Harry Shearer tag:correspondents.theatlantic.com,2009-05-01:/harry_shearer//24 2009-10-27T20:59:06Z Le Blog Movable Type Enterprise 4.24-en Should We Launch a War on Immigration? tag:correspondents.theatlantic.com,2009:/harry_shearer//24.29162 2009-10-27T18:23:43Z 2009-10-27T20:59:06Z Harry Shearer immigration.JPGLast week Britain was convulsed in a media frenzy.  Unlike the one in the United States the week before, this controversy did not center around an event which, even if it had been true in every particular, still would have legitimately been a major news story only for broadcasters in Colorado. 

The UK fracas was over the invitation to the leader of the British National Party, Nick Griffin, to appear on the BBC's prime-time television debate program, "Question Time", and over his treatment on Thursday's broadcast. Griffin and his party are just to the right of Pat Buchanan, just to the left of Americans who kill census takers and scrawl "FED" on their corpses.

The other participants on the program (from the three mainstream parties), and the moderator, questioned Griffin relentlessly on issues of race and immigration, the matters on which the BNP has built its small inroad into the political system, two British seats in the European parliament.  On race, he's marvelously foolish, referring to white English people as "the aborigines of this country."   

Immigration, though, is the issue on which Griffin can be more explicit, less cagey. You can't go into a Starbucks or a fashion shop in London and be waited on by a Brit these days. In almost every instance, the smiling face handing you your caffeine or your frock is a young woman from Poland. The Labor government underestimated the amount of immigration from Eastern Europe once it entered the EU by a factor of ten. Youths from African and Caribbean countries are blamed for the introduction of "knife culture", and it doesn't mean a performance of "Aida" where the tenor carries a blade. Griffin wants an end to all this, a notion which, if followed to its logical conclusion, would require the expulsion of the royal family, German to its last pfennig.

The next night, my wife and I and a couple of friends were discussing the Griffin brouhaha over dinner. My wife is a British immigrant to the U.S.; my parents--after much trying, and without being able to bring along the rest of their families, who were left to die in Europe--were Polish and Austrian immigrants to America. There we were, discussing "the immigration problem." And what struck me is that the folks  in Britain talk about this matter as if it's a British problem, just as Buchanan's pitchfork-toters, now morphed into Glenn Beck's teabaggers,  talk about immigration-related problems as if it's an American thing.  In point of fact, most Western industrialized nations, notably Australia, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, are wrestling with what they conceive to be their own, particular "immigration problem"--Muslims in Amsterdam and the Paris suburbs, Indonesian "asylum seekers" taking leaky boats to the Aussie coast. And, in each country, a little Nick Griffin is making a little political hay.

What's striking is that none of these governments acknowledges, in these long-running, rancorous debates, that the issue is anything other than a particular, localized one, and, further, that none of these governments seems to have discovered and implemented a  solution--a quota, a points system, an electric border fence--that works, that can be adapted or shared by its brethren. In this, the immigration problem resembles nothing so much as the drug problem.  

What we need, obviously, is a War on Immigration.

Photo Credit: Flickr User swanksalot
]]> Who Benefits from the Great Health-Care Debate? tag:correspondents.theatlantic.com,2009:/harry_shearer//24.27547 2009-09-30T19:36:01Z 2009-09-30T20:48:10Z Harry Shearer 3917883976_6b2dee7dcf.jpgAfter a couple of weeks in London and one in New Orleans, I'm back in L.A., immersed in the American media culture (!) once more.  The health-care debate, which, for better or worse, would have been concluded in about two or three months in any other Western democracy, grinds on, positions being repeated pretty much as they were before the big Town Hall scare of August. 

About all that's changed is that the current wave of health-reform commercials inundating cable news seems to have shifted over to the pro-whatever-the-current-bill-is side. That, after a summer of anti-whatever-the-current-bill-is-not spots, leads me to one conclusion: The true beneficiaries of the drawn-out health-care-reform debate are not the doctors, nor the drug or insurance companies, and surely not the patients. The true beneficiaries are the broadcasters.

If I were a conspiratorially-minded gent, I would even suggest that that fact explains the timing of the Obama Administration's push. Sure, they had other possible priorities -- the climate-change bill would seem to have a more pressing deadline, figuring out a plausible strategy in Afghanistan could have come sooner in the year to suit some folks.

But this is a non-election year. Broadcasters are suffering, with no welter of campaign commercials to buffer them against the disappearance of car spots and bank spots and department store spots (remind me again what department stores were).  So this is the perfect year to stage an endless debate, the major product of which is hundreds of millions of dollars in television commercials. 

Not since the mandated digital changeover have broadcasters received such a lovely gift from their federal government.  

(Photo: Flickr/Andrew Aliferis)
]]> Another Kind of Public Option tag:correspondents.theatlantic.com,2009:/harry_shearer//24.24631 2009-09-08T12:58:53Z 2009-09-08T18:31:02Z Harry Shearer It's on my mind now because, aside from having it on in my hotel room, it was the target a couple of weeks ago of a broadside attack by the head of its chief competitor, Sky News.  Speaking at the Edinburgh Television Festival, James Murdoch (son of Rupert and a chip off the old bludgeon) revived his dad's twenty-year old broadside at the same venue against the same target.  The BBC, James complained, was unfair competition.  A Murdoch complaining of unfair competition, of course, is like a crocodile complaining of reptilian behavior.

The complaint by young Mr. Murdoch, though, echoed the accusations of those who oppose a health-care public option: a government-run non-profit enterprise makes it hard for profit-making outfits to compete.  The BBC example is instructive.  It is, of course, not government-run (see the row between the BBC's news division and the Labour government during the run-up to the Iraq War, a row whose flames were fanned by, surprise, Rupert Murdoch), although the government does collect the license fee that funds it.

And Americans should disabuse ourselves of the antiquated view of the BBC (gleaned from all those PBS reruns) as some gold standard of television generally; two hours of the daytime output of its main channel would bring you right up to date with the Beeb's capacity to generate benign trash.

CNN.JPGBut, when you want to understand the impact of the particular public option that is BBC News (and, specifically, its news channel), just compare Murdoch's Sky News and CNN International--which do compete with BBC's output--with Murdoch's Fox News and CNN's domestic product--which don't.   The former are, by any standard, more serious, more balanced, more--to boil it down--grown up.  In fairness, not only the competition with the Beeb is responsible for the relative sanity of Sky (though it does, in the Murdochian mold, play more downmarket); British communication law has a requirement that news broadcasts be, here's a twist, fair and balanced.

But CNN, which goes head-to-head with BBC's World news channel in global competition, is a good couple dozen IQ points above what CNN offers its American audience.  And it's been that way for a while, which leads one to assume that Time Warner can make money that way, too, or the International channel would long since have vanished.

The public option makes for better choices?  Where have I heard that before?

Photo Credit: Flickr user hyku

]]> Britain to America: More is Better tag:correspondents.theatlantic.com,2009:/harry_shearer//24.21216 2009-07-13T22:04:54Z 2009-07-13T22:45:28Z Harry Shearer
Then there are the differences.  The one that's particularly attracted my notice is the difference between the British and American newspaper industries--namely, the Brits still have one.   In the last month, the biggest UK news story--a rolling expose of the expenses run up by Members of Parliament but paid for by taxpayers--flew off the front pages of the nation's only remaining daily broadsheet, The Telegraph.  This past week, another major story--about the alleged rampant use of wiretapping to listen in on the messages and conversations of political and media celebs--was hurled by one newspaper, The Guardian, at the top management of another, the News of the World.  In other words, an old-fashioned newspaper war.

We all know how bad things are for American newspapers--the closing down of dailies in Denver and Seattle, the thinning (both in page width and page number) of the proud East Coast monarchs, the constant near-death experiences of the Tribune properties.  Look at any big-city daily on a Saturday, and you'd think the world had run out of news, or the forests of Canada had run out of trees.

In London, the Saturday editions plop on your porch with the weight of a white paper on Afghanistan, except that they're full of color magazines and free offers.  You think: Did I drink too much Friday night and sleep all through Saturday?  They look like American Sunday papers, fat and overstuffed, even with news.  Then Sunday comes around, and it all happens again, more heft, more color magazines, more scary stories saved up for brunchtime.

The UK newspapers have maintained a quaint tradition of competition between the daily and Sunday editions of the same nameplates, under the same owners.  

I asked a British friend about this phenomenon, of the lack of death rattles from (what used to be) Fleet Street, and he said, calmly, "I guess we're still a nation of newspaper readers."  In fairness, the UK has no Drudge or Huffpo, no scrappy news aggregator drawing all the hits.  If you're online in Britain, you get your news from the papers' (or the BBC's or SKy News') websites.  

But one can't help comparing the plenitude of stuff--gossip, ads, supplements, offers, even news--delivered all through the weekend, by both the classy titles and the downmarket tabloids.  Comparing them to the wan offerings on Saturdays in the states, one has to wonder if our British cousins are teaching Americans an ironic lesson: when it comes to newspapers, more is better.
]]> In Defense of Sarah Palin, Kind of... tag:correspondents.theatlantic.com,2009:/harry_shearer//24.19308 2009-06-12T21:59:09Z 2009-06-12T22:14:09Z It ill behooves a humorist to take a public position on another comic's jokes, so I'll just say that people, like Chris Matthews, who abjure Letterman's "knocked up" joke on grounds that the language is unacceptably rough must have missed... Harry Shearer
But, as to Sarah Palin's response: I'm gratified to see one politician who sees fit to avoid the current fad of pretending to have a sense of humor.   Who hasn't gagged as Senators and other supposed dignitaries have trooped onto the stages of Dave, Jay, Conan, Jon, Steve, and SNL to demonstrate their "good to have a beer with" credentials?  I will never forget being on Bill Maher's old "Politically Incorrect" when Sen. Orrin Hatch showed up with a memorized sheaf of witticisms cranked out by his staff, and delivered each one the way the morning paper is delivered: with a plop, usually ending up wet.  Like other pols on the same mission, Sen. Hatch made only two mistakes: he had his jokes crafted by political, rather than comedy, professionals, and he uttered them with all the comic timing of a C-SPAN speech. 

Governor Palin, on the other hand, stood proud as someone incensed by joking.  I for one think our politicians should have an adversarial relationship with humor, and vice versa.  That's healthy for the country.

I'm also glad to see Governor Palin attacking Dave's japes for contributing to a serious problem; "no wonder young women have such low self-esteem", she said of joking about sexual indiscretions with minors.  I therefore anticipate with great eagerness the governor's next assault against a social force that causes young women to have low self-esteem, namely, the numberless pageants where, from age 4 upwards, such women are persuaded by their parents and other elders into tarting up and parading in states of garish overdress and unbecoming undrerdress before judges I'd trust around young women a lot less than Dave.

Carrie Prejean, for example, gained  a national platform for her views purely because such eminences judged her most toothsome in a bathing suit.  I'm sure Governor Palin recognizes the damage that does to the self-image of young women who aspire to be acknowledged for what they know or what they can do, not how well they can pad out the top of a swimsuit.  

Oh, wait.  

Never mind.
]]> The Mainstream Media Keep Getting New Orleans Wrong tag:correspondents.theatlantic.com,2009:/harry_shearer//24.18678 2009-06-03T04:53:01Z 2009-06-03T05:18:20Z Harry Shearer denounce it in the New York Times), I saw the moment as more akin to what you do when a stranger hideously attacks your loved one: unless you're Newt Gingrich (who famously demanded a divorce from his first wife on her cancer bed), you don't abandon her.  You cleave to her, and defend her.

As I watched New Orleans flood, from my birth home in Los Angeles, then read the dispatches appearing over the next few weeks in the remarkably reborn New Orleans Times-Picayune, a strange awareness arose.  The national media placed the "Katrina" story in a couple of handy templates: a natural disaster story, and a story of the suffering of African Americans at the hands of an unfeeling Republican administration.  What local media--also including WWL Radio and WWL and WDSU TV--reported was that flooding, and suffering, extended far and wide throughout the metropolitan area, to rich and poor neighborhoods, black and white neighborhoods, urban and suburban neighborhoods.  And they began, as October turned to November, to report results of on-the-ground investigations, by distinguished engineers working pro bono, that showed the levees hadn't been overtopped, that Katrina was not what flooded New Orleans (even though it whacked the Mississippi Gulf Coast), that the floods were triggered by more than four dozen breaches in levees and floodwalls that had been poorly designed and constructed under the exclusive jurisdiction of the United States Army Corps of Engineers.  US taxpayers, in short, had paid billions over four decades to flood New Orleans.

We're almost four years on, and national media reporters still like to fly into the city, root about for a new change on the familiar story, and jet back out.  Latest example: this, from the Los Angeles Times (yes, complaining about accuracy in that paper is like regretting that skunks don't emit Chanel #5).   High up in the story, the reporter, who's doing a piece about supposed continuing controversy over whether the city's footprint should be shrunk and how that controversy is "tak(ing) on a new racial dimension", writes this:

"Immediately after the storm, many residents, often African Americans, worried that low-lying flood-ravaged neighborhoods would be left unbuilt and turned into wetlands."

Utilizing an almost Cheneyesque skill at conflation and elision, the reporter leaves in the reader's mind the notion that those "flood-ravaged neighborhoods", like the Lower Ninth Ward, are all "low-lying".  Perhaps the reporter, like so many out-of-towners, misinterprets the name of the district; in fact, the "Lower" in the name refers to the neighborhood's location on the river, downriver from the French Quarter and Garden District (the latter of which is Uptown).  In fact, many parts of the city that flooded during "Katrina" had never before flooded.  They weren't low-lying, but lying in the direct path of water unleashed by catastrophic levee breaches.

And, though New Orleans is in the midst of racial controversies, they tend to circulate around the legacy of Mayor Nagin, the battles between the new city council and the Mayor's functionaries, and the issues surrounding health-care and housing for the working poor.  

One of these days, a few years on, someone in the mainstream media--assuming it still exists--will win a Pulitzer for discovering what New Orleanians have known since August 30, 2005.  
]]> The Man of Ideas tag:correspondents.theatlantic.com,2009:/harry_shearer//24.18639 2009-06-02T15:45:10Z 2009-06-02T16:02:51Z Harry Shearer
And now, back out of power and back into the media, Speaker Gingrich (as likes to be called) is again marketing himself as a man of ideas.  "Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less" sprang from Gingrich's fertile idea farm last summer, and spread to the McCain campaign.  "Twelve American Solutions for Jobs and Prosperity" is a new campaign we'll surely hear more about.  

Yet, in the past three weeks, the man of ideas has launched stunningly vituperative campaigns against two women: Nancy Pelosi and Sonia Sotomayor.  One would expect the ex-speaker to disagree with these people, but the ideas he's been propagating have been, in the cast of Pelosi, the ideas that she's "disgusting" and "trivial", and, in the case of Sotomayor, that she's a "racist".  He demanded that Pelosi resign and that Sotomayor withdraw her nomination.

Apparently, when you're running a non-campaign campaign for the leadership of the Republican party, those are what pass for Ideas.  What would Deming and Drucker think?
]]> Blame the Customer. It Always Works. tag:correspondents.theatlantic.com,2009:/harry_shearer//24.18224 2009-05-25T15:29:53Z 2009-05-25T15:53:51Z Harry Shearer
I'm writing from a hotel room in Manhattan.  Just outside my door, the management has thoughtfully provided a copy of today's New York Times...free of charge.  Downstairs in the breakfast room, the Times and other papers are available, equally gratis.  When I get to LaGuardia Airport later this week, free copies of all the papers will be available in the shuttle lounges (if you're flying to Boston or D.C.).  When I made a practice of attending political conventions, the papers (and newsmagazines) fell over themselves trying to get me and other attendees to read their product, flogging it gratis at us from every place they could stand a cardboard kiosk.  

My point?  The news industry has long trained many of us to regard its product as something of at least negotiable value.  You pay for it if you have to, but if you're in the right place at the right time it's free.  The industry's business model regarded us, the readers and viewers, as packages of eyeballs to be sold to the real customers, advertisers.   Many news-industry pundits say readers were trained to regard papers as objects with a price, and the Internet interrupted that relationship.  Any USA Today reader knows that's not true; that paper is as freely available in hotels as soap or plastic laundry bags.  

The problem is that the customer hasn't changed; the business model has.  Advertisers have decided our eyeballs can be targeted more precisely and efficiently elsewhere, and the news industry is frantically trying to shift the financial burden to us, the consumers.  Maybe it will work.  

The music industry could have returned to its earlier practice, of offering product lines to people with more money than time--i.e., non-kids.  It chose rather to spend a decade attacking its dwindling customer base.  The news industry, having trained many of us to be dutifully packaged for sale to advertisers, now views us--at least, those of us who read our news online--as the parasitic enemy, to be suddenly retrained to pay for what we consume.   
Had publishers had any foresight, they might, in the past, have regarded the freewheeling mergers of, let's say, the department-store industry with slightly less equanimity, since a multilplicity of such stores was the bedrock of their advertising business.  Perhaps they were blinded by their own affection for monopoly status.   But lamenting the short-sightedness of newspaper publishers is a job best left to out-of-work journalists.

I won't pretend I know what will save the news industry, although a less credulous, less trivial product wouldn't hurt.  But the example of the record industry suggests that the customer should be wooed, not punished.
]]> What to Remember on Memorial Day tag:correspondents.theatlantic.com,2009:/harry_shearer//24.18174 2009-05-23T19:01:44Z 2009-05-23T19:17:20Z Harry Shearer When I was a kid, RJR Tobacco used to brag about sending free cartons of Camels to our troops overseas.  Support takes many forms.  
If our troops ever figure out just what these kinds of support really mean, anybody without a basement better tie a yellow ribbon to their butt and kiss it farewell..
]]> Dumbing Us Down tag:correspondents.theatlantic.com,2009:/harry_shearer//24.17059 2009-05-14T22:00:00Z 2009-05-15T13:32:56Z Harry Shearer
So, I began to wonder, to what country did all three criteria actually apply?  Bingo.  Pakistan.  Had nukes, had cross-border wars with its neighbor India and--most chillingly--its ISI intelligence service had long nurtured the Taliban, long after we stopped funding the mujahadeen in Afghanistan.   Except, by declaration of President Bush, Pakistan was our friend in the GWOT, and so wouldn't be subjected to the dire consequences of the Three Criteria.

Yet, in the ongoing argument about the Iraq War, now almost sure to outlast the war itself, both supporters and opponents have been complicit in one great illusion: the insistence on discussing Iraq in isolation.  No comparison to other countries, like Pakistan, no discussion of consequences for neighboring countries, like Iran (except late in the game).  The only hint in the whole discussion that other countries mattered in this matter was the airy assurance of the neo-cons that "victory" in Iraq would "democratize" the Middle East.  Presto, vote-o.

Highly complicit in this  compartmentalization of Iraq was the Washington-New York press corps.  They bought the Administration's focus on Iraq as the center of the known universe, and fought--when they did fight--the rhetorical battle on that constricted field.   Critics allowed onto the air or the op-ed pages struggled to downplay Iraq as the center of the GWOT with occasional glancing references to forgotten old Afghanistan, but none to Saudi Arabia or Egypt or, for that matter, Hamburg---areas far more central to the history of 9/11.  
Pakistan, when it was mentioned at all, was our hardy, if momentarily undemocratic, ally in the war.  

A few newspapers have long since apologized for the addled credulity almost all the media displayed over the Administration's kabuki intel.  None have apologized, and none will, for buying into the  Administration's world view, because that narrow focus played  to journalism's own tunnel vision.  They overcompensate for that error now with hyperventilating over the sudden discovery that Pakistan has no intention of moving a large part of its huge army away from the Indian border to fight against a Taliban that large parts of its intelligence and military apparatus still support.  

At the same time, back in Iraq, the former Sunni insurgents--with their American paychecks running out and the promised  melding into the army and police forces not forthcoming--are increasingly reverting to insurgency.  The place is de-surging.  

One way the modern American media dumb us down is by their insistence on being able to focus on only one story, one country at a time.  Pakistan is this week's missing white girl.  
Have you seen Zardari?




]]>