> The real problem is a media system based on competitive profit
> maximization, which is what produces lowest common denominator
> programming. But that starts getting into dangerous territory for
> liberals, so best to get nostalgic for those great old days when
> Hearst ruled the mediascape and the LA Times was a crap paper run by
> the original Chandler.
Yes, thanks for the yglesias article.
What I have noticed in the last twenty years that is troubling is a 1) growing proliferation of special interest magazines 2) an increasingly porous boundary between content and advertising. These two trends tend to reinforce one another. The net subliminal effect of this is to convince people of the, hmmm, primoridalness of the market, which is kind of depressing.
As for blogs -- there are blogs like Riverbend, which are exceptional. Orwell argued for their value in "Inside the Whale"
"While I have been writing this essay another European war has broken out. It will either last several years and tear Western civilization to pieces, or it will end inconclusively and prepare the way for yet another war which will do the job once and for all. But war is only 'peace intensified'. What is quite obviously happening, war or no war, is the break-up of laissez-faire capitalism and of the liberal-Christian culture. Until recently the full implications of this were not foreseen, because it was generally imagined that socialism could preserve and even enlarge the atmosphere of liberalism. It is now beginning to be realized how false this idea was. Almost certainly we are moving into an age of totalitarian dictatorships--an age in which freedom of thought will be at first a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction. The autonomous individual is going to be stamped out of existence. But this means that literature, in the form in which we know it, must suffer at least a temporary death. The literature of liberalism is coming to an end and the literature of totalitarianism has not yet appeared and is barely imaginable. As for the writer, he is sitting on a melting iceberg; he is merely an anachronism, a hangover from the bourgeois age, as surely doomed as the hippopotamus. Miller seems to me a man out of the common because he saw and proclaimed this fact a long while before most of his contemporaries--at a time, indeed, when many of them were actually burbling about a renaissance of literature. Wyndham Lewis had said years earlier that the major history of the English language was finished, but he was basing this on different and rather trivial reasons. But from now onwards the all-important fact for the creative writers going to be that this is not a writer's world. That does not mean that he cannot help to bring the new society into being, but he can take no part in the process as a writer. For as a writer he is a liberal, and what is happening is the destruction of liberalism. It seems likely, therefore, that in the remaining years of free speech any novel worth reading will follow more or less along the lines that Miller has followed--I do not mean in technique or subject matter, but in implied outlook. The passive attitude will come back, and it will be more consciously passive than before. Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly there is nothing left but quietism--robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it. Get inside the whale--or rather, admit you are inside the whale (for you are, of course). Give yourself over to the world-process, stop fighting against it or pretending that you control it; simply accept it, endure it, record it. That seems to be the formula, that any sensitive novelist is now likely to adopt. A novel on more positive, 'constructive' lines, and not emotionally spurious, is at present very difficult to imagine."
The parallel is not exact, but it seems no coincidence that the best writing and thought nowadays is limited in scope, subjective, and like Riverbend's insisting upon a small objective truth, because when we try to make our statements too big, they cannot help but participate in the dishonesty of an official language that is continually failing us. So we hang on to Riverbend and Juan Cole -- to honest observers and honest scholars -- and eschew official explanations and pomo abstractions.
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