On Tuesday, December 3, 2002, at 12:11 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> Obviously, it's far easier to have your own show than to be a guest on
> a show whose host is aggressively hostile to you.
obviously, but that also doesn't mean it's impossible to go to o'reilly's home court and beat him. you just have to play the game the right way. while i wouldn't consider myself some super-savvy media consultant, i would hazard a guess that coming on and spluttering about imperialist crimes is not a winning gameplan. there may be some people who can beat o'reilly at his own game, but i suspect, given the home-court advantage afforded a show's host, you'd have to make his own game work against him. that takes more subtletly, wit, and flexibility than trying to yell louder than he does.
> Just how many Americans do you think know who James Carville or Jon
> Stewart is? Are they better known than Karl Marx or Michael Moore or
> even Noam Chomsky? If Ohio State students serve as a sample to study
> name recognition -- they tend to be as "Middle-American" as they come
> -- Americans are better acquainted with the latter than the former.
well, i can't really disagree with you here. i would just say that o'reilly himself is in the carville/stewart category, not the marx/moore/chomsky category. yes, he's the highest rated news show on cable, but that's still not very much, really. carville co-hosted firing line or some otherly-titled knockoff of such; and stewart was (rightly, imo) catapulted into the limelight with the daily show's coverage of "indecision 2000." o'reilly is king of a relatively small hill, i think.
>
>>> <snipping stuff on resources and a liberation news service>
>>
>> <snipping my own comments on mass media leading up to a reference to
>> the twilight zone>
> ***** Perhaps the first shows to offer more varied reflections on US
> foreign policy were the anthologies (Worland 1996). _The Twilight
> Zone_ raised the possibility of US troops dying in Vietnam in 1963, a
> year before the Tonkin Gulf Resolution formalized US entry into the
> war as an acknowledged combatant. _The Outer Limits_ too offered
> stories that dealt with the situation in southeast Asia. Both dealt
> with other Cold War reflections, too -- sometimes critically,
> sometimes repeating established cliches. However, if the anthology
> shows periodically pushed the edges of the creative and political
> envelope, they were also shaped by the limited tolerance of
> controversial material by networks and sponsors. _Twilight Zone_
> creator Rod Sterling once characterized himself not as "a meek
> conformist," but rather "a tired non-conformist." He noted, "I'm not
> writing any material that lies in the danger zone. . . . It no longer
> behooves us to bite the hand that feeds us" (Boddy 1984, 106).
> <http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/mepp/exofile/sftv.html> *****
well, what rod says and what rod does are not necessarily the same thing. why would he *proclaim* the subversive work he's doing. that would kind of defeat the purpose. there was recently a nice npr bit on the progress of the twilight zone . . . but i don't have the time to grab it, right now.
>
> Those are the limits and possibilities offered by the corporate media.
> Michael Denning's _The Cultural Front_ gives us an extensive
> discussion of examples of popular and avant-garde politico-cultural
> expressions in the media ranging from music, theater, literature,
> radio, to film in the days of the Popular Front (which came under
> severe attacks during the days of the Red Purge).
a good guy and an interesting book. denning was one of the relatively few tenured profs at yale to actually publicly support organizing grad students, unlike hypocrites like brian davies, for example.
>
> I'm not a mass media worker, however. Are you? If you are one, you
> may try to exploit the possibilities while learning to live with the
> limits. If you are not one, though, you will have to approach the
> question of communication differently.
>
working on both of those things!
:-)
j