Great job Zachary! We lost a lot of great people at The Journal. It seemed to me that people wanted their news immediately and didn't really care whether we had the police report or were waiting for a source to call, they wanted it now. Also, there was a endorsed pay check signed by Samuel Clemens that was framed and hung in the publisher's office that disappeared one day. Sam's brother, Orrin Clemens was the Journal's editor.
So howcome you didn't say anything when I was emailing Sullivan at the start of the Covid fun with you on the email list? You guys weren't asking any of the hard and necessary questions; you were still doing arts reporting with your staff of no one. And I wrote to (at) Sullivan saying look, look what's going on here, we have an AWOL congressman who says he's a big rural-broadband guy and meanwhile our ed systems are falling apart because no one's got bandwidth, we're not getting real answers out of the local tertiary hospital, what the fuck with our child state health director, we can't even find out how well or poorly prepped we are for this, because we have a rotted-out shell of a Gannett victim for a local paper and the most substantial reporting we have comes from college students. And I don't see your voice anywhere in that set of emails. Nor did you follow up on those stories.
News > elegies when we have no newspapers. Leave the elegies to the nonfiction workshop.
My favorite McChesney review, written, surprisingly enough, not by me. This is about Telecommunications, Mass Media, & Democracy:
Here come the Martian Marxists
Reviewed in the United States on September 10, 2010
and I wouldn't be surprised if they're riding on their Martian bike.
This book is a sad joke and a frivolous, ideologically-poisoned waste of thousands of hours of archival research. McChesney, whose reputation as the academic pundit King of All Media is based on the rickety foundation of this misbegotten work, imagines himself to be doing muscular, old-school political economy, and this, I surmise, is what licenses him to write his narrative in a hermetic cultural vacuum. But that's messed up on both counts.
What do I mean by cultural vacuum? Click through to the "Search Inside" function and enter "jazz" as a search term. You'll get exactly two hits. Two. This is . . . problematic for a book about broadcasting in the Jazz Age. That's because people never shut up about jazz and its implications for broadcasting. Jazz, you see, signified at the time as evil set to melody: it was gangsta rap, death metal and punk rock rolled into one. But McChesney doesn't want to talk about that, because all of his bourgeois reformers were on the wrong side of history where jazz was concerned. But if you were against commercialism in 1928 through 1935, you were also against jazz, because it was catchpenny commercial garbage in league with the Devil, as opposed to the philanthropically-subsidized cultural spinach that it is today.
Now run a search on vaudeville: One solitary hit.
Now run a search on Tin Pan Alley: Zip. Zero. Nada. Sweet Fanny Adams. Not a sausage. Mayor McCheese has never heard of America's gargantuan, world-conquering, popular music industry, not its signature weapon of conquest, which we would call payola but was then known as song plugging.
This means that his book is worthless as a work of political economy, because vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley were major cultural and economic institutions that exerted unparalleled influence on the evolution of radio programming. You may as well write a history of cooking without reference to farming and fire.
Other things missing from McChesney's dire saga about the corporate theft and desecration of the airwaves: Programs. There are four hits for Amos 'n' Andy (virtually unavoidable) but otherwise the Bobcat really doesn't want to go near any specific radio shows, especially not popular ones, because that would raise all kinds of difficult questions about the social class of radio listeners and their cultural preferences. For McChesney, early programming was bluntly divided into two simple categories: "commercial" (bad) and "educational" (good). This is an ideal way to spin things if you're looking to persuade academics that you're preaching true Gospel. Guess which class of programs they like better.
There are no actual listeners in this book. "The people," on whose behalf McChesney presumes to speak, are not consulted. Which is strange, because early radio listeners were a vocal and opinionated lot who wrote zillions of letters of protest and praise about what they were hearing, and sent them to magazines, newspapers, federal officials and broadcasters. McChesney isn't going to touch this deep and vital vein of evidence, because not one word of it supports his melodramatic story of mustache-twirling top-hatted villains stealing the family farm of the airwaves.
I've got lots more epistemological muck to rake here, but I gotta go to work now. Later.
Great job Zachary! We lost a lot of great people at The Journal. It seemed to me that people wanted their news immediately and didn't really care whether we had the police report or were waiting for a source to call, they wanted it now. Also, there was a endorsed pay check signed by Samuel Clemens that was framed and hung in the publisher's office that disappeared one day. Sam's brother, Orrin Clemens was the Journal's editor.
Thanks for writing about this tragedy. We need to start calling for public funding of local newspapers.
So howcome you didn't say anything when I was emailing Sullivan at the start of the Covid fun with you on the email list? You guys weren't asking any of the hard and necessary questions; you were still doing arts reporting with your staff of no one. And I wrote to (at) Sullivan saying look, look what's going on here, we have an AWOL congressman who says he's a big rural-broadband guy and meanwhile our ed systems are falling apart because no one's got bandwidth, we're not getting real answers out of the local tertiary hospital, what the fuck with our child state health director, we can't even find out how well or poorly prepped we are for this, because we have a rotted-out shell of a Gannett victim for a local paper and the most substantial reporting we have comes from college students. And I don't see your voice anywhere in that set of emails. Nor did you follow up on those stories.
News > elegies when we have no newspapers. Leave the elegies to the nonfiction workshop.
Thanks for reading. Sounds like my work isn't for you. Cheers.
Not actually an answer to the question, which was not rhetorical.
I wrote about Bob McChesney's visit to UI 6 years ago. https://blogforiowa.com/2014/03/13/mcchesney-we-need-public-funding-for-journalism/
Thanks for this. I wasn't familiar with McChesney's work. Great read.
My favorite McChesney review, written, surprisingly enough, not by me. This is about Telecommunications, Mass Media, & Democracy:
Here come the Martian Marxists
Reviewed in the United States on September 10, 2010
and I wouldn't be surprised if they're riding on their Martian bike.
This book is a sad joke and a frivolous, ideologically-poisoned waste of thousands of hours of archival research. McChesney, whose reputation as the academic pundit King of All Media is based on the rickety foundation of this misbegotten work, imagines himself to be doing muscular, old-school political economy, and this, I surmise, is what licenses him to write his narrative in a hermetic cultural vacuum. But that's messed up on both counts.
What do I mean by cultural vacuum? Click through to the "Search Inside" function and enter "jazz" as a search term. You'll get exactly two hits. Two. This is . . . problematic for a book about broadcasting in the Jazz Age. That's because people never shut up about jazz and its implications for broadcasting. Jazz, you see, signified at the time as evil set to melody: it was gangsta rap, death metal and punk rock rolled into one. But McChesney doesn't want to talk about that, because all of his bourgeois reformers were on the wrong side of history where jazz was concerned. But if you were against commercialism in 1928 through 1935, you were also against jazz, because it was catchpenny commercial garbage in league with the Devil, as opposed to the philanthropically-subsidized cultural spinach that it is today.
Now run a search on vaudeville: One solitary hit.
Now run a search on Tin Pan Alley: Zip. Zero. Nada. Sweet Fanny Adams. Not a sausage. Mayor McCheese has never heard of America's gargantuan, world-conquering, popular music industry, not its signature weapon of conquest, which we would call payola but was then known as song plugging.
This means that his book is worthless as a work of political economy, because vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley were major cultural and economic institutions that exerted unparalleled influence on the evolution of radio programming. You may as well write a history of cooking without reference to farming and fire.
Other things missing from McChesney's dire saga about the corporate theft and desecration of the airwaves: Programs. There are four hits for Amos 'n' Andy (virtually unavoidable) but otherwise the Bobcat really doesn't want to go near any specific radio shows, especially not popular ones, because that would raise all kinds of difficult questions about the social class of radio listeners and their cultural preferences. For McChesney, early programming was bluntly divided into two simple categories: "commercial" (bad) and "educational" (good). This is an ideal way to spin things if you're looking to persuade academics that you're preaching true Gospel. Guess which class of programs they like better.
There are no actual listeners in this book. "The people," on whose behalf McChesney presumes to speak, are not consulted. Which is strange, because early radio listeners were a vocal and opinionated lot who wrote zillions of letters of protest and praise about what they were hearing, and sent them to magazines, newspapers, federal officials and broadcasters. McChesney isn't going to touch this deep and vital vein of evidence, because not one word of it supports his melodramatic story of mustache-twirling top-hatted villains stealing the family farm of the airwaves.
I've got lots more epistemological muck to rake here, but I gotta go to work now. Later.
A great reflection on the meaning and effect of the decimation of local journalism.
Thanks for this, Dan.