99 Luftballons

Politics for Joe 2
99 Luftballons
August 25, 2010

I thought of the title for this one as I was preparing to write about the dubious practice of the trial balloon. Those who have fond memories of the pastel T-shirt with unstructured jacket era surely remember 99 Luftballons, the anthemic German-English pop song heartily sung by Nena walking through a war zone. The controversy at the time was that Nena had armpit hair. That was the 1980s. Ronald Raegan was simple-minded and so was the decade.

In some ways eras in North America are defined by the glowing aura of whomever is in the White House. The more complex the mind of the President, the more complex the era. Franklin Roosevelt is I truly do believe the one true genius ever elected as the President or Prime Minister of a major nation. Were FDR and Pierre Trudeau both at the same cocktail party, the conversation would gravitate towards the American. Plus FDR was noted as the inventor, shaker and pourer of cocktails that could bring an entire newsroom of reporters to their knees. And the problems he faced as President had an heavier mix than his planter’s punch: Depression, Fascism, Civil Rights, World War Two, a brawny and expansive Soviet Union, and the invention of the modern welfare state. He would never had found time for golf, even if he could have played.

Eisenhower however had time for golf. The old general loved simple and straight lines of attack and he had the perfect time for that strategy. Granted, developing and holding a de facto empire is not a simple thing, but America was so pre-dominant economically and militarily that it actually could hold together political and economic hegemony at that time. They are only just now realizing that time has passed.

But, to run through some of the rest quickly: Kennedy - complex (Civil Rights, Vietnam, Soviet Union, Berlin Wall, Cuba); Reagan - simple (what problems? Have a party and leave the bill for that strange little vice-president you never really liked); Obama - complex (space will not allow the listing).

Getting back to 99 Luftballons, I hadn’t realized how perfectly the lyrics fit until for curiousity’s sake I looked them up. Here, see a few lines for yourself:

99 Decision Street.

99 ministers meet.

To worry, worry, super-scurry.

Call the troops out in a hurry.

This is what we've waited for.

This is it boys, this is war.

The president is on the line

As 99 red balloons go by.

Now, Ontario is not about to go to war with anyone, but I’m noticing a disturbing trend in terms of sending out trial balloons like so many World War One zeppelins out over the cities and towns of this province and equally scaring the bejeezus out of everyone.

There has always been something about Dalton McGuinty I haven’t liked, but I’ve only been able to put my finger on it lately. I know that it stemmed from the time of the run-up to the 2003 provincial election when the then-Leader of the Opposition Liberals gave perhaps the shiftiest, dodgiest, most weaselly political interview I have seen to this day with Paula Todd, then of TVOntario’s late and sadly missed Studio 2. After it was over I emailed Paula and said, I think, ‘Well you certainly gave it your best show.’ She in turn wondered if the viewers had caught the slipperiness of the thin-lipped McGuinty. Seven years of his Premiership later, I guess not.

My first personal encounter with what I’ll call the Chicken Little style of government was through my association with TVO as a member, later vice-president of their Regional Advisory Council for Northwestern Ontario. It was in the lead-up to Greg Sorbara’s first budget as Minister of Finance. Town halls were scheduled across the province for the purpose of discussing a number of possible options, including selling TVO, selling the provincial liquor outlets, and raising fees on i.e. campsites.

If there is one thing that can get the educated portion of Ontario all in a tizzy, it is threatening TVO. At the time in 2003, TVO had over 600 members in Thunder Bay alone. That may not sound huge, but any marketer will tell you that a 0.5% return on a passive campaign is pretty good. Think about it. TVO really only does consumer marketing through its own in-house media: website and television. as obnoxious as pledge weeks can be, they certainly beat high rep commercials across other networks with Steve Paikin playing Old Spice Guy.

Now there’s a foreboding image.

I had a word with the Minister of Natural Resources, David Ramsay. It was his ill fate to be the Cabinet representative at this particular grumpy Town hall. The Cabinet must have drawn straws to see who would attend these affairs. The losers won, getting the spine-stiffening task of playing St. Sebastian in a sharp blue suit. The Thunder Bay event was well-attended - some 40 breakout tables of 9: 1 facilitator to every 8 agitators. I cornered Ramsay at the side of the stage just after the first wave of crowd was arriving.

I knew Ramsay slightly from the days when I worked at Queen’s Park, so I played the part of the cool, ‘Hey, I’m on your side babe’ Liberal. “So what the hell’s up with TVO?,” I asked in a conspiratorial whisper, complete with sideways shifting eyes. He seemed relieved that he hadn’t been attacked. “Let me put it to you this way,” he said, “There are some sacred cows in this province and TVO is one of them.” Granted, i was relieved. Granted, I’ve never really worried about a TVO sale ever since. Granted, I still don’t like how the network’s public affairs unit has been shrunk to the size of Steve Paikin’s chin.

More to the point, it told me that this entire consultative exercise was a sham. If there was no chance in hell that the Province was going to sell TVO to a Bronfman, Miss Piggy or David Radler why was that option even being discussed? I can’t even think of any rock-ribbed Tories who have seriously pushed for a TVO sale, and you’d be drummed out of the NDP caucus for even joking about it. Therefore, this was an idea generated by the government itself.

The sky is falling! The sky is falling! And Chicken Little releases a pretty red helium balloon with DOOM! written on it in bright white letters. And oh look dear, isn’t that a World War One zeppelin on the horizon.

We entered the era of the trial balloon. They’d been done before McGuinty certainly. Arguably, this notion of putting out a policy option as a leak and seeing which way the wind of public opinion blows the balloon; it has been around since at least the beginning of private polling.

But McGuinty takes the thing to a whole new level which I why I find it morally corrupt, or at the very least sneaky and cynical. The story ends up with Chicken Little revealed as the hero. When everybody shrieks at the balloon, Chicken Little steps up and says, ‘Never never shall I sell TVO. Never never shall you miss a show.’ Then everybody dances and they start serving cheesecake. Why? Their government and Premier Dalton Little listens! Hoorah.

I saw that recently the spectre of TVO and the Liquor Control Board being privatized was brought up again, by the portly current Minister of Finance Dwight Duncan. I don’t believe it for a second. We’ve discussed TVO to death already, and the LCBO is a cash cow. Did nobody ever watch an episode of The Sopranos? Who on Earth is insane enough to dump a monopoly on liquor in a province whose northern half is feeling increasingly desperate?

No, it’s yet another trail balloon. And they’ve done it before in non-financial portfolios, as with the proposed education reforms last year that would have taught little Joey, age 10, how to fellate a banana. (I know there are international readers of my work who have just looked at the previous sentence and said to themselves, “Nawwww.” Oh it’s true. It’s damn true.) The Premier got to put on his Super Chicken cape and squawk that he will save us all by shooting down this heinous attack on moral values.

By the way, the announcement that Ontario will now sanction Mixed Martial Arts cards may yet prove to be a trial balloon ready for shooting down, but I rather doubt it. There will be money to be made and the Toronto and Ottawa media are mewing like happy kittens at having another event to cover, another special advertising section to sell.

The puzzlement is that it such an unnecessary, cynical habit, to rankly upset and then soothe the electorate. It seems to me abusive husbands use much the same psychological tactics to cower their spouses. And I do wonder sometimes what a good and honest public servant like Mike Gravelle thinks about all this, deep down inside. I’ll let you know if I find out.

So. I had tried to think of a new tag line for Politics for Joe, but the more I tried the more I realized that the one I’ve been using for years will do just fine. From Patrick McGoohan’s legendary series, because we’re all just living in The Village, we quote The Prisoner ... Be seeing you.

For more great reading, be sure and visit the source of this column: Lake Superior News.

Simon Cowell, Christopher Hitchens, and Celebrity Has Its Benefits

Everybody sing! "You had a bad day..."

Inside Television 516
Publication date: 8-27-10
By: Hubert O’Hearn


I recently finished reading an advance copy of the paperback release of Chris Hedges’ 2009 Pulitzer Prize Winner, The End of Illusion. It is an immensely thoughtful book; a highly critical examination of American and by extension Western society. I recommend it to anyone who might be mildly curious regarding the near future of civilization.

The opening section delves into the modern cult of celebrity and how it is that an ever-increasing number of people are perfectly willing to go through bizarre humiliation on reality television in order to be celebrities. It is as though one is invited to a private planet on the planet where celebrities talk just with celebrities and drive celebrity cars and do celebrity things. They are richer than us, prettier than us, and most of all we want to be like them whereas they don’t want to be like us.

It’s on the whole a pretty ugly picture but the argument is well-founded and difficult to debate in opposition. It can be proven anecdotally. I would be willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that at some point both you and I have thought - fantasized perhaps - about going on a reality show. One gazes around the living room and wonders how the family would look on TV. I know that ours, before recent illness, would have made Everybody Loves Raymond look like Swedish depressive cinema.

Obviously taking this beyond an inner chuckle or two is not healthy. Hedges book came out before the notorious Balloon Boy incident, but that is a sterling example. This too, I am writing just as the story has broken in the UK that Simon Cowell’s long successful X Factor talent show that he is bringing to Fox next season ... has its vocals sweetened. Not just the full performances before a rapturous live audience, which is trickier to do, but the sweetening extends to the auditions. Everybody involved with the show swears up and down that the sweetening is done in editing and the judges base their opinions on what is in the room. But that’s not the point. The point is that even the auditioners are made better than the great unwashed us. Put as bluntly as possible: we suck worse even than the people who suck on the show because their sucking was made to sound better, whereas we would just suck; A Capella.

Cowell will have a bad day or three, but surely deep down he will be musing that controversy creates cash. I will almost guarantee you that ratings will go up as more people will tune in trying to ‘spot the cheating.’ One almost wonders if Cowell’s people intentionally leaked this, just so people like me would write about it and people like you would read about it. This is television. people are capable of doing Machiavellian plots. The modern Machiavelli abandoned politics long ago for media; that is where the power is after all.

The long-time reader will know that I’ve cast spears disguised as words at the cults of celebrity and pseudo-reality TV before. I’m as on the record as the Watergate Tapes. But I’ve recently been working on a theory that absolutely everything we ingest: food, air, culture and thought alike all have both positive and negative effects. Even a reformed smoker will likely admit that he felt generally happy and more relaxed while killing himself.

And so, even the cult of celebrity and its off-shoot the celebrity confessional have their good sides. Put it this way - knowing an awful lot about someone you will likely ever meet does expand one’s range of knowledge. How many people do you know as well, in terms of triumphs and tribulations, as Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan or Sandra Bullock? Family, yes. Close friends, certainly. A work colleague or two. A hundred people or so would you say? Even five hundred is a tidy little village but a rather small pool from which to draw experience and wisdom on the myriad problems life presents.

I thought of this while watching Christopher Hitchens give an interview to Charlie Rose on PBS about the former’s battle with cancer of the esophagus. I know I’ve written a lot about Hitchens lately, but I don’t apologize. If in fact he is soon to be missed, he will be sorely missed. I greatly admire those who can state an opinion with confidence and style and defend that opinion with flame and passion.

Being an eloquent man, Hitchens took the time given to him by a wisely uninterrupting Charlie Rose to muse about cancer, death and what it’s like. He said that one deludes one’s self by thinking that one is in control of the situation, whereas it is the tumor which really has the initiative. One reacts to what the tumor does.

He wants to be conscious at the moment of death and hopes to be able to make an observation at the moment preceding. A reporter to the end. But he also knows that may not be possible, given the painful state that death by cancer involves. And his fear? That he will not be able to write, for that is his recreation.

His recreation. There is meaning in that, for he did not say his job, career, or means of living. I won’t dwell on it, for that is a subject for another day, but just thinking about someone describing their skill as their recreation made for a time well absorbed. So would that moment were Hitchens not a celebrity and on a talk show, discussing his personal medical crisis? Possible, but it hasn’t before. So celebrity and its membership has its benefits. Be seeing you.

Hello Joe, Waddaya Know?

Politics for Joe: Number One

Hello Joe, Waddaya Know?

For this, the first of I hope many political columns to come, I had prepared to write a quite serious piece about the Harper Government’s decision to close the prison farms from the angle that because of climate change, we are actually going to need more people who know how to run a tractor, not less. You’ll be reading, I hope, that take on a present issue quite soon.

But I stopped myself literally as I was about to write the title. This is after all the first column by me to be published by Lake Superior News, for whose back I am truly grateful to piggy. As it presents itself as Your Trusted News Service, I thought about that word Trust. It does imply an honesty of communication - no hidden motives allowed.

Therefore, as this is a political column and therefore an opinion-based beast, if you’re going to trust it, you’re going to have to know precisely who’s behind it. I say this not with the effect of: ‘If you agree with me, you’ll like this; if you don’t, you won’t.’ Disagreement, if only to sharpen the edge of one’s contrary opinion, can make for healthy reading. The best political speech I ever heard in my life was delivered by Margaret Thatcher - the admiration pretty much ends there.

More to the positive point, my belief is that you need to know the tack of my political views in order vto assess the weight of what I discuss. Put more simply, if I write that Stephen Harper is running Canada lately like a Tammany Hall Mayor, is that an exception to my usual opinion of Harper, or is is the rule?

It’s the rule. I am not an admirer of this government, although I will say that Harper fought the good fight in attempting to persuade Obama and others that putting a ‘luxury tax’ on the major banks was a punishment on the honest designed to bail out the dishonest. Well done. But in general, he’s Boss Hogg with a blow dryer and a sweater.

This does not lead me to swoony enchantment with the Liberals either. To me the most interesting thing about the dog sniffing the public is doing with Michael Ignatieff is that they have been told repeatedly that Iggy is a really brilliant and admired guy because he has all kinds of really brilliant and admired ideas - but they don’t choose to discuss those ideas because many of them are directly contrary to general Canadian public opinion. He was a hawk on the Iraq War for example, which certainly must lead to awkward pauses in the conversation on those evenings when Ignatieff and Jean Chretien share a table.

By any sensible standard I should be a New Democrat. They are the only party to take the truly crucial issues of the environment and the danger of globalization prominently. Every party in both Canada and the U.S. has a wonderfully written policy about climate change - they pull it out of the drawer when asked to present their credentials. The Soviet Union had a constitution so lovely it would make your heart sing. Its principles were ignored as well.

Still, there is a remaining and lingering aura about the NDP that makes them seem like the CFL next to the Conservative and Liberal NFL. Great time, fine players - but when the going gets tough and the tough turn pro (passim Hunter Thompson) the pros are in the two elder parties. When Bob Rae, a former NDP Premier of Ontario for God’s sake, joined the Liberals it felt like a bar mitzvah or a confirmation. He seemed all growed up finally.

So I remain a dissatisfied left-of-centre non-card carrying Liberal - which sits me with most of the country. But i will call ‘em as I see ‘em.

Lastly, I’ve decided to call this column Politics for Joe as a bit of a tribute to my late father Don O’Hearn. You can hear a brief clip of his brief career in radio news here. Otherwise, he wrote a column on provincial politics (and believe you me, politics in Ontario can certainly be provincial) for some thirty years. He always wanted to write a book called Politics for Joe, where he explained to the reader how politics, which Churchill called the only game fit for adults to play, really works.

I guess I’m going to have to write the darn book for him, column by column.

In closing, let me know your thoughts and ...

Write if you get work...and hang by your thumbs

Your New TV Stars! Ted Danson and Ric Flair!

were I really good at Photoshop I'd have put an R after the G. But I'm lousy at photoshop and Canadians would be insulted by the misspelling. So it's Gray/Grey Pride. Damn funny picture though.

Inside Television 515
Publication date: 8-20-10
By: Hubert O’Hearn

I have to admit, there is something smugly satisfying in seeing facts justify one’s suspicions. There has been a column idea tramping around in the back of my head for the past couple of weeks. You see, I also archive these columns and other articles on my web blogs. (I’m not sure it’s morally right to give myself a free ad by putting a url here. Search Google - it’s all out there.) I started this back in March.

You do get a sense of your audience this way. Google supplies a very good basic package of analytics with their free blogging service. Incredibly simple to use too. But, except for a book review of The Tower, The Zoo and The Tortoise that hasn’t run yet in print, far and away the most popular thing I’ve written was a largely nostalgia-based column on TV Moms.

I was surprised and kind of relieved. Here I was thinking that I was perhaps under-servicing the youth market. I’d started cutting back on allusions to yesteryear (he says looking over at Eric Dowd who does just that every week from Queen’s Park) or when I have used them I’ve tried to explain them fully. To get all puffy and sociological sounding, I feared that the common cultural vocabulary had shifted forward.

Well, what the hell do I know? Nostalgia sells. There are still people - mostly Americans and Chinese (I don’t know why either) - hitting on that June column every day. So I was seriously wondering if the TV audience was in fact aging. It would make sense. people do tend to get stuck with a technology they understand. The elderly still play their records and generally speaking were the last generation to always have someone in the family who could hammer out a few numbers on the family piano, rather than the guitar.

So on Tuesday of this week I read that the median age for the Big Four American networks is - try and guess - fifty one. 51! After all these years, I have become a key demographic point. Even Fox, the self-described ‘young’ network has a median age of 44; which also interestingly is the median age for the American Idol audience.

What does this mean? Well, quickly and superficially I’d bet the farm on Shania Twain becoming the new judge on Idol. She’s 40. She’s hot. She’s in.

For sports, TNA Impact! is undoubtedly right in dusting off Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair and Kevin Nash and putting them front and centre. That’s who the TV audience grew up watching. They can’t see Ken Stabler go deep to win the game in the fourth quarter any more, but they can see Flair bleed all over the place.

Advertising agencies seem calm as ohming Buddhist monks about this demographic shift. Older people do have money, after all; and needs for hair products, pee products and Viagra ads sprouting like wild wheat on Prairie fields.

And the broadcasters are sanguine about it all too. From the AP story by-lined to David Bauder:
“You hear people saying, ‘Your audiences are older now and you don’t have the young people you used to have in the 1980s,’” said David Poltrack, chief research executive at CBS. “I say, ‘Yeah, the U.S. auto companies aren’t controlling 80 per cent of the market any more, either.’ ”

But in the larger dimension, there are opportunities and problems. Knowing that the audience is the same audience craved for from 1975 to 1985, look back at what the hit shows were then and re-work them now. Please don’t just re-make them. I have this tidal wave of fear that the rolling drum and charging surfer announcing the revival of Hawaii Five-O will rapidly lead to a disaster of flood relief proportion.

The new Law & Order (if such an adjective can be applied to the ancient order) set in Los Angeles and the new Jimmy Smits legal series Outlaw could both work. Why? Seems to me that Columbo worked pretty well in L.A. as did Dragnet as did L.A. Law which had a young star named, er, Jimmy Smits. Even from this distant hinterland of North America that I live in, I can see Ted Danson affixing a hairpiece right now and saying to Mary Steenburgen, ‘we’re back in the game honey!’

In the long run, it’s not good. Television will run out of audience at about the point the world runs out of oil. Not very damn long in other words. But by then, the ad executives, the TV executives ... and the oil executives of today all will have retired. So until then - party on!

In re-reading the previous I almost thought there was a moral in there. Then I remembered: television has no morals. Party on! Be seeing you.

Shuffle Up and Deal, Canadian Style

The Premier enters the game wearing his lucky hat

I’ve been developing an interesting little gallery for our dining room. As Sunday readers know, I have been reviewing books in addition to discussing the television industry on Fridays. Thus we cover the spread from the ridiculous (Friday) to the sublime (Sunday).

So on a whim, I started asking the authors of the books I really love to send two words - any two words - on paper over their signatures. Then the result is framed and displayed. It’ll be a nice bit of something for the heirs to squabble over. I’m looking at one right now from Vicky Coren, the professional poker player, television presenter and proper journalist for The Guardian - the world’s greatest newspaper in case I haven’t mentioned that before, which I have.

In Vicky’s book, For Richer for Poorer, she talks about how the poker pros never, ever thought that on-line gaming would take off ... until of course it did. Suddenly shadowy figures who lived in hotel rooms and went by nicknames like Texas Dolly (Doyle Brunson), The Poker Brat (Phil Hellmuth), Kid Poker (Danny Negreanu) or Huck Seed (Huck Seed - no really) found themselves courted by the on-line sites like PokerStars, UltimateBet and so forth seeking their endorsement. The television explosion followed - essentially infomercials for the sites seeking to relieve members of unwanted wallet fat.

Always one to spot a trend years after it occurs, we now see that the provinces of Bee Cee and Ontario want their taste, their slice, their house vigorish, their piece of the action. In 2012, Mister and Mrs. Ontario will be able to ruin their retirement savings by looking at Jack-Seven in the hole and hitting the All-In button. ‘Honey, I was feeling it! ...’

Serious commentators have and will say serious things about the repugnant nature of this decision. I’ll leave it up to them. As for myself, a little television fantasy will do.

The Premier’s salary is about $200,00 and a Cabinet Minister’s is about $165,000. Gentlemen, I think we’ve established the stakes. I would like to suggest a little televised game to properly launch this wonderful, upcoming tax grab (Surely, ‘necessary revenue opportunity’? - Ed.). The players? Nine in total. The government will put up three: The Premier, the Minister of Finance and a third Cabinet Member to be named at the Premier’s discretion. They will each put up one year’s salary. All of it. If they lose - well, welcome to the outcome of your policy decision. If they win- I’ll get to that.

Three pros: I suggest Negreanu, who is Canadian, Hellmuth who has won more World Series of poker bracelets than anyone, and the stolid, black-hatted figure of Chris ‘Jesus’ Ferguson. I include Ferguson just so we can see the scene of Premier Dalton McGuinty explaining the wisdom of on-line gambling to a man named Jesus - who will have nothing to say in return. The three pros will put up their own money in this cash game.

The final three players will be the three poorest people in Ontario, who the province will stake to $150,000 each. They and they alone can walk away from the table any time. For everyone else, it’s straight knockout, winner take all baby because that’s how capitalism works sweetheart.

In the unlikely event one of the politicians win, they have to keep the money. Yes, they have to keep the money and spend it on the biggest, gaudiest, most wasteful piece of grotesque statuary they can find and sit it on their front lawn. It will be their own Stanley Cup, and serve as a visual reminder to passers-by that this is where their money lives.

I’m sure Vicky would love to fly over to host the event. And it will have the biggest ratings since the old Wintario draws. Surely no one in Queen’s Park could object? Leadership is leadership by example after all. Be seeing you.

Anchors Away 3 - "If God could do the tricks we can do..."

The best ever movie about movies...

In some ways it seems light-hearted to refer to television news as a traditional medium alongside newspapers. There is still a good percentage of the population alive today who remembers the pre-television era, whereas The Times of London has been around since 1785. But the presentation of news on television has been so arresting and vivid over roughly sixty years that it deserves its place along with the newspaper. There were many brilliant, words written about the assassination of President John Kennedy; words both poetic and rippingly conspiratorial. Yet hearing the phrase ‘Kennedy assassination’ first fills the mind with the Zapruder film, not William Manchester or Jim Garrison.


Yet, it is television that evidently feels more threatened by new media, likely because they are similar as closely-matched cousins. Except one cousin has more toys than the other. Both television and the internet combine visual and audio outputs - the internet does print better. Television has had the call-in Larry King type show since the first microphone was tap tap tapped. But on the internet, your droning thoughts are not cut off by a screening producer. Everybody gets on the air as it were. Even in terms of visuals, the internet allows the user to change angles, views or commentary with a click. Television is lurching along at this - naturally through sports first, by following your favourite driver in a NASCAR race - but still has a long way to go.

When it comes time to discuss the newspaper industry and its survival, bear the above points about the internet in mind. I think we should deal with one medium at a time, to avoid clouding the issue and also because the newspaper industry will have to react to television’s changes, not the other way around.

Why is this? This is crucial for it sets up the remainder of my argument and recommendations. The lower technology always adapts to the higher technology, not the reverse. Live theatre by the time of England during the Victorian Era had become a place of spectacle, literally with pitched naval battles raging across flooded London stages. Along came the movies. Oddly enough, the two-dimensional, black and white movie screen did pitched naval battles better than the full colour live attraction; mostly because the stage was using little boats of the scale of Shetland Ponies, whereas the toy props the movie studio used looked like the full-size Intrepid or Bounty. Hence theatre dropped spectacle except in musical form and went for drawing room comedies and kitchen sink dramas. Things that fit the physical space of the stage and allowed the audience to feel as though it was ‘there’.

(Parenthetically - hence the parentheses - my favourite line in the movies comes from Richard Rush’s The Stunt Man. Peter O’Toole plays a half-mad movie director based by rumour on David Lean. He states that King Kong was only three foot six yet appeared to be a giant ape. O’Toole summarized before loping off, “If God could do the tricks we can do, He’d be a happy man.”)

I alluded to radio drama in the previous installment of this series. It thrived and was brilliant and achieved mind-cracking absurdity in comedy everywhere from Jack Benny’s imagined vault to The Goons and the sound of a sock filled with pudding thrown at a brick wall. (That was actually one of Spike Milligan’s script directions. He wanted precisely that sound.) But television had faces. Jackie Gleason’s eyes could widen, Perry Mason could raise an eyebrow, Mr. Spock could raise one hell of an eyebrow, and even pudding-filled socks could not compete. Granted, there is still comedy on radio (as in every drive-time show in existence), and some drama if you hunt it out - but as market share declined radio had to get out of the business. It retained its advantage in music, as music sounded better on radio.

So as a general working principle, television has to look at its competitor and plan like a football coach. What does the other side do absolutely better than we do? We don’t do that. What do we do absolutely better than they do? We concentrate on doing that.

The internet is much better, significantly stronger, than either television or newspapers on several counts. Television used to win on immediacy, but as Einstein taught us, time is relative. Having a crew on the scene in minutes is not immediate. A passer-by with a cell phone camera and a send button is immediate.

A second advantage is range. Any topic any where any time. For instance, if one is suddenly curious about the news from Luxembourg, can quickly find out that the country is cooperating in tracing Kim Jong-Il’s slush fund. Television is limited in its range by time; newspapers by space. Banking authorities in Luxembourg have to fight their way in (one imagines umbrellas housing sub-machine guns or lasers).

Finally, there is the advantage mentioned earlier - the consumer can have equal voice to the producer. Indeed, through posting or blogging, the consumer can be the producer. A Letter to the Editor seems positively quaint in comparison, perhaps because it is quaint in comparison. If the art of news is conversational - the premise we began with - with the internet the user can change the topic and/or deliver a monologue or editorial any time he or she wants.

- TO BE CONTINUED -

(I had originally expected to have finished this series off in three columns, but I am mindful that reading for very long on a screen is tiring. So we will deliver the Grand Unified Theory ... next time. In the meantime why not find a good book to read?  Please share on Twitter or Facebook and I love to read your comments. Be seeing you - H)

Anchors Away 2 - How News Media Will Survive

My kind of town, Luxembourg is ...

My previous column on news anchors and news media in general brought a surprisingly large on-line response in terms of page views. Apparently my opinions are quite well-received in Luxembourg. So in part thanks to those kind people who after all put the lux in Benelux, I’m going to expand on that column. There has been so much debate on the future (if any) of news media that it seems wrong to not fully flesh out my opinions. I’ve been writing a television column for eleven years, so my thoughts have been fully nurtured and evolved; and besides, someone might actually agree with me. maybe even someone with the power to do something about it.

The one point that media executives should rest easiest about is the one that they most worry about. Extinction. Will the internet replace newspapers, magazines, television, radio, movies and pretty much every other form of communication other than the note passed to Sally Curlicue by Jimmy Jeroboam in Grade Three written in invisible ink. Oh wait, Jimmy probably just texts her anyway, so scratch that.

But - I don’t believe that the internet will totally replace print. I have two good reasons for that assumption - the livelier one instinctive, the drier based on historical evidence. Let’s start off dry and get lively later, which curiously enough has been the daily motto of most great newsmen.

Do art forms ever really vanish? The Greek plays of the 6th century BC are still performed as are songs played on instruments rudimentary to human civilization. Opera may wax or wane depending on nation or culture, but it is definitely not vanishing. Movies did not eliminate live theatre; in fact the more under-stated acting that the large screen welcomed ended up improving theatre. Based on the kind of movies he produced, Jack Warner had more to do with the development of the Method than Konstantin Stanislavsky; and I’m not so sure Jack Warner could have even spelt Stanislavsky.

And on and on. Radio did not replace movies nor did television replace radio (I’ll get to radio drama in the next column). Magazines did not replace newspapers and rock did not eliminate jazz.

‘Aha!’, you say believing you have a hole card that will beat me. ‘What about music? The LP is dead and who buys CDs except the elderly as Christmas presents for the kids?’ I’ll give that argument its due when it is proven correct. There are still LPs - ask Green Day or Radiohead - there are just less of them. If the music industry gleaned to the fact that there actually would be an audience out there for a product like the old ‘concept albums’ of the 1960s or 70s (Tommy, Aqualung etc.) with packaging that people would actually want ti own and display, there will be more of them. And the difference between an LP, CD or DVD is more an evolutionary scenario than an actual difference in form or content. Although granted DVDs can have visual content.

So, there is the historical argument. People and buildings may crumble into dust, but invent a popular art form and your imagination’s child becomes a god as immortal as Zeus. Nice to know.

And are newspapers and television newscasts art forms? Certainly. Even cursory observation bears that out. Are there elements of design? Yes. Are words and images chosen in order to impart meaning? Absolutely. Is not an editorial a soliloquy, a front page a theme and if there is an evening newspaper or newscast that didn’t have an interest in appealing to an audience then it certainly didn’t live long in the marketplace. (And yes art requires an audience in order to exist. Space is full of light but even light doesn’t seem to exist until it smacks into something and makes it shine.)

By my logic then - and I was schooled at the Vulcan Academy of Logic - news media is composed of art forms. So the lesson or the template to be derived by harried publishers or managing producers, racing about in the same mad way as my border collie was ripping through the house earlier tonight, trying to figure out what the hell to try next - that template can be found by looking at other arts and how they managed to survive.

I’ve already hinted at the answer. They largely survived by adapting elements of their new competitor into their own format. I mentioned the effect that movies had on live theatre. Acting changed, and so did writing. Because movies required camera movement to maintain visual interest, and because movies’ trump over theatre was the ability to instantly change settings, scenes were shorter in the movie theatre than in the live theatre. As such, dialogue became shorter, sharper and peppier. Theatre had to adapt. Effectively, there is a direct line from The Jazz Singer to David Mamet.

Book publishing to me is the classic adaptive art form. As an industry, publishing turns into a publicist for its competitors seeking public interest and dollars. Whatever the public shows an interest in, someone’s going to turn out a book about it.

So how can news media learn from their fellow artists. As they used to say on the radio, tune in next time. Be seeing you.

(Please share these columns and please share your comments. I always appreciate your opinions. - H)

Anchors Away?

Since the announced retirements of news anchors Lloyd Robertson from CTV News and Kevin Newman from Global, there has been an interesting series of articles in Canada’s major papers, all with a similar theme. Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary and Thunder Bay have all had their readers chewing over the idea that television news needs a re-think and the days of the powerful anchor are dead.

As the regular readers of this column know, to paraphrase the late Vince Lombardi there are three things I am passionate about: God, my Family and the News. (And Liverpool FC, but that’s a subject for another day.) So it will come as no shock that I feel duty-bound to add to the debate.

I don’t think the days of the anchor are done, for reasons I’ll quickly get to. But I do want to cede one debating point to my print opponents. They are absolutely correct when they say that there is no anchor as powerful as Walter Cronkite was, and Canada’s anchors have never has similar influence. Mind you, events made Cronkite into Cronkite. He was the one in the studio when John Kennedy died and he happened to be the anchor and news editor when CBS News finally turned on the Vietnam War in reporting on the Tet Offensive and its aftermath. Full kudos to CBS for doing it first, but the mood of the United States was already turning strongly against the war and in many ways the major media followed rather than led public opinion.

There will not be as powerful a grouping as say Cronkite and Huntley-Brinkley were to the 1960s or Rather, Brokaw and Jennings were to the 1990s. The simple truth is that there are a lot more news shows with anchors than there used to be and it’s hard to stand out in a crowd.

And yet, there is still a strong role to be played by the right person. If pressed to express a concise definition of what a good general news medium (newscast or newspaper) should be about, it would be this: the consumer will be suitably informed and capable of forming an opinion regarding whatever will be the important discourse of the next day.

That definition is left intentionally broad. Important discourse is as varying as public mood, which as a thousand computer programmers attempting to predict the stock market ruefully know is completely unpredictable. The big stories - war, peace, oil vomited into the Gulf of Mexico - are obvious. But Michael Jackson had been reduced to the perception of a burned-out creepy guy - then he died and became as beloved as Mickey Mouse. I don’t know why anyone cares about the large-bummed Kardashians and neither do you. Point is, there are people who do care these things, it is part of their discourse and therefore they are part of news.

So, given that the public cares about things that news editors may think are utterly trivial; and news editors care about other things that they wish to enhance or inject into public discourse, news is therefore a conversational medium. The medium offers up what it believes to be the consumer’s needs, but the medium must also satisfy the consumer’s wants, or else it’s time to fold up shop and go into Public Relations to earn one’s keep.

The crux of it though is in that word ‘conversational.’ A conversation implies communication between or among individuals; actual people with actual voices and actual personalities. This is why I have become a robotic drone on my view that newspapers that will survive the non-terminal  shrinkage of their marketplace share will be those papers that breathe with the thoughts and opinions of their writers, provided those writers also have excellent reporting skills. Every style sheet known to man or wire service should be burnt.

For television, it’s actually easier. While the editorial choices of what stories to present and how to present them will always vary from newsroom to newsroom, the fundamental nature of television requires a human voice narrating the story. Whether the story is presented as a mini-documentary or Rip Trenchcoat standing in front of the White House, the visuals require words.

Finally, fill in for me the final word of this phrase: People are creatures ? No, not the night, unless Alice Cooper is reading this. Habit. We like familiarity and therefore a familiar voice is a comfort especially when the news itself is hard as a cast iron frying pan.

The late Don Hewitt, creator of 60 Minutes and pupil of Edward R. Murrow coined the term anchor. I do believe it shall prove as durable as the nautical device from which it borrowed its name. Be seeing you.