Tag Archives: Trump

The Arithmetic of News

 

The Pew Research Center just released a study that must awaken newspaperpeople in cold sweats, or urine: 81% of Americans get their news from a screen —  either online outlets or social media (a putrid redundancy) sites. That doesn’t even include TV. Of the stragglers left over who get their news from papers or magazines, more than 60% are 65 and older.

So newspapers are literally dying.

That’s hardly new, news or surprising. I’m in the business, and can’t say I really support the concept of newspapers in a modern era. One day, historians will look back at our cultural institutions and think it quaint that we used to get our news from day-old parchment. That living things needed to be killed, shredded and delivered manually for  mankind to learn who won yesterday’s game shows.

Still, the death of papers is not like the death of coal. There has been little evidence that news coverage contributes to global warming (unless you count Trump as a carbon  emissions threat). In fact, consumption of news is at a record high.

So there are elements of newspapers that could still flourish, if not most newspapers themselves. The New York Times and Washington Post have seen a revival of scoops and influence unmatched since the Nixon years. So, they’re likely safe, if Jeff Sessions doesn’t equate reading news to heroin.

But, for the few who have little access to or interest in the Post or Times, the question over what constitutes news becomes as gray as uncertainty.

Our preeminent TV news outlets aren’t helping things any. Every MSNBC segment is simply asking a commentator, ‘Don’t you think Donald Trump is a nincompoop?’ The answer — and endless supply of examples — make for great comedy.  Just ask Alec Baldwin. And it soothes the confirmation biases of two-thirds of the country.

CNN is entering similarly shark-infested waters, accentuating sermonizers over strategists. Still, they’re the only network that gets A-list commentators Woodward, Bernstein and the NYT’s Maggie Haberman, the Three Musketeers of the White House. But they are three in a house of neophytes — who make enough errors to provide the administration defensive mortars.

That leaves the short-bus student, Fox News. For the first time, the network is losing regularly to MSNBC, once unthinkable. The state news agency is learning the limited punditry appeal of columnists from obscure outlets like Axios and The Washington Examiner, whoever the fuck they are now (I worked in DC for six years and never saw a copy). Hint: the outlet is the only measure of a commentator, who are interchangeably uniform.

So who to watch? When does news actually occur? Who to watch when it does?

There may be a simple but pretty accurate algorithm to measure the issue, and perhaps an answer that won’t even require you listen to a single word from the blowhards. Plus, it’s color-coded, so Alabamans can understand it.

It works this way. If possible, put CNN, FOX and MSNBC next to each other on the TV guide, so you can quickly flip up just two clicks for the world pulse.

Don’t bother listening, or even making out he pictures on the screen. Just look at the bottom of the screen: There will be a blue strip or a red one emblazoned across the bottom. Marketing research must dictate those colors — only.

Now click quickly twice, noting the color bands on the bottom.

If you see three red bands splashing Mauban BREAKING NEWS, you know that something real happened. An example of this would be the hurricanes or the Vegas shootings, incidents that demanded attention across all manner political spectrum.

If there are two red banners and one blue banner, the news will be negative against trump. The alleged Bannon-Trump split, for instance, dominated the broadcasts of CNN and MSNBC for an interminable span. Fox’s lead stories on the day of Fire and Fury’s release were the cold temperatures in the Northeast, and Jeff Sessions consideration of an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s role into Russian meddling.

If there’s one red banner, the news is good for Trump. Trump’s strike on Syria. His choice of Gorsuch. Stock news.

Finally, if all the banners are all screaming in blue, there is no real news that day. Turn off the TV. Step outside. Forget the Gnash.

We’ve come to measure our world in analytics. Why not the news that dictates it?

 

 

 

A Funny Thing Happened…

 

The matriarch of the Bowles family, Thelma, died shortly before Thanksgiving this year. She was 103 years old.

103. The things Thelma saw.

Charlie Chaplin made his first film in 1914. The first stone of the Lincoln Memorial was put into place. Woodrow Wilson signed a declaration commemorating Mother’s Day. Babe Ruth made his major league debut for the Boston Red Sox.

As we do so many of our kin, the Bowles honored Thelma in the little churches where she was raised. The ceremony was followed by the small, somber-but-love-filled reunions that seem to follow all hollowed departures. I used to not understand funerals. Now, it seems, I speak their language as a second tongue.

Which, before this Dinosaur Edition of Factslaps (Trump may soon be receiving a Round Earth or Sound It Out Edition soon), I’d like to make formal my funeral requests. These are my wishes, being of unsound mind and body:

  1. I want to be cremated, and have my ashes donated to science.
  2. I want multiple headstones (who says you can only have one?), dotting the nation’s unsuspecting cemeteries.
  3. I want every tombstone to read “I’m Just Resting My Eyes.”
  4. I want my funeral service to include a break dance contest.

And now, a word from our sponsors:

  • Dinosaurs lived on Earth for 150 million years. We’ve been around for just 0.1% of that time.
  • Dinosaurs are not, technically, extinct, since birds are considered by science as a type of dinosaur.
  • The longest complete dinosaur is the 27 meters (89 feet) long Diplodocus, which was discovered in Wyoming.
  • The smallest known dinosaur was about four inches (10 cm) tall and weighed less than a chihuahua.
  • Most dinosaurs are known from just a single tooth or bone.
  • The word “Dinosaur”comes from the ancient Greek and means “terrible lizard.”
  • If Earth’s history were condensed into 24 hours, life would’ve appeared at 4am, land plants at 10:24pm, dinosaur extinction at 11:41pm and human history would’ve begun at 11:58:43pm.
  • There’s a limestone cliff with more than 5,000 dinosaur footprints in Bolivia, with many dating back 68 million years.
  • The dinosaur noises in the “Jurassic Park” movie were made from recordings of tortoise sex.
  • 40% of Americans think that humansand dinosaurs lived at the same time.

Livid, from New York, It’s Saturday Night!

 

First: How is it that Donald Trump has not responded to rapper Eminem’s scathing video beat down of the administration, in which he told his fans that if they were supporters of the Pumpkin-in-Chief, they should stop following buying his music?

It was a rare non-response (which has become as much a tea leaf into his thinking as the Tweets he does make) from a president who likes nothing more than to enter a social fray in which he can offend.

Confusion is the only scenario I can think of that led to the silence:

buy provigil europe Flunkie: “Sir, social media is buzzing about Eminem’s video criticizing you.”

Trump: “Those sons of bitches. Was it the green one?”

The Incontinent Id did offer some interesting fantasizing last week. Namely, wondering aloud if the media’s daily excoriating of him wasn’t tantamount to unequal political coverage.

Of course, one of the greatest memories in the history of memories didn’t use the word “tantamount.” Multi-syllabic words are not his friend (except bigly, which actually is a word, coined in the 1400’s). Instead, he mused aloud whether he should yank NBC’s broadcasting license.

Gen. John Kelly couldn’t get to him in time to tell Trump he doesn’t have the legal authority to do that. Or perhaps Sarah Huckabee Sanders scolded Kelly that it’s disrespectful for a Gold Star family member to differ with a president. Regardless, the Tweet went out like a silent fart at church.

Still, under the broken-clock theory of logic, Trump occasionally (if unintentionally) strikes on a salient point. What if he could revoke FCC licenses? The question is less one of power than programming. Trump has floated the idea of equal air time before. But what would Republicans put in its stead? The GOP is terrific at bellyaching (Hannity, O’Reilly, Limbaugh), less so at belly laughs. 

Consider: Name one politically satirical TV show that is conservative. There was once Dennis Miller of Saturday Night Live fame, but his humor became so obscure even he didn’t get his jokes. Other right-tilting comedians include Tim Allen, Jeff Foxworthy, Adam Sandler and Larry the Cable Guy. But they joke about politics about as often as they do pedophilia.

Now consider the other side of the ledger. There are no fewer than seven big-budget comedy shows making Koch-like money skewering President Carrot Top: The Daily Show, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Real Time with Bill Maher, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Late Night with Seth Meyer and The Opposition with Jordan Klepper. And that doesn’t include Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update, The Trump Show on Comedy Central, or the increasingly leftward leanings of mainstream comedians Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon. All but Klepper were born during Democratic presidencies.

What gives? The most common answer I get is “Republicans aren’t funny.” But we know simply from the success of Republicans’ non-political entertainment that this isn’t the case. Sandler’s movies clear $83 million a flick. Allen’s Home Improvement ran for nine years and took more than a dozen Emmy Awards.

The issue, then, must be the material more than the emcees. And here’s where you find the comedic difficulty of conservatism.

Like journalism, comedy requires editorial freedom to work. It also requires watch dogging, critiquing and whistle blowing when the system goes off the rails — hardly a skill set sought in quarters that seek order or discipline, like the military, government or church.

Picture a Republican TV show that excoriates Trump for a boneheaded comment. Or teases the religious right. They’d be shut down in a week — by Republicans. When you take god or the president off the comedy menu, you’re left with a plateful of limp-noodle punchlines. And little to aim at besides people telling the jokes.

Which as been the sole stratagem left standing for the alt-right. A day after the Vegas shooting, Sean Hannity went on the air to play a montage of comedy shows that took a moment to recognize the massacre — and make a call for a change to gun laws.

Hannity vomited some nonsense about the left’s unquenchable desire to politicize American sadness.

But the shows were right, if only on a visceral scale. We are sad. And mad. And goofy and dumb and eager to address issues of the day, bigly (it means “to handle with great force, often emotionally”). So loosen up, Foxtards. There are literally millions to be made with just a dash of humor.

But here’s a tip. When you go looking for the show’s band leader, don’t bother Eminem. I don’t think he likes you.