The embarrassing Miley Cyrus Vanity Fair photo shows the value of public relations people—and why investing real money makes people more careful about what they do.
Continue reading "Miley Cyrus, Unprotected Celebrity" »
Recognizing a trend we've reported on, Time magazine notes that efforts to make money off of global warming hysteria and other allegedly eco-friendly trends are actually harming the environment and stealing from consumers.
Continue reading "'Time' Magazine Remarks "Clean Energy Scam"" »
William F. Buckley, author, columnist, TV talk show host, and founding editor of National Review magazine, died today at age 82.
Buckley was one of the people most responsible for making the conservative movement a powerful force in the United States during the past six decades.
Especially through his influential magazine, Buckley set the agenda for the American right and made it appealing to a mass audience. His editorial approach and political philosophy combined to create an ecumenism on the right that allowed the various factions to work together, although the relationships have always been strained to some degree. However, his stolid opposition to statism in all of its forms provided a rallying cry for the American right and continues to do so.
Continue reading "William F. Buckley and the Modern American Right" »
Big-name and -money advertisers have hitherto been reluctant to put much money into web advertising, but that trend is reversing fast, according to eMarketer, a leading advertisement tracker.
In 2006 the top 100 advertisers cut their spending on TV, radio, and print by $230 million and raised their online ad spending by $558 million—an increase of approximately 17 percent.
Continue reading "Advertisers Moving to Internet—and Fast" »
Critic John J. Miller has published a very informative interview with Robert E. Howard scholar Rusty Burke on National Review Online, which merits attention.
The excerpts below provide a good sense of why the underappreciated writer of the Conan the Barbarian stories deserves more consideration. Howard wrote for the pulps in a variety of genres, and modern-day readers are rediscovering his non-Conan writings and realizing that he was above all a master storyteller.
Particularly praiseworthy is Burke's emphasis on the importance of story in narrative fiction, which reflects criticisms made in the prior century by G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and other such luminaries:
Continue reading "Master Storyteller" »
I've done a quick check of the major intellectual magazines on the right—such as National Review, The American Spectator, The Weekly Standard, The American Conservative, Christianity Today, First Things, The American, Chronicles, etc., plus the Opinion Journal, TCS Daily, FrontPage magazine, and Focus on the Family sites, and I found not a single article on the controversy over former NBA star Tim Hardaway's comments opposing homosexuality.
This is rather surprising given that Hardaway's comments set off a fusillade of hatred toward him and a blatant attempt to destroy not only his reputation but his livelihood as an example to all who would question the elite's attitude on this matter or any other it finds particularly important to its agenda.
This is very interesting given that on the whole these excellent publications cover just about everything of any import (and many of very little significance), including a wide variety of cultural questions. One can find reviews of the new movie Ghost Rider on several of these sites, for example. On the Hardaway matter, however, there has been an eerie silence on the right, even though the major media have been all over the story for the past week, and have been greatly on the attack against Hardaway for his opinions.
These opinions that are being attacked (once we set aside Hardaway's intemperate use of the word hate), moreover, are in fact the opinions that most people on the right—and indeed most people in the nation—hold: a deep, fundamental discomfort with the idea of homosexual behavior. People feel and advocate differing degrees of toleration toward homosexuality, of course, but there's clearly a basic feeling among regular people that there is indeed something wrong with homosexuality and that it is hence something to be tolerated, not put on an equal footing with heterosexuality.
That's simply the reality of people's attitudes, and this feeling has been common throughout human history.
None of that should be controversial or surprise anyone. The fact that the contemprary American elites strongly support a contrary opinion does not change the reality. It only exemplifies the vast divide between the elite and hoi polloi today.
Certainly this is a subject that most political-intellectual publications should find perfectly fascinating. Typically these publications are ever-ready to report on and analyze any big differences between elite and mass opinions and attitudes. Yet in this case, interest seems surprisingly weak.
It is possible that I have missed some brief discussions of this matter in major publications on the right, but the paucity of treatment of the story among conservatives is very clear from a check of their websites, including use of their search engines to make sure that I haven't missed anything major.
The only conclusion that one can draw from this eerie silence on the right regarding the deliberate destruction of Tim Hardaway is that most publications are simply afraid to touch it.
Given what has happened to Hardaway, I can't blame them. The silence speaks eloquently of the power being arrayed against the public expression of a very normal human attitude.
Here's an interesting item in our ongoing series of observations that everything happens in the Omniculture. Women's Wear Daily reports that photo editors are beginning to retouch photos of seriously underweight fashion models in order to make them appear . . . healthier:
PUTTING ON THE POUNDS: As the body mass index of runway walkers continues to make headlines, skinny models just might present a whole new problem for editors. Everyone has a story of a celebrity cover slimmed by Photoshop, but several editors have been quietly ordering the retouching of gaunt model shots to make them look, well, a little fatter. "A model shows up and you realize she's too thin and has lost weight since the booking, but the show must go on," said Allure editor in chief Linda Wells. "When the film comes to me, I realize I don't want to see hip bones and ribs in the magazine."
Enter the retouching process, which helps make the haggard look healthier. "If a girl shows up at a shoot and she's too skinny, a good stylist can pose her so that the reader doesn't have as much of a sense of it," said Lucky editor in chief Kim France. But, she added, "There are angles at which a girl's arm can look haunting."
"It's never something where you made the girl look heavy," said France. "It's just a quiet, small change." . . .
"It seems like we've been doing it more lately than in years past," said Wells. "It is something we noticed at the fashion shows this year — there were some alarming moments on the runway. And that caused some chatter."
It seems unlikely that the fashion in ladies' figures will soon become Rubenesque, as in the image immediately above, but a comparison between the Rubens image and that of the fashion model shown at the top of this item suggests that it is a good thing indeed if the trend toward increasingly gaunt fashion models has run its course. The change suggests a salutary self-correcting aspect of the Omniculture. Everything happens, and often good things do occur.
In an effort to show better profitabilty to their corporate conglomerate owners, magazines are instituting hiring freezes to reduce expenses through attrition. Advertising Age reports:
Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., where ad pages through August are down 6.1%, according to TNS Media Intelligence, has a freeze under way. And at Time Inc., where pages are off 2.9% through August, the heads of finance and human resources have gotten together over the past month to look at all open positions; which vacancies actually get filled will be up to four executives who report directly to Chairman-CEO Ann S. Moore.
In addition, numerous magazines have shut down in the past year.
Numerous writers and analysts have pointed out that large media conglomerates' purchases of movie studios, magazines, and book publishing companies have had a deleterious effect on the quality of production in these media by forcing them to bring in higher profits than were historically attainable.
I suspect that the decline of American education has had a much more important effect on the quality of popular culture in the past half-century, but there were always two additional interesting questions regarding media conglomeration that needed to be asked and seldom were.
Question one was whether these two industries would remain as appealing to corporations as they had become during the 1970s and the two decades thereafter.
Question two was whether the decline in quality and increasing sameness of product from corporatized major publishers and film studios would cause a rise in competition from independent producers and publishers. And if the latter happened, might not the answer to question one be that the big corporations might wish to unload some of these firms?
That does appear to be the case, with the well-documented rise of independent media productions, proliferation of new magazines (which has slowed only in the past few years), and increasing success of university presses, small book-publishing houses, and other such ventures.
We are seeing some signs of a reversal of the media consolidation of the past couple of decades.
In today's news, for example, The Wall Street Journal reports that Time-Warner is jettisoning numerous magazines "as it looks to prune its portfolio of smaller, less-profitable titles."
This move is significant because it includes very popular titles such as Popular Science, Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, Skiing, Parenting, and Babytalk. Of course these will all be sold to other big investors, because they are still worth a lot of money, but this looks to me like part of what may be a continuing devolution to a more reasonable scale of organization for these publications.
Equally significant in today's news is the announcement by the New York Times Co. that it is selling off its television stations:
"The decision to explore the sale of our broadcast stations is a result of our ongoing analysis of our business portfolio," said Janet L. Robinson, president and CEO. "These are well-managed and profitable stations that generate substantial cash flows and are located in attractive markets. We believe a divestiture would allow us to sharpen our focus on developing our newspaper and rapidly growing digital businesses, and the synergies between them, thereby increasing the value of our Company for our shareholders."
The stations that comprise the Broadcast Media Group are:
- WHO-TV in Des Moines, Iowa (NBC);
- KFSM-TV in Ft. Smith, Ark. (CBS);
- WHNT-TV in Huntsville, Ala. (CBS);
- WREG-TV in Memphis, Tenn. (CBS);
- WQAD-TV in Moline, Ill. (ABC);
- WTKR-TV in Norfolk, Va. (CBS);
- KFOR-TV in Oklahoma City, Okla. (NBC);
- KAUT-TV in Oklahoma City, Okla. (MyNetworkTV); and
- WNEP-TV in Scranton, Penn. (ABC).
Leftist critics complained about the corporatization and consolidation of the media as an unwelcome phenomenon in the '70s and thereafter, and they were correct to point out that there would be deleterious effects.
Market-oriented analysts simply replied by saying that the consolidation would be good because people wouldn't do it if it didn't make sense.
That was not the correct response, however.People do stupid things, and corporations do stupid things too.
The sensible response should have been that the media consolidation that began in the 1960s was most likely part of a societal and technological transition that would ultimately work toward everybody's benefit, as free markets typically do over the long term.
And that appears to be what has happened and is happening today.
Contrary to the leftists' claims, competition among media providers actually increased during the period of consolidation, as a simple glance at the current media landscape should make abundantly clear. In response to that competition, big media companies are beginning to divest themselves of some of their media holdings in order to make themselves leaner and more effective at responding to competition, as the New York Times statement makes clear.
That process will increase media competition further, and will create increased capacity for variety, efficiency, and customer satisfaction in our communications media.
That is what markets do, and it is always to the good in the long term.
Here's a publication no one should be without: Four Weeks is a new monthly magazine that includes a variety of articles in four categories customized for the four weeks of a woman's menstrual cycle.
In week 1, the magazine informs us, ladies like things to be "Fun, Familiar," and in subsequent weeks "Exciting, Exotic," "Indulgent, Introspective," and "Cautious, Caring," respectively.
Also of great interest is the magazine's Hormone Horoscope, which deftly combines two things of utter inscutability into an easily understood guide to life.
Thanks, gals!
The magazine is available on newstands now, and sample articles are available on the magazine's website.
According to the press release from the new publisher: Michael Ian Black, a character actor who appeared regularly in the cancelled NBC TV series Ed, will serve as Editor at Large, which usually means a person who writes for the magazine but does no editing. Entrepreneur Monty Sarhan purchased the magazine and will serve as its CEO and Editor in Chief, which ought to provide a good deal of humor in itself.
Sarhan says the magazine's mission will continue to be "parodying politics, pop culture and society," but that its new approach will be "smart, relevant, sarcastic, clever and biting. Our goal is 'intelligent irreverence,' and we have evolved CRACKED into a best-of-breed humor magazine." Among the magazine's authors will be writers from popular TV shows such as Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show, and Chappelle's Show.
It certainly sounds as if they're going for intelligence.
Judging by the articles on the Cracked website, however, the magazine appears to be only mildly amusing in fits and starts, and is not the slightest bit intelligent. The Onion is a lot better than this.
The prolonging of American adolescence continues apace.