, right out of The Larry Sanders Show. That’s not a good thing. The product was an online computer backup service, the digital equivalent, I’m sure, of the Garden Weasel.

Microsoft did it, and so did Yahoo. Now Wal-Mart is giving its customers an object lesson in the downside of digital rights management. The store sold MP3s heavily laden with DRM, and required the store to authorize the  use of the music you bought on a new computer. The multibillion-dollar business has given up the DRM ghost and is moving to MP3s, but it’s too cheap just to keep that part of the business open, so it, like MSN and Yahoo before it, is warning previous customers that they should burn their songs onto CDs and then re-import them to get around the DRM markings*.

Story from Technologizer here.  Writes Harry McCracken:

Remember, Wal-Mart’s music was promoted with Microsoft’s PlaysForSure tagline, one of the hollowest promises ever made in the history of personal technology. I don’t know how much it would have cost Wal-Mart to keep its DRM servers chugging, but I suspect it could have come up with the dough if it had considered PlaysForSure to be an obligation rather than hollow marketing copy.

(Link via Mac Daily News.) Both M’soft and Yahoo eventually backed down in various ways; Wal-Mart should simply just replace the inferior product it sold people with DRM-free MP3s.

* And again, this process merely illustrates how weak the DRM was in the first place.

Maura Johnston, the Idolator blogger, on an IFC panel discussion on the future of music journalism:

There is some old cohesion to the promotional cycles—because MP3 blogs have become more professionalized.  So they are posting MP3s that are sanctioned, and that are supplied to them by a promotional company. So there is a creeping promotionalism into it.

Link via the Daily Swarm. It’s a canny observation: We’re going to be seeing two sets of bloggers, the ins and the outs, the former gifted with promo material and the like, just as college radio DJs and alt-paper writers were back in the day. The new radicalism: Posting a deep cut.

It’s because critics get into concerts free. They don’t have to pay the charges–they are barely aware of them.

I’ve gotten comped to concerts my entire life, so I don’t complain about paying occasionally; besides, an artist will get a lot more money from you at one concert than he or she will over the course of a career’s worth of album releases. Still, it’s always shocking to experience a public event as a civilian.

Case in point: An upcoming Vampire Weekend concert. I go online to the site of a local concert promotion group, Lucky Man Concerts, which has the virtue of not, as far as I know, being an arm of Live Nation, formerly known as Clear Channel.

The cost is a reasonable $19. When you start to buy the ticket online, you get the choice of will call or printing your own ticket. As you can see, the latter costs $2.50!

Printing the ticket myself saves the promoter money, right? So why am I paying $2.50?

Fine, whatever, it’s only a $20 ticket. Proceed through to checkout and you get presented with this screen:

Two more charges are appended, with no explanation other than “ticket fee” and “order fee.” Again, I’m not complaining for myself; I’ve seen nearly every great band in the world free multiple times. (And many. many more bad ones.) But this is the sort of Sopranos-like extortion that affects millions of concert-goers every year:

Original ticket price: $19.

Total price, three fees later, after being shaken down by the ticket-selling system: $30.50, for a 60+ percent premium. 

.. but if you read the coverage of its ATP show carefully, it appears that Kevin Shields didn’t play a single new song.

(Stereogum coverage here. Cool pix from the show on Pitchfork here. NYT review and Pareles interview with Shields here.)

Loveless came out in 1991, if memory serves. MBV’s two proper albums remain compelling, and their shows were sui generis: Besides the sonic textures and fierce attack, the volume level was indeed uniquely loud. It was so loud that, as you looked over the crowd and saw skin pushed back on the faces of the audience by the successive buffets of aural shock, it almost became silent.

All that said, it’s 17 years later, and Shields hasn’t been able to get his act together to rehearse a single new song, not even for a hepster festival he was the main draw for.

It reminds us that, in this time of alternative-era reunion tours (of which the Pixies and now MBV have been most celebrated), you really can’t compare these bands to the broken-down ’60s stars whose decrepitude fueled the original punk movement.

You can’t compare them because they are worse. You can’t blame the bands; Shields, for example, recorded the equivalent of two and a half albums two decades ago but still, according to Hitsville’s First Law of Reunion Tours, the amount of money he takes in this year could be as much as he’s made in his entire career up to this point. But how about the press: Has any journalist yet made the obvious point that this is a nostalgia trip, nothing more?

This is a paragraph buried in Dave Kehr’s typically erudite piece on the restored Godfathers:

The tight grain of the image, so important a component of [Gordon] Willis’s original low-light photography, has returned to particularly spectacular effect in the four-disc Blu-ray edition. The effect is not unlike that of a pristine 35-millimeter print projected in perfect focus — a rare enough phenomenon in a movie theater and, until quite recently, inconceivable in the living room.

The point of that second sentence isn’t noted often enough: Home viewing today can be with an outlay of not too much money up front not just a fair equivalent of theater-going but in a lot of cases better. (And of course for most people in the country the option of seeing, say The Godfather on a big screen in any condition isn’t available.) As I wrote earlier this year:

And these days, of course, the movie theater has become a zoo. (Before a film I saw recently at a megaplex, we were shown a commercial that featured a cartoon piece of snot in an old west setting being run out of town by a sheriff named “Mucinex” or somesuch. The theater showed it twice before the film—and then had it blaring again on an oversized screen in the lobby.) Given a scenario in which a couple or a family can a) stay in and watch a movie in superb and powerful reproduction at home in peace and quiet with popcorn at hand or b) pay $20 and $40+, respectively, before snacks to schlep to a cacophonous environment, be bombarded with commercials, experience poor projection, and have someone texting in the seat next to them, the choice isn’t even close.

A couple of weeks ago I went to one of the swankier plexes in town—the Harkins Fashion Square, in Scottsdale—to see Wanted. Outside of the picture’s being dark (because the company was scrimping on projection lamps), it was showing on a screen that couldn’t accomodate the width of the film.

In other words, a public showing in a theater suddenly became the equivalent of a cropped VHS picture on a square TV. While amenities like stadium seating have made things better, in most other ways home viewing gets better even as old-fashioned movie-going is regressing.

Which brings us back to Blu-ray, which still has not taken off. There are myriad reasons: The discs are too expensive; there aren’t enough films available, and far too few tony titles that really show off the clarity; and the players remain costly, too. (There are other, unseen, drawbacks, too, like the hidden costs of DRM.)

And in any case, the consensus seems to be that they will be around in any case for only five to ten years, until all home movie watching becomes wholly digital and wholly HD. The battles about control of those digital bits aside, what seems incontrovertible is that the very near future holds immense progress on something that matters more than DRM or box office or anything else: Movies being seen the way they were meant to be seen.

The record industry behaves a lot like a wolverine with its leg caught in a trap: An animal with a naturally dyspeptic disposition in such excruciating pain that merely being close to it becomes physically dangerous.

Given how corrupt the industry is, the sight has not been an unenjoyable one—from a distance. But there are still some cautionary tales of people who got too close. Case in point: A file-sharing case in San Antonio, Texas.

Ars Technica reports that a judge found for the RIAA in the case. But since the violator in question was a 16-year-old who said she didn’t know that downloading songs on Kazaa was illegal, the judge lowered the per-song fine to $200.

In response, the RIAA has taken the trial to a jury for damages, hoping to get the fine increased.

Full story here.

From the NYT coverage of the latest OJ Simpson trial:

The man who set up the hotel-room confrontation that led to armed robbery charges against O. J. Simpson testified Monday that he had received at least $210,000 from several news organizations, including ABC News, in exchange for interviews, photographs and parts of an audio recording he had secretly made of the events.
[…]
Those fees included $150,000 from the celebrity gossip Web site TMZ.com for excerpts of [Thomas] Riccio’s audio recording, as well as $15,000 from ABC News and $25,000 from the syndicated television show “Entertainment Tonight” for what Mr. Riccio said were interviews about the confrontation.

But spokesmen for ABC News and “Entertainment Tonight” said the payments were not for interviews but for other materials. A spokeswoman for TMZ.com said the Web site does not comment about how it acquires material.

Emphasis added. So, the guy, Thomas Riccio, says one thing, the news orgs another. Note that only one of the parties was under oath! And what would be his impetus be to lie?

Entertainment Tonight, meanwhile, still hasn’t retracted its big scoop about the birth of twins to Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt back in May, which it steadfastly said it stood behind in the face of all evidence to the contrary, including the denial of the still-pregnant mother. The kids were actually born six weeks later.

Patrick Goldstein, in his Big Picture LAT blog, has been writing about Jeffrey Katzenberg’s 3-D boosterism and moderating an ongoing enthusiastic debate on the subject. This morning he wondered aloud why Katzenberg hadn’t been part of it:

As it turns out, he actually did write a response that his people sent along to my editors late last week. But alas, the response came with a series of non-negotiable demands, notably that The Times must run his response on the front page of the Calendar section, above the fold–i.e., in the same prominent position that my column originally ran. Although my editors assured him that no one, no matter how much of a Hollywood big shot, had ever dictated that their letter be run on the front page–in other words, not even Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey’s old partner Steven Spielberg or the late Charlton Heston, who set the modern record for most letters-to-the-editor by a famous actor–Jeffrey took his marbles and went home.

The big question: What happens if David Geffen owns the paper?

I was throwing away a newspaper and noticed this from the NYT obit on Richard Wright: “Pink Floyd’s 1979 album, “The Wall,” eventually sold 23 million copies in the United States.”

The album has been certified for 23 times platinum by the RIAA, but the RIAA doubles certs for double albums. So it’s really about 11 million. Weird the paper’s copy editing desk doesn’t know stuff like that. (And, of course, the band and its record company are never going to call in a correction.)

While researching this I just came upon Idolator’s essay on the same issue. It’s a terrific distillation of the problem by Chris Molanphy. He strips off the double-album dross and comes up with this revised chart of the RIAA’s top sellers:

THE REVISIONIST, SENSIBLE ALL-TIME LIST
29 Their Greatest Hits 1971–1975, The Eagles
27 Thriller, Michael Jackson
23 Led Zeppelin IV, Led Zeppelin
22 Back in Black, AC/DC
20 Come on Over, Shania Twain
19 Rumours, Fleetwood Mac
17 Boston
17 The Bodyguard, Whitney Houston (Soundtrack)
17 No Fences, Garth Brooks
16 Cracked Rear View, Hootie & the Blowfish
16 Greatest Hits, Elton John
16 Jagged Little Pill, Alanis Morissette
16 Hotel California, The Eagles
16 Physical Graffiti, Led Zeppelin
15 Born in the U.S.A., Bruce Springsteen
15 Appetite for Destruction, Guns ‘N Roses
15 Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd
15 Greatest Hits, Journey
15 Supernatural, Santana
14 Ropin’ the Wind, Garth Brooks
14 …Baby One More Time, Britney Spears
14 Greatest Hits, Simon & Garfunkel
14 Backstreet Boys
14 Metallica
14 Bat Out of Hell, Meat Loaf

(Physical Graffiti is crossed about because he mistakenly included it in his revised list, though it’s a double LP.)

I would add only a few things. One, the RIAA certifications are based on shipments reported by labels, not actual sales, so the number of pieces sold is by definition lower than whatever whatever total has been shipped. Second, the totals of the pre-SoundScan era are suspect to this day. It’s hard to believe Tapestry, the signal album of its era, has only sold ten million copies, for example.*

There are a couple of other aspects that should be considered when thinking about these figures. The first of course is changes in population; there are half again as many potential album buyers today as there were in 1970. Individual albums make up that deficit over time, as successive generations have te opportuity to buy it, but extra credit should be given to the records that penetrated deeply into a much smaller audience pool.

And there’s also the cultural evolution aspects of the early rock era (and, to be fair, the hip-hop and alt-rock eras as well); it should be noted that Elvis Presley, the Beatles and the Stones, to note just three obvious examples, had to create an audience, something Shania Twain didn’t have to dirty her hands doing.

And finally, since we are now in the iTunes era, barring some fluke phenomenon it’s doubtful that any record released today will ever challenge the current inhabitants of that top ten; too many potential buyers will just buy the individual tracks on Tunes. I think Molanphy should take his chart one farther, and remove greatest hits albums as well. Let Thriller reign!

* And on the other side of the equation, the RIAA’s list of top sellers has just a couple of Elvis Presley titles on it, though he’s always cited as the bestselling king. A huge proportion of his alleged sales are solely attributable to the fake platinums he would garner from initial shipments.

The dual problems that bedevil Howard Kurtz were on perfect display on this morning’s Reliable Sources. Kurtz’s first vulnerability is conflict of interest. He works for the Washington Post and CNN; that calls into question anything he reports about the Post or its national competitors, and CNN and its competitors.

(In other words, he’s pretty reliable, except when he’s discussing the Post or the NYT or the Wall Street Journal or USA Today or CNN, Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC, or MSNBC.)

The second problem, which seems to be caused by the first but also has the feel of being part of his journalistic approach in any case, is a talent for bland mooting, as the British say, of journalistic problems but never addressing head on their obvious implications. In this way, he is the ostrich of media reporting.

Case in point is today’s show, which was playing off Wall St.’s near-meltdown this week. (Transcript available here.) His guests are Ali Velshi, billed as a “senior CNN business correspondent,”  and Steven Pearlstein, a Post biz columnist. Note that both are colleagues of Kurtz’s.

My impression is that the NYT and the WSJ have been fairly aggressive in their coverage of the run-up to this little disaster, going back to the predatory loan scandals earlier this decade and continuing through the risks of the complex financial instruments whose elusive values nearly brought our financial system to a halt last week. If you’re doing a show about who got the story right and who didn’t, wouldn’t you bend over backward to acknowledge those who did? Kurtz gave his newsroom buddy Pearlstein lots of time to pat himself on the back for his work on the issue, and he probably deserves it, but the Post’s biz section can’t compete with the Times’ or the WSJ’s. If the latter two operations didn’t cover the run-up well, Kurtz should have said so. If they did, he should have acknowledged it.

Kurtz didn’t do either because he’s not in the business of actual media reporting. He’s in the business of media non-reporting.

In the course of this journey, he’s developed the facility of acting like he’s saying something but never managing to bring it down to reality. Here he is questioning Velshi:

 KURTZ: But where are the stories saying that the government didn’t build the levees [i.e., to protect against the metaphorical financial hurricane] high enough? This didn’t have to happen. It was a failure, to some extent, of federal regulation.

VELSHI: Yes. And those stories are coming out now, and they’re coming a little bit too late. The fact is, this is the same discussion you and I had several months ago about where were people warning about the mortgage crisis. This is just an extension of all of that.

We — there were some people covering them, but they weren’t breaking news.
[…]
Thematic evolutions of stories don’t seem to make it onto TV as easily as they do into some kind of journals, and that’s part of the problem.

Most reporters who have a key representative of an institution central to their beat on the hook would take this opportunity to ask the obvious question. Say: “Ali, why didn’t CNN’s business desk get on this story early? Says here you’re a ’senior business correspondent.’ Did you lack the expertise or the resources or were you guys just asleep at the switch?” *

But Kurtz didn’t, again because he was questioning a representative of a company he worked for. And couldn’t he have at least brought up the other obvious question: How has the nation’s premiere business channel, CNBC, taken on this issue over the last few years? Here again, you get the feeling he didn’t want to address the equally obvious answer: A lot better than the CNN business desk did.

* Free bonus followup question: “In retrospect, Ali, as we sit amid a financial disaster your own network calls the worst since the Depression, did you serve your audience well over the years leading up to this precipice?”

The first graf of a Rolling Stone Q&A with Conor Oberst:

Since the release of 2007’s Cassadaga, Bright Eyes frontman Conor Oberst has been either touring or cruising around the country in his car. On his new solo disc — which isn’t a Bright Eyes project because it doesn’t feature longtime collaborator Mike Mogis — the Omaha, Nebraska, singer-songwriter reflects on road trips through Florida (”Cape Canaveral”) and Northern California (”Sausalito”). And on “Moab,” Oberst sings the mantra “There’s nothing that the road cannot heal.” To record the set, Oberst decamped to Mexico — musicians, girls and recording gear in tow. “I knew I didn’t want to be in a studio,” says Oberst, 28. “It was beautiful, warm and remote, and they didn’t mind us making noise.”

Emphasis added. I don’t think Oberst has a couple of young children I haven’t heard about. So writer Austin Scaggs seemed to be indulging in some very un-emolike sexism, and possibly revealing it as well.

… in which American Graffiti meets High Fidelity meets Annie Hall meets Hair meets After Hours: A group of New Jersey kids, high on music, lust and an unspoken but positively tribal sense of kinship, spend the night running around a Manhattan so romanticized that you park in front of the door at a hot club show; Electric Ladyland is the setting for not an orgy but rather what I guess would be the first great filmed emo sex scene; and a Port Authority toilet gross-out becomes a gentle, blissfully detoxified ongoing joke. The movie’s main concern is a meditation on Keatsian aesthetics: Is there anything in the world more important than a secret show by your favorite band?

The music industry RIAA’s massive multi-pronged assault on file-sharers and universities—debilitating, pointless, destructive and futile—doesn’t get as much attneiton as it should. One of the few parties with energy enough to track it all is Ray Beckerman, who on his blog Recording Industry vs. the People tracks as many of the cases as he can.

…So now the RIAA is going ofter him, filing a suit charging him with “vexatious” legal behavior. From Wired’s coverage:

Lory Lybeck, a Washington state defense attorney leading a proposed class-action lawsuit accusing the RIAA of allegedly engaging in “sham” litigation tactics, said the RIAA’s motion comes from the same organization that has sued about 30,000 people over the last five years for file sharing, some of them falsely. It’s the same organization, he said, that has sued dead people, the elderly and even children — all while using unlicensed investigators.

“This is like irony and irony and irony,” Lybeck said in a telephone interview. “That’s what vexatious litigation is.”

Slate’s Josh Levin has a smart look at the evolving role of the so-called “red band trailer” —i.e., movie previews that don’t have that green “approved for all audiences” screen in front of them. This lets the studios smut it up for kids on the internet, who will not be deterred by an industry-mandated dialog box before the clip is shown. (”Are you sure you’re 18?”)

A real breakthrough will be when the major movie-trailer sites start offering them for download. I couldn’t find any on iTunes or at Yahoo.

Interesting foonote: After the exhibition industry essentially banned them in 2000, the Regal Entertainment Group recently broke ranks and started showing the naughty trailers. Regal is controlled by gay-bashing creationist and tedious moralizing Bush-head Philip Anschutz.