Splice Today

Put It On My Tab

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:20:00 -0400

Politicians used to be loveable rascals, the more colorful the more delightful and revered. The old muldoons knew how to get things done in their own peculiar ways, for themselves but especially for others, which was the secret to their staying power. Politics was a form of locomotion: it got people and programs from here to there. The council member, the state senator and delegate, and in the early ethnic days even the notary public, were masters of their domain. Political clubs and organizations ruled the districts and everybody and anybody belonged to one or the other, the extended families of their day.

Consider Baltimore’s late City Councilman Mimi DiPietro, the master of malapropisms, who once referred to members of the media as “you meteors” and who claimed to be the king of patronage for having sponsored more than 2,500 city patronage appointees, mostly immigrants, from his East Baltimore warren, the old First District.

And there was, too, Clarence Du Burns, locker room attendant, City Council member and president as well as mayor, who once announced that a high-speed train between Baltimore and Washington would be a “boondoggle for everybody.”

Contrast those characters with the over-stuffed, self-righteous marplots of today like, say, Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY), Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY) and Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) and it’s easy to see how far down the slope politics and politicians have fallen. Public service has given way to private self-interest.

Politics used to be a face-to-face business. Over the years, beginning in the 1960s, three things occurred to deliver us where we are in politics today—the expansion of the media into then unforeseen applications, the influence of money and the arrogance of a privileged class. Begin with the last. It used to be said that people in politics were pretty much like the people who elected them, hence the concept of the citizen legislator. But in today’s world, elective politics is dominated by lawyers, the wealthy and other pedigreed professionals who are far removed from the clubhouse and the extended family upon which local political systems were built.

For example, in the 1960s, Baltimore had three self-contained Congressional districts, which were represented by Democrats George Fallon, Samuel Friedel and Edward A. Garmatz, among the three most powerful members of Congress. Fallon was chairman of the House Public Works Committee; Friedel was chairman of the Government Operations Committee; and Garmatz was chairman of the House Maritime Committee. Put them all together and their combined total years of education didn’t add up to a high school diploma. Today we’re being flogged to death with PhDs, LLDs and MBAs.

The three were home in Maryland every night, schmoozing in the clubhouses and making the rounds of the bull roasts and crab feasts. These days the closest constituents get to their elected officials is on cable TV (C-Span), Facebook, YouTube, Twitter or some other form of the multi-fractured electronic town hall.

Second, the media has caused a massive fracture in politics and a realignment of the electorate that actually has little to do with individual politicians but more in keeping with the public bullhorn that vilifies the political system and those who populate it. The media has insinuated itself not as the medium delivering the message but as the arbiter of policy decisions as well as behavior. For example, Massa’s constituents had little to say about his bizarre conduct but Glenn Beck and Larry King performed the evisceration for them. Put another way, the TV box and the blogosphere have replaced the ballot box. Power no longer belongs to the people but resides with those who arrive via an electrical outlet in the wall.

Finally, money: obscene amounts of it, and even more to come, courtesy of the U.S. Supreme Court. Begin with a timeline on how far we’ve come: In 1970, Former Gov. Marvin Mandel’s winning campaign cost $1.3 million, considered an enormous sum at the time. Mandel’s 1974 campaign spent $1.5 million. William Donald Schafer’s 1990 campaign for governor spent $3 million and change. Parris Glendening’s first campaign in 1994 cost $6 million. And a recent Washington Post analysis showed that in 2006, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich (R) raised $19.6 million to outspend his winning challenger, Gov. Martin O’Malley (D), who raised and spent $16 million. Multiply those numbers by billions at the federal level.

Presidents, governors and political parties used to enforce discipline and party loyalty by controlling the flow of money to candidates and campaigns. Under the old laws, they were the primary sources of campaign fundraising and thus candidates at all levels relied on the party hierarchy for financial support. Under the new laws, both federal and local, candidates can raise huge sums of money on their own and are independent of the party structure as well as presidents and governors.

Until 1973, corporate campaign contributions were illegal in Maryland but union contributions, through their committees on political education (COPE), were legal and welcome. Corporate contributions found their way into Maryland campaigns through illegal, under-the-table methods. Corporations and businesses, for instance, were assessed certain amounts and “bagmen” would make the rounds every week to collect the money from office “petty cash” funds. Or there was the direct “white envelope” exchange exemplified during the administration of Spiro T. Agnew. The 1973 Maryland election law change brought corporate campaign money out into open by legalizing it within the strict limits of the state’s contribution laws.

And in Maryland, there are the so-called “continuing committees,” whereby incumbent officials do not have to abide by separate campaigns but can continue stockpiling unlimited amounts of money year after year. Thus we have legislators amassing campaign accounts containing hundreds of thousands of dollars that can be used for anything that can be vaguely construed as political. Need a new car? Claim it’s necessary for constituent work. Want to take 10 people to dinner? Why, of course, it’s a meeting to discuss neighborhood issues. It’s all on the campaign contribution tab.

At the national level, corporate money began rolling in through political action committees (PACs), a loophole that was created in the campaign finance reforms following the Watergate scandals in the mid-1970s. The next wave of corporate money followed in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act, which allowed outside organizations to fund advertising as long as a campaign theoretically had no knowledge of it (the Swift Boat commercials against John Kerry in 2004). And the latest round is the Supreme Court decision which gives corporations the right of free speech (unlimited campaign contributions) by treating them as individuals, thus overturning 90 years of existing law which prohibited corporate contributions to federal campaigns.

So through mechanisms created by legislators themselves at all levels of government, they have quietly taken control away from the voters and passed it on to lobbyists and special interests such as banks and the health care industry in exchange for money, further separating the electorate from the political process.

Bad behavior is bipartisan. Is it any wonder, then, that people feel powerless and ticked off? They watch Massa, a Democrat, unravel on TV as he talks abut “tickle fights,” “snorkeling” and “fracking.” And they see Bunning, a Republican, wage a one-man campaign against extending unemployment benefits. In New York, Gov. David Paterson, followed Eliot Spitzer in his fall from grace, while Harlem’s Rangel waits to see what’s in store for him after getting caught with his fingers in the tambourine. And the long line of Republicans—Rep. Mark Foley, Sen. John Ensign, Sen. David Vitter, Gov. Mark Sanford and Sen. Larry Craig—and the apparent brothel they ran on “C” Street, a chip shot away from the nation’s capitol, tug at the nation’s moral sinew and the fragility of the political system.

In one of those ironic twists, at the same time politicians posture for more transparency, that elusive goal is exactly what brought many of them down. So when it comes to transparency, the political flavor of the month, too much of a good thing can be bad for politicians.

Man with Parkinson's accosted by Tea Party supporters tells his side

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 15:06:18 -0400

Bulldoze out of the red

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:38:08 -0400

Have you ever wondered what will become of Detroit?

"Indefensible Men"

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:25:16 -0400

From the December 2009 issue of The Baffler (no online version of this article available). For those not familiar with The Baffler, this is the revival of a magazine of business and culture edited by Thomas Frank that had previously been published from 1988 to 2007. This issue was called “Margin Call” and included articles by Matt Taibbi, Naomi Klein, Michael Lind. I believe readers will find this piece to be relevant. Enjoy!

Brian Williams has nothing but respect for The Daily Show

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 11:38:09 -0400

An American Infographic

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 11:42:09 -0400

My new years resolution is to make an infographic on every This American Life ever made. The idea is to expand and add context to the stories and information contained in the shows. Basically, anything I am curious about while listening to the pieces.

Sen. Roy Ashburn no longer in closet

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:24:32 -0500

Republican Sen. Roy Ashburn, who has been on leave from the Senate since his DUI arrest last week, confirmed today that he is gay.

Bloggers and press access

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:04:49 -0500

Jay Liner’s business card for The Baltimore Organ lists him as “Founder & Chief Protagonist” of the Web site. The Pikesville lawyer is a self-described boomer from the anti-Vietnam generation, a progressive who writes about “what piques his curiosity,” from the slots debate to Baltimore County politics to Viagra commercials.

Figuring Out the Media’s One-Percent Rule

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:34:25 -0500

Joachim Blunck—known simply as JB to friends and colleagues—and I met in the mid-1970s while we were students at Johns Hopkins University. JB was the founding art director at Baltimore’s free weekly City Paper and was spirited away by the Village Voice, then owned by Rupert Murdoch, four years later. He then became a key cog in Murdoch’s News Corporation operations, most notably in Fox’s early television shows. Ever restless, he moved from Manhattan to Los Angeles in 1995, where he contentedly remains in the Westchester neighborhood, working on small-budget films, keeping tabs on the media industry’s current tumult, and is ready to pounce when opportunity strikes. The following interview was conducted by email last week.

Splice Today: You've been a media/entertainment professional since graduating from JHU in 1976. How can you sum up what's changed from the 70s to today in your business? What's better, what's worse?

Joachim Blunck: More, better, faster. When we were in school, I still had a black and white TV with only broadcast channels, a rotary dial home phone, read the newspaper every day, and did my schoolwork with a yellow pad and typewriter. To see a movie we went to a movie theater. Thirty-five or so years later, my daughter Kaley, who's a college junior at UCSC, has a large flat screen television with satellite reception, an AppleTV, a DVD player, a web-enabled iPhone, and gets news, entertainment and does her schoolwork on a web-connected MacBook—and she uses them all simultaneously. She goes to the movies, too, probably texting until the lights dim. There's more of everything, available to everyone, all the time.

Endless choices, and regrettably, endless junk. The misconception, though, is that everything is junk, which isn't true. The amount of interesting, high-quality material has grown as well. I've always maintained that everything adheres to what I call the one percent rule—that one percent of anything in any discipline is innovative and of real quality. Plumbers, mechanics, literature, art, television, movies—they all have their "bests" which we tend to seek out and emulate. It's in the emulation that things start to fall apart. So, a really great TV idea begets dozens of imitators, whether it's a procedural crime drama, or a reality competition. So it seems like there's nothing but junk, but if you look closely there are lots of people doing very good work.

On the downside, the entrenched media has screwed the pooch with regards to societal imperatives like a strong fourth estate. They abdicated classified advertising to craigslist, not understanding that the community bonding of classifieds is a major driver of circulation, and, with rare exception (one percent rule) were slow to embrace the web. This generation doesn't read newspapers, or even newspaper websites, for information. Television really hasn't stepped up to fill the void in an intelligent way. Reasonable political discourse is splintered into overly specialized forums that ignore each other.

I did a lecture recently at Hopkins to a class of media studies students. Just one read the newspaper, and he only did it when he visited his parents. They didn't watch any news channels regularly. But, they could hold forth on Housewives of New Jersey and The Real World in great detail. Johns Hopkins media studies students—presumably part of the one percent. Ugh.

ST: What are you currently working on?

JB: Pitching show ideas, writing spec scripts, doing meetings. We do lots of meetings out here. Like many producers, I'm trying to position myself for the world as it emerges from the recession. I've also been working with some longtime partners on low-budget documentaries. Last year our film The Seventh Python made the festival rounds. Now we're working on biopic about early 60s pop singer Chris Montez. I have an interesting iron in the fire that may bear fruit in the next month, but I don't want to jinx it. I'll keep you posted.

ST: During your lengthy career did you have one or two specific mentors/rabbis that helped you along?

JB: There was one in particular. At the Voice and later Murdoch Magazines I was close to a fellow named John Evans. When I arrived at the Voice, he was the Associate Publisher in charge of classifieds. He was an eccentric, brilliant and unforgettable Welshman who came to the US on a 40' sailboat from Gibraltar a few years before. We hit it off and he quickly introduced me to the higher ups at News Corp and guided my career up until Rupert Murdoch bought what would become Fox.

At that point, knowing my interest in movies and television, he helped facilitate my transfer. We worked closely during Murdoch's magazine expansion in the early 80s, and our mutual fondness for sailing brought us very close together. I embraced his non-lateral way of thinking and his very effective management style. He would go on to be a major player for Murdoch on the print and information technology side of things. He died suddenly in 2004. I ran across some video lately of a 1987 trip we took in the Caribbean on Zorra, an 80' sailboat that belonged to a boatbuilding friend of ours. It was very emotional seeing that again, and reminded me of how important he was to me.

ST: You left Baltimore's City Paper for the Village Voice in 1981. What was it like going from a ramshackle start-up to what was then an engine of weekly newspapers in the United States?

JB: Talk about letdown. The rap on the Voice at that time was that while it was certainly top of the alternative press heap, it had become a bloated, self-indulgent, self-important, aging liberal rant rag. It was all that, but it was still the Voice.

Within a month of getting there, the publisher who hired me as Production Director was canned, replaced by Marty Singerman, a longtime Murdoch confidant. He wouldn't even entertain a meeting with me. My first instinct—this coupled with the letdown of the reality of the Voice—was to leave. I was offered the Art Director slot at the Soho Weekly News. With one foot out the door, John Evans pulled me back, sat me down with Marty (who would become in many ways as important to me as John), and solidified my career there. It was Marty who a few months later introduced me to Murdoch.

At the Voice I was more an observer to the editorial process, and a cynical critic of the myopic self-importance of the writers. They made people like our (City Paper) colleague J.D. Considine look like lost puppies. These writers took themselves way too seriously, and copy editing was kept to punctuation and basic grammar. I did a bit of art direction there, and there was always a need to trim stories to fit—maybe have room for a headline (!) and a picture. Once I was laying out a Joe Conason column that was too long, and asked him to do a little cutting. The writers' reaction was always to look for jump space, but as head of production I minimized that for both aesthetic and practical reasons. Conason finally relented, trimming it to fit on the page with a headline. No picture, but off the column went to press.

It wasn't my place to mix in, but later I couldn't resist pushing his buttons. I told him that after reading his piece I thought it could have shrunk quite a bit more, without losing the thrusts of his arguments. He took the bait and asked me to show him. I crossed out all the adjectives, and its length dropped by more than a third. It was on point, crisp, and an arguably better read. He wasn't amused. I wouldn't be doing any more editing until I got to television, where tight, clever, economical writing rules.

ST: You worked for Rupert Murdoch for a number of years, with A Current Affair, Good Day New York and the FX Channel. How much interaction did you have with Murdoch and how much autonomy did he give you and your colleagues? What led to you severing ties with News Corp and do you regret it now?

JB: In my early days at News Corp it was still a relatively small company on the executive side. One of my many hats was to work at the corporate offices on a variety of things for Murdoch. I had my share of meetings and interaction, and got a good fly-on-the-wall view. It was during that time that I gained enough trust to be thrown into Fox with a couple Aussie journalists, and basically set loose to do whatever had to be done.

A Current Affair was the answer to Murdoch's request for an evening news show. Murdoch had considerable interest in our progress—he regularly spoke to us, and was present at a couple early, formative meetings—but the interpretation and execution was left to us. Peter Brennan was the editorial heart and soul of the show; I worked the visual style and got it to air. Sound familiar? We were housed at the Fox NY station, the former Metromedia WNEW. There was no help—we were Murdoch interlopers. I remember putting together equipment and people, spending what would become millions of dollars without regard for the internal accounting systems. The show went from concept to air in less than eight weeks. If anyone ever asked "by whose authority," I just said "Rupert." That was fun.

Later at Good Day I would be running the whole shebang. We took a dead-as-a-doornail idea and turned it into a lasting, successful franchise. It took three months to pull the show from eighth to second place in New York. Murdoch called occasionally (usually at three a.m. from a jet somewhere) to ask how things were going, but he never interfered. If he had a concern, he'd let me explain my position and nearly always said, "Well good then. Carry on." I think if my ratings were bad it would have been an entirely different matter.

Murdoch's phone calls could come at very opportune times as well. In 1989 I produced the first Fox New Year's Eve Broadcast live from Times Square. It was an amalgam of street bits, taped comedy, live music, and was hosted by Penn & Teller from the roof of the Marriott overlooking the crowd. The production was switched from a cramped trailer at the base of the building that holds the famous ball. Remember, this is live television, no delay, something rarely done at the network. They sent along a nervous senior executive to "chaperone" me. Anyway, we had Southside Johnny performing at a Manhattan club party, the feed incorporated into the show. As he took the stage, the picture going out live, he shouts into the microphone, "We're gonna party like a motherfucker!" and starts playing.

The exec, sitting next to me in the broadcast trailer, starts dialing furiously on his cell phone (the old Moto brick). Of course, there was no signal, and he starts buzzing in my ear to do something. I ignored him and the show went on. He fumed. Just after midnight, Penn & Teller do the classic rope/knot magic trick, but they do it with a live snake. They tie the snake in a knot, and then seemingly cut it in half with a pair of scissors, awkwardly hacking at it (it was a very juicy sausage). All the while the Fox exec is imploring me to cut away. No chance. Finally, after another remote routine, Penn & Teller strip to their underwear in the 20-degree weather. It's great television. The exec is apoplectic. The show ends, he starts yelling. Everyone in the trailer is staring at him as he goes off on me. The private landline phone in the trailer rings. It's for me. I interrupt the exec and answer. "Hi Rupert … oh thanks, glad you enjoyed it … yes, that was funny … okay … thanks, I really appreciate the call. Bye." Silence. The Fox exec took off into the night. I was back the next year to do it all again, with Penn & Teller.

The FX startup went the same way. Tons of autonomy, lots of money flowing, and occasional support in the form of a call or a visit. You always knew Murdoch was watching, because his comments and observations were uncannily on point. I don't know how he had the time.

In my time at News Corp I was never afraid for my job, and always felt supported. I left after moving to Los Angeles. New York was an oasis in the television system, and our distance from Hollywood and proximity to Murdoch made things easy. As long as we succeeded and delivered, we were left alone. In LA, everyone gets into your business and looks for ways to either piss on or co-opt your work. It wasn't fun anymore, and I had my fill.

In hindsight, I certainly could have made things work. My career since has not had the rush of those years. Some regrets, and maybe I'd do it differently now, but I'm happy with life. Kids do that for you [in addition to Kaley, JB has a son, Zach, 16]—my focus changed.

ST: When A Current Affair started its buzz-meter was off the charts in New York, with personalities like Steve Dunleavy and others landing in the gossip columns and just a lot of excitement around the show. I imagine it was a rush to be a major domo on the show, if exhausting. What was the atmosphere like? Maybe like an extended coke/meth high or something different? And how do you look back on those Fox shows today? I see that you did the "Color Correction" for the film Outfoxed.

JB: Not drugs, but an awful lot of liquor. We had a phone extension installed in the bar across from the office. We were reinventing storytelling for television. No one had ever seen anything like it, and we were too naive to say no to anything that was suggested. We were renegades with a healthy sense of humor. It was very much the same outlaw mentality that we had at City Paper.

People often think back to ACA as tawdry and salacious, when in fact it was just good tabloid reporting with a twinkle in our eyes. If you got the joke, fine, if you didn't, at least you were entertained. In our first month we got a positive review in The New York Times! The reviewer got it. For the most part, so did the audience, and the rising ratings just fueled our daring.

Aside from the preppie murder, Jim and Tammy Faye, and all the other big stories that we led with simply because no one else did (that changed, didn't it?), the one I remember with a laugh was the Peter Holm story. Holm was a dumb hunk of a Swede who was being divorced by Joan Collins. He sued for palimony in LA Court. We put together, in a day, a show (live to air at the time) that was a mock telethon to raise money for Holm. Our studio had been used for years for the Jerry Lewis Telethon when it came from New York, so in the rafters were phones, tables, chairs, risers, decorations, all the stuff you needed to do a telethon. We set up the studio with mock phone banks populated with celebrity lookalikes (and Cindy Adams), did a backdrop with a tote board that looked like a big thermometer (The Peter Meter), recorded tape packages with New Yorkers and what they would donate (a slum apartment, food from the trash, etc), ran a text zipper on the screen with amounts people were giving (all fake—Joan Carson $1000 … Joanna Carson $10,000), and had the telethon portions of the broadcast hosted by one of our reporters in a tux.

Maury Povich, of course, would not lower himself to our descending levels, and hosted the "show" from his usual set. The show did include an actual package about the trial, but the capper was a satellite interview with Holm as he left court that day. He, of course, could hear our show in his earpiece between Q&A sessions with Maury. While a viewer would have seen the obvious satire, hearing the show interspersed with Maury’s conversation seemed to give a different impression. After the show was over I got a call in the control room from our producer in LA. Holm wanted to know how much money we'd raised.

ACA, Good Day, the FX shows and everything else all had the same sensibility. I had the time of my life. Of course, we begat a tectonic change in news. There are no more tabloid news magazines. Everything is just tabloid, and without the consideration and execution that we invented. News is now salacious and tawdry, and increasingly stupid.

Not much of a story with Outfoxed. I do color work on occasion to bridge between producing assignments. It was a four-day gig. The producers of Outfoxed made some good points, but on the whole they were as misinformed as everyone else.

ST: Do you follow the continuing acquisitions, plotting, subterfuge, etc. of Murdoch today, and do you think, as is commonly thought in some quarters, that he's an evil media force? Or, rather, an old-fashioned entrepreneur?

JB: Success breeds detractors. Murdoch succeeds. He is fearless and incredibly smart. It was always an eye-opener seeing him run a room. He listens, considers, decides, and more often that not, provides the initial idea that fuels the machine. In media, he's the last of the old-time journos.

Politics aside (and I think Fox News is awful), his moves in publishing were always copied, whether it was changing the game with the unions or using technology to further coverage and production. He's leading the charge to save what's left of real reportage. The Wall Street Journal and Harper Collins will be among the first on the iPad. Murdoch understands more than anyone that newspapers represent power, and that he and the rest of the industry failed to understand the impact of the Web. Unfortunately, his people screwed up MySpace. My impression is that the touchpad moves are being encouraged directly by him. Will it all work? Dunno.

ST: You left Manhattan in the 90s for Los Angeles. I remember at one point you had a serious bicycle accident: did that affect your desire for a change of scenery? And, though I doubt it, have you become a bicycle rights activist?

JB: The bike accident did help drive me to get out of Good Day and expand my horizons. Despite the success, I was getting bored. FX was next. In my career I've tended to move from startup to startup, trying not to repeat myself, adding to my experience. Not good for a settled career path, but a great ride.

And no, not a bike activist. I still ride—the beach here is great for that—and I use a motorcycle to get around LA most of the time. Death wish? Nah, I just like the implicit freedom of two-wheeled transportation. I've always wandered. I'm not sure what I've been looking for.

ST: One time you told me—this was in the late 90s—while we were talking in Malibu, that Hollywood was a dead end for people over 40. Do you still feel that way?

JB: What was Hunter Thompson's music industry quote that was bastardized to TV? It's true.

If you haven't made an impact by 40 or so, it's very hard to keep up the game as an independent. TV execs like their ideas coming from either young people, or people that they've worked with successfully time and again. I never established myself in film, and my sprint-from-here-to-there career has not given me a strong base. I tend to innovate my way forward—I'm still here, and I'm still trying to do new things.

I've sensed a bit of give in the system in some ways. There is a distinct need for experienced people to guide the up-and-comers. It happens, but it requires that the old timers check their ambition, and the young turks open their ears. I've worked with some very talented young producers, and the experience has been rewarding.

ST: When I describe you to friends, I've always said that you were consistently a few years ahead of the rest of the media pack. For example, when you helped me out by designing New York Press in '88, you made the decision that the weekly should be produced on desk-top Macs, which no other weekly was doing at the time. Do you still feel you've got a pulse on what's going on in the industry or have you taken a step back to relax more, spend time with your kids, etc. You once told me, "Some people work to live, I live to work."

JB: I still live to work, but the kids have tempered my ambition for the better. Like I said, I tend to innovate my way forward. The trick has been finding environments that let me do my thing, and on the whole, I have. Several years ago I moved Bunim-Murray Productions (The Real World, etc.) away from industry-standard Avid production systems, to one being developed by Apple. I ran the largest beta test, and developed the workflow for what is now the de facto new standard: Apple's Final Cut Pro. Cool stuff.

I went on to work with the nascent capabilities of Flash Media Server, and developed several interfaces that are found in bits and pieces around the web. I've done my share of website work, MMOGs, commerce. The future still includes TV, but not necessarily TV sets as we know them now. There are technologies coming down the pipe that will cause yet another shift in our enjoyment of media. I'm still plugging away and trying to ride that wave.

ST: Do you think all aggregation websites are going to prosper or will some fall by the wayside? What websites do you check in on every day? And what's been your own online experience?

JB: More and more people are their own aggregators. Despite the enormous number of choices, I think people have a tendency to find comfort in a small array of sites that they learn about through friends. I look at everything I can and find the overall lack of real innovation depressing. The missed opportunities are everywhere.

I think if you can look beyond the pornographic crap, ChatRoulette is a marvelous idea: it plays to our worst fears and desires—what if it could be harnessed in a useful way? People of Walmart is a hoot. Personally, my daily tabs hold a mixer of old-school news, technology, video, cars and bikes, weird sites, and a couple of blogs.

ST: What do you think the media/entertainment industry will look like in five years?

JB: I think the industry in general has the whole web thing inside out. TV people hate web people; web people think TV people are dinosaurs. But that doesn't matter in the end.

Big corporations are run by people who are risk averse, so there is a distinct lack of risk-taking unless it's driven by emerging technology whose long lead-time to the market makes adoption inevitability. Satellite distribution drove cable and forced a change in viewer habits. DVD technology forced major changes in production economics. TV on the web is forcing a complete reconsideration of the presentation and advertising model that's existed for 50 years. The technologies are not driven by storytellers, they are driven by technocrats. The creative side plays catch-up and does its best to adapt the new technologies to our caveman legacy as storytellers. The business people just want it fast and cheap.

The only consistent truth is that people like video in all forms. Chat, texting, news, gossip, information, all eventually feed into it. The company that can cohesively bind all the pieces of the puzzle and make them relevant to daily life will win in the end. No one does that yet.

I have plenty of ideas, if anyone is willing to listen. Ha!

There Is No Center Anymore

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:32:38 -0500

Bobby, Bobby, Bobby. What the hell were you thinking? The governor of Maryland goes off for a couple of days, no more, on a Pentagon-sponsored trip to visit 26 of the state’s National Guardsmen in Iraq, by now the forgotten war, and you get your knickers in a knot? Wow! What happens if we have a Chilean-sized earthquake or a Katrina-force hurricane along the Chesapeake Bay. Does he declare Apocalypse now?

Bobby, of course, is Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R), the once and would-be future governor of Maryland, and the incumbent who made the trip to Iraq is Martin O’Malley (D), who makes up the Jack Armstrong vs. Elvis quotient of state politics, jock and rock star. Ehrlich criticized O’Malley not so much for taking the trip as for leaving Annapolis while the General Assembly is in session, as Ehrlich’s apologists were quick to point out when the headline-grab backfired.

As he seeks to expand his reach in apparent preparation for a re-match with O’Malley this year, Ehrlich is doing what every outsider does—create straw men only to attempt to knock them down. Consider Ehrlich’s Feb. 28 op-ed in the Washington Post in which he wrote: “Our political leadership in Annapolis is regularly enacting policies that conflict with mainstream sentiment in Maryland.” Many political scientists would call that courage or leadership, which is why we, the people, elect officials and invest our power with them.

About the trip to Iraq, even O’Malley’s spokesman acknowledged that the timing was not the most accommodating but that the Pentagon, not the governor’s office, arranged the travel schedule. Besides, much of the two-day out-of-state travel occurred on a weekend when, at this half-way juncture in the session, the General Assembly is either dithering or at home for a break and away from the State House. Crunch time in the legislature has not yet arrived and will not be a consideration for another couple of weeks. And remember, enacting a budget is the Assembly’s only constitutional obligation. Everything else is ornamental.

Besides, as Ehrlich well knows, this is the age of instant communication, which can put anyone in touch with the immediate world in a nanosecond. What’s more, O’Malley is a well-known techno-geek who is permanently attached to his Blackberry. Short of all that, O’Malley was traveling on a Pentagon aircraft, whose communication system was probably as elaborate as that of Air Force One and surely more immediate than the State House push-button phone.

In his Washington Post piece, Ehrlich ripped an opinion of Attorney General Doug Gansler, which held that Maryland should begin recognizing same-sex marriages that are performed in other states until the courts or the legislature decide otherwise. “The opinion’s release also throws into chaos a legislative session that should be focused exclusively on creating jobs and reining in government spending,” Ehrlich, or his ghost, wrote.

So far, the only chaos visible during the session is originating from a single member of Ehrlich’s own Republican party, an anthropological jar specimen named Donald Dwyer, of Anne Arundel County, who has demanded Gansler’s impeachment without understanding that the General Assembly lacks that authority. For those who, like Dwyer, may not have access to an English language dictionary, impeach means to accuse, and not, as Dwyer seems to imply or wish, to remove.

What Ehrlich is apparently attempting as he tools up his campaign is to tap into the anger and angst that is warping the national mood and threatening incumbents at every level. “The question is whether their [the voters] representatives in Annapolis will ever start listening,” he wrote in the Post. There you have it, citizens, an instant campaign bumper sticker —“Annapolis Isn’t Listening.”

“Our representatives in Annapolis are out of step with families, employers and taxpayers,” Ehrlich wrote. “If nothing else, Mr. Gansler’s opinion will send lawmakers running for the ideological trenches rather than coming to grips with their spending habits or getting government off the back of job-creating entrepreneurs.”

The problem with that argument is that its strengths are also its weaknesses. There are really four Ehrlichs—the go-along, get-along Bobby of the House of Delegates in the 1980s, the right-wing operative and protégé of Newt Gingrich as a member of Congress, the governor who ran from the right and tried and failed to govern from the center and now Bobby Teabagger, who’s trying to reinvent himself as a sideline populist. And the difficulty for Ehrlich today is that the center of American politics has collapsed. The system has been marginalized by forces outside the standard definitions of right, left and center.

T.S. Eliot observed that mankind is constantly swinging between tyranny and anarchy. The partitioning of the American electorate has happened many times before: The flirtation with communism during the 1930s; the virulent anti-communism following World War II, which produced historian Arthur Schlesinger’s important treatise, The Vital Center; the polarization during the McCarthy era in the 1950s; the hard-headed sons against hard-hatted fathers’ belligerence over the Vietnam war. One difference today is that political parties no longer seem to matter. And it is exactly into this netherland where Ehrlich is heading without a compass.

The trouble with being a former governor is the paper trail that follows you around like tin cans tied to a dog’s tail. No governor in recent years has kicked up more of an ideological fuss than Ehrlich did when he accused House Speaker Michael Busch (D-Anne Arundel) of playing the “race card” on slot machine legislation. As for Gansler’s opinion, so far only the troglodyte Dwyer is stuck in a trench. Two bills, as usual for the past several years, have been introduced, one anti-gay marriage, one legalizing gay marriage. Both, following the customary legislative shredder, will probably die and the status quo will live on until the next session and a new legislature reprises the matter for consideration once again.

Since Ehrlich has raised the issue of spending habits, no governor in recent years had a higher rate of growth than Ehrlich, 12 percent in one year, and an increase of more than $3 billion in tolls, taxes and fees. In addition, Ehrlich pioneered borrowing against future federal transportation funds at the same time he attacks O’Malley for spending money the state doesn’t have. O’Malley’s tax increase amounted to $1.3 billion, as opposed to Ehrlich’s $3 billion, and the rate of growth in this year’s budget is zero percent compared with Ehrlich’s 12 percent. Ehrlich also added to the cost of government by creating two new cabinet agencies as political paybacks, one for the handicapped, the other for veterans.

About officials “enacting policies that conflict with mainstream sentiment in Maryland,” that’s usually the case with forward-thinking legislation. There was a time when there was massive opposition to both the Baltimore Beltway and I-83.That was followed by opposition to the Baltimore Metro System by rural legislators and those in Anne Arundel and Baltimore Counties. In the early 60s, there was opposition to public accommodations legislation everywhere but in Baltimore City. In the 70s, the medical community as well as others opposed the creation of the universally acclaimed Shock Trauma system in Maryland. And the most raucous opposition of all was to the gun control law in 1973, at the time the first of its kind in the nation as well as the strictest. There was even an uprising in Baltimore that led to an opposition referendum on Harborplace, the centerpiece of the city’s tourism industry.

That, Bobby, is what leadership is all about—making tough calls and getting the job done. Woodrow Wilson observed, “The ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people.” But sometimes the ringing causes an Excedrin-sized headache.