Reason Magazine - Topics > Television

"Drop Dead Gorgeous—and Military Trained!"

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 08 May 2008 10:45:00 EDT

Via the overheated commentary of Extreme Mortman comes this bizarre slow-news-day CNN Situation Room bit on how Israel (that 60-year-old!) is overhauling its image by having former military gals pose for Maxim magazine. "Israel is hip, sexy, and fun," says CNN:

Not sure if Fox News will counterblast with the girls of the PLO.

Gentle reader, does this news change your views on foreign aid?

Or does it merely convince you further that we're living in the Rapture and we don't even know it?

Just Sue Ellen Stories

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 01 May 2008 09:25:00 EDT

"How 'Dallas' Won the Cold War," the Nick Gillespie/me co-production in this weekend's Washington Post, drew some interesting testimonial responses. A sampling:

In 1987 [...] I visited Bukhara in Uzbekistan. At one point, we were invited into the living area behind a shop, where the owner took out a video cassette and played it for us. It was a grainy episode of "Dallas," dubbed in Finnish. (We learned later that Estonians would record the Finnish version of "Dallas"--and other Western TV shows also--off of Helsinki TV, easily seen Tallinn. These would then circulate throughout the USSR.) Our host grilled us intensely about each of the appliances in Miss Ellie's kitchen. Thus did visions of Southfork reach even unto Central Asia.
*
In the summer of 1983 I was traveling through Europe with my Brother. One of the countries we visited was Romania. I recall meeting [a] 20-30 year old Romanian male. His first question to me was "Who shot JR"? I was surprised to hear such a question. He said he watched the series however [the] episodes they see were a few seasons behind. It was unfortunate for I could not answer his question.
*
I was there when Dallas won the Cold War, with an American tour group, just after Dallas started running. Wherever we went--Moscow, St Petersburg, Odessa, Kiev, everywhere!--the touring day could not begin till after the morning episode was over, since neither the driver nor guide would stir till then. Same thing for the late-afternoon epidsode, the tour had to end before it began. And it was not only our driver and guide--auto and pedestran traffic just disappeared from the streets during those two hours. I think I remember being told it was Boris Yeltsin's party that sponsored the twice-a-day showing ... and ran political messages in the commercial breaks since they knew everyone in the, then, USSR, would be watching.
*
Do you remember a news story following the opening of Albania? Boat people from Albania started coming across to Italy and landing on the beaches in droves, causing a headache for the Italian police. One policeman reported that when he approached a group of Albanian boat people, they said, "Is this Dallas?"

*
In the late 80s, probably 1987, I was in Inverness, Scotland. My then wife and I went out to a pub. We walked in and saw the entire bar looking in our direction and up to a TV that was placed above the door. There was dead silence except for the American accents on the television. As we proceeded into the place and bellied up to the bar, we turned to look and on the screen was Dallas. The entire place was mesmerized.
*
It's probably the most important show ever, as ridiculous as that might sound. Its impact on the rest of the world was even more profound than its impact in the U.S.
I would propose that Baywatch continued the Dallas phenomenon in the late 80s and 90s. To people outside the U.S., and particularly in Germany, Baywatch symbolized the myth of California: A place to live freely and enjoy the abundance of the earth. Must have been very attractive to the East Germans who could get the program and wanted very much to travel, and to the West Germans who were sick of the whole big government, nanny state thing. When the Wall came down in 1989, David Hasselhoff (brilliantly) flew to Berlin right away to give a "Freedom" concert at the Brandenburger Tor.

Over in the comments at my personal blog, one of my favorite film writers, David Ehrenstein, adds:

The impact of Dallas cannot be underestimated. At heart it was little more than a louche retread of Sirk's Written on the Wind and Stevens' Giant but with the unabashed vulgarity of Russ Meyer thrown in for good measure.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder was obsessed with the show, assigning two of his most valuable boyfriends (Udo Kier and Raul Gimenez) all-important taping duties. He didn't want to miss a nanosecond. Needless to say Berlin Alexanderplatz is rather different in overall presentation. But its dark heart is much the same.

At Commentary magazine, Abe Greenwald searches for the new diverting Dallas in our modern twilight struggle, and comes up with ... Hillary vs. Obama! Still, my favorite response was probably this:

Good article, I enjoyed it but there is one failing. To wit: Contrary to popular belief, this is no evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald shot/killed JFK.

Some related nuggets from the reason vault: The Second Romanian Revolution Will Be Televised, and Charles Paul Freund's classic In Praise of Vulgarity.

Poperah

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:40:00 EDT

A lot of Christians are angry at Oprah about her latest book club selection, Eckhart Tolle's New Age tome A New Earth. Here is one of many YouTube videos attacking her:

That clip is called The Church of Oprah Exposed; it is, among other things, a promo for Carrington Steele's book and DVD Don't Drink the Kool-Aid: Oprah, Obama, and the Occult. (Yes, of course there's an Obama angle. Apparently Jeremiah Wright isn't the only controversial preacher in his life.)

It isn't just fringy Christians who talk about a Church of Oprah. In 2002 the deeply mainstream Christianity Today published a famous article, "The Church of O," that makes a more respectful, less paranoid argument that Oprah is a spiritual leader. The best quote in it comes from a Bible teacher in Chicago: "I like Oprah. I'm a closet groupie, though, because her theology's a little off." Another Chicago Christian -- the infamous Rev. Wright -- has a good line as well: "Somebody who makes $100 a week has no problem tithing. But start making $35 million a year, and you'll want to renegotiate the contract. You don't want to be a part of 'organized religion' at that point."

Over in the ivory tower, Prof. Kathryn Lofton of Indiana University has taken a slightly different approach, arguing that "Oprah does things in a religious manner, but she is not a religion." She goes on:

"She endorses some modes of theological existence, but dislikes many more. For her, religion implies control and oppression and the inability to catalog shop. The only way religion or religious belief works for Oprah is if it is carefully coordinated with capitalist pleasure. Thus, the turn to 'spirituality' -- the non-dogmatic dogma that encourages an ambiguous theism alongside an exuberant consumerism," Lofton said.

In Winfrey's view, Buddhism isn't about meditation and renunciation, it's about beaded bracelets and fragrant incense. "Christianity isn't about Christ's apocalyptic visions or the memorization of creeds, it's about a friendly guy named Jesus and his egalitarian message. As long as you can spend, feel good about yourself and look good, your religious belief will be tolerated on Planet O. The religion of Oprah is the incorporated faith of late-capitalist America," Lofton said.

Sort of a mellower, bourgier version of the spiritual jacuzzi I described in reason in May 2003. That article concluded with a look at Discordianism, the Church of the SubGenius, and other "joke religions" -- I wrote it too early to include the Flying Spaghetti Monster -- so I shouldn't end this post without mentioning that Oprahism has manifested itself in that sphere as well. Here's one more YouTube clip:

For extra credit, read the comment thread on that film's YouTube page. The Carrington Steele crowd has discovered the video and seems to be taking it literally. God bless the Internet: bringing mutually incomprehending tribes together since 1969.

Links! We Got Links!

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 08:00:00 EDT

Stuff I've been meaning to blog:

* a leftist critique of the New Deal,

* an online chat with Al Qaeda,

* a psychiatric strange loop,

* and from 1986, the first important piece of Reagan revisionism.

Bonus politics-free, prog-free music link: Candi Staton sings Merle Haggard.

Guantanamo: The DVD

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 10:53:00 EDT

John Yoo's newly declassified torture memo -- download it here -- surely paved the path for the abuses at Guantanamo. But it wasn't alone. Vanity Fair reports:

Ideas arose from other sources. The first year of Fox TV's dramatic series 24 came to a conclusion in spring 2002, and the second year of the series began that fall. An inescapable message of the program is that torture works. "We saw it on cable," [Lt. Col. Diane] Beaver recalled. "People had already seen the first series. It was hugely popular." Jack Bauer had many friends at Guantánamo, Beaver added. "He gave people lots of ideas."

The rest of the Vanity Fair feature isn't so funny. Read it here.

Blurry Boobs, Butts Bother Bureaucrats

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 17:15:00 EDT

Fox is refusing to pay a $91,000 indecency fine imposed by the Federal Communications Commission for a 2003 broadcast of the now-defunct reality show Married by America in which the naughty bits of strippers at a bachelor party were blurry but inferrable. The FCC conceded that "the pixelation of the female strippers' naked breasts and buttocks does render the material less explicit and graphic than it would have been in the absence of pixelation" but concluded that "the material is still sufficiently graphic and explicit to support an indecency finding." It initially imposed a fine of $1.2 million—$7,000 for each of 169 Fox stations that aired the show—but later decided to fine just the 13 Fox stations in cities where viewers had complained. Fox nevertheless remains defiant, saying the FCC fine is "arbitrary and capricious, inconsistent with precedent, and patently unconstitutional."

In my column last week I said the FCC should stop it already with the indecency nonsense. Now I'm having second thoughts. I never saw Married by America, but I feel pretty confident in suggesting that it was less entertaining than the bureaucratic brouhaha it generated.

[via The Freedom Files]

The Upside of Seeing Financial Institutions Face a Crisis

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 08:00:00 EDT

It's as good an excuse as any to link to the long-lost ending of It's a Wonderful Life.

Rough Trade in Foreign Sausage

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:40:00 EDT

The European Union, friend of free trade:

Swiss pork-and-beef cervelat sausages have traditionally used Brazilian cow-intestine skins, but the European Union has banned imports of the skins, fearing they may contain traces of mad cow disease, or BSE.

Picnickers flock to parks at weekends to barbecue the large, bland sausages which look like giant hot dogs. But skin stocks will run out by the end of the year, forcing butchers to use alternatives which purists say split easily and lack flavour....

The [economics] minister said there would be enough sausages for spectators at the European soccer championship the Swiss and Austrians are hosting later this year, and promised to push for a review of the EU ban.

If that fails, Swiss fans may just have to put up with inferior skins, even if they do not curl the sausage when cooked, she said. "I believe Swiss consumers will have the courage to accept a slightly straighter cervelat."

Oh, well, at least there's unfettered trade in sausages within Europe. Hold on -- what's that?

The generally good relations between Czechs and Slovaks cooled dramatically last year when Slovakia applied to the EU for trademark protection for its 'spekácky' sausage. This speciality has also been produced from time immemorial by Czech manufacturers. A trademark for the Slovak sausage would mean that the Czechs would have to produce their sausage according to the Slovak recipe. The prospect triggered outraged protest in the Czech Republic. The Czech daily reports that the agricultural ministers of the two states have now reached an agreement at a trade fair in Brno. "Czechs and Slovaks are now working together again on the 'spekácky' project. Both countries will jointly apply to the EU for the registration of this regional speciality. ... If the EU grants protection, there will be a 'sausage declaration' that stipulates the recipes to be used, but allows each country to use its own."

They've always provoked passion, those sausages:

Nonsense of Indecency

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 07:00:00 EDT

In most of the places where this column appears, the four-letter words it contains will not be spelled out. Instead they will be rendered as initial letters followed by dashes.

That custom is an example of self-restraint by newspapers and websites that do not want to offend their readers. It is not the result of government censorship, which would violate the First Amendment.

Yet as a case the Supreme Court recently agreed to hear illustrates, different rules apply to broadcast TV, where the Federal Communications Commission has decreed that anything it deems "indecent" may not be aired between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. One day soon Americans will marvel at the bureaucratic energy expended on censorship in this one arbitrarily chosen segment of the media universe.

The FCC imposed its first fine for broadcast indecency in 1975, provoked by a mid-afternoon airing of a George Carlin monologue on a New York City radio station. In upholding the fine, the Supreme Court emphasized the distinction between Carlin's "verbal shock treatment," involving the deliberately provocative, repeated use of expletives, and "the isolated use of a potentially offensive word."

For the next three decades, taking its cue from the Court, the FCC let stray expletives slide. Then Bono got a little carried away at the 2003 Golden Globe Awards, where he pronounced his award for best original movie song "really, really fucking brilliant."

In response to complaints orchestrated by the Parents Television Council, the FCC's Enforcement Bureau said Bono's expletive was not indecent because it was not really a sexual reference and in any event was "fleeting and isolated." Five months later, the commission reversed this finding, along with its longstanding policy of overlooking isolated vulgarities. The FCC later ruled that expletive-containing comments by Cher at the 2002 Billboard Music Awards and by Nicole Richie at the 2003 Billboard Music Awards were indecent as well.

Last June, in response to a lawsuit by broadcasters, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled that the FCC had violated the Administrative Procedure Act by failing to "articulate a reasoned basis for its change in policy." That decision, which the Supreme Court now has agreed to review, did not definitively address the broadcasters' constitutional objections, but the court was skeptical that they could be overcome.

The 2nd Circuit suggested that the FCC's indecency rules are unconstitutionally vague, creating "an undue chilling effect on free speech" by drawing seemingly arbitrary distinctions. A single fuck or shit on a live awards show can cost a network millions of dollars, for example, but the same words are OK in a "bona fide news interview," even if the interview is a thinly disguised promotion for one of the network's own entertainment shows.

The accidental airing of Cher's "fuck 'em" is indecent, but the deliberate airing of the very same footage in the context of a news report is not. The "repeated and deliberate use of numerous expletives" is OK in a fictional World War II movie because they are "integral" to the film yet indecent in a documentary about real-life blues musicians.

It's obvious by now that the FCC makes up the rules for acceptable speech as it goes along. In the paradigmatic example of broadcast indecency, Carlin's monologue about "the words you couldn't say on the public airwaves," there's no question that the expletives were "integral" to the routine, which was partly about the very censorship to which it became subject.

The premise underlying the Supreme Court's decision upholding the fine for Carlin's monologue was that TV and radio over the airwaves are "uniquely pervasive" and "uniquely accessible to children." With nine out of 10 U.S. homes receiving cable or satellite TV, with downloads and DVRs making a hash of "time channeling," with ratings and parental controls available across video sources, that premise is no longer tenable. The only question is how much longer the courts will pretend otherwise.

© Copyright 2008 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

'I'd Normally Shake Your Hand, but I Don't Want to Get a Contact High'

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 12:16:00 EDT

In the second installment of his 35,000-part series "Better Know a Lobby," Stephen Colbert sits down with the Drug Policy Alliance's Ethan Nadelmann "in his opium den."

And If You Freeze the Frame at Just the Right Moment, You Can See a White Robe and Pointy Hood Hanging on the Back of the Door

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 11:56:00 EDT

Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson has watched Hillary Clinton's "something is happening in the world" ad so many times that he has lost his mind. Spurred by "an uneasy feeling that something was not quite right," he found that "repeated watching of the ad on YouTube increased my unease." Eventually Patterson realized what was bothering him:

I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad's central image—innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger—it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn't help but think of D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation," the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad—as I see it—is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.

Patterson concedes that the Clinton campaign might not have had a racist intent, but he's pretty sure that the candidate benefited from the support of voters spooked by the idea of a black man answering that red phone. And if that was not the plan all along, why on earth would the ad's creators have put a blond child in it? True, "two other sleeping children, presumably in another bed, are not blond, but they are dimly lighted, leaving them ambiguous. Still it is obvious that they are not black—both, in fact, seem vaguely Latino." Just like the children menaced by lurking black men in Birth of a Nation?

I hate Hillary Clinton more than the next guy, and I thought the red phone ad was moronic and demagogic. But Patterson's take on it is even stupider.

To Be Fair, Mondale Was Wearing A Big Gold Medallion and an Earring In the Original

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 10:23:00 EDT

Camille Paglia has the best take yet on Hillary Clinton's red phone ad:

If it's 3 a.m., why is the male-seeming mother fully dressed as she comes in to check on her sleeping children? Is she a bar crawler or insomniac? An obsessive-compulsive housecleaner, like Joan Crawford in "Mommie Dearest"? And why is Hillary sitting at her desk in full drag and jewelry at that ungodly hour? A president should not be a monomaniac incapable of rest and perched on guard all night like Poe's baleful raven.

At L-o-o-o-n-g Last Sir, Have You No Sense of Humor?

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 08:41:00 EDT

Just last night I was telling someone that I couldn't imagine any scenario on God's green earth that would get me to vote for Hillary Clinton. But that was before I watched this clip of Grade A rageaholic and unfunny sports humorist Keith Olbermann, with anger more than sadness, laying into Hitlery for Geraldine Ferraro's sins. See how long you can last through his hilariously self-serious tirade; I crapped out somewhere on minute five:

Link via Wonkette. Nick Gillespie wrote last year about the many (horrifying) moods of Keith Olbermann. UPDATE: YouTube seems to be having server-squirrel issues; try this link.

The Wire vs. The Sun

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:30:00 EDT

The fifth and final season of The Wire concluded Sunday night. Until this year critics were nearly unanimous in their praise for the Baltimore-based HBO series, but the last 10 episodes provoked furious debates between the program's defenders and detractors. The chief cause of the ferment was the show's critique of the newspaper where Wire creator David Simon began his career: the Baltimore Sun.

I'm not going to join the argument about the season's artistic merit—not here, anyway. I do have a few thoughts about the substance of Simon's criticisms. I might not have a front-row seat at the paper, but I'm not squinting from the back row either: I subscribe to The Sun, my wife is a reporter there, and our circle of friends includes several current and former Sun staffers, some of whom had cameos on The Wire this year. (Disclaimer: What follows are my own opinions. They are not necessarily shared by anyone who happens to be married to me.)

Here is Simon's critique, conveniently summarized in an essay for the March Esquire:

[W]hen the Chicago Tribune Company buys Times Mirror and more buyouts follow, the tipping point will be reached. Instead of a news report so essential to the high-end readers that they might—even amid the turmoil of the Internet—still charge for their product online and off, American newspapers will soon be offering a shell of themselves in a market unwilling to pay for such and then, in desperation, giving the product away for free. The window will close; newspapers will not be getting better, stronger, more comprehensive. Not ever again.

In Baltimore, the response will be to drop beats, to abandon the pretense of actually covering the city in detail, to regard institutional memory and the need to look at the city’s problems systemically as, well, quaint. The newsroom culture will instead emphasize impact.

No longer would the journalism be rooted in the organic work of reporters sent into the streets to learn new things and then pull smart, balanced stories through the keyhole. Impact means prizes. Now you pick a target and, to the exclusion of all complexity, you hammer on that target, story after story. Most especially, you write additional accounts highlighting the "impact" that The Sun's coverage has achieved—covering your own coverage—the better to show that the newspaper has effected change.

Note that this is not the familiar liberal narrative of newspaper decline. In the standard story, like Simon's story, short-sighted media companies cut the meat out of powerful papers. But in the usual account, those "impact" stories are the missing meat and the editors who assign them—in The Sun's case, John Carroll and Bill Marimow—are the heroes standing up for journalistic "excellence."

For Simon, by contrast, Carroll and Marimow are a central part of the problem. Their stand-ins on his show are sanctimonious blowhards; their prize-hungry journalism is a substitute for the real thing. Their quest for "impact" brings to mind Ivan Illich's opening to Deschooling Society, with its disdain for the confusion of "process" with "substance," its ire at a world where "Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve those ends." It's the same problem The Wire decries in policework and schooling, where decaying bureaucracies defend their performance by jacking up meaningless statistics.

I don't agree with all of Simon's take. It's hard to believe, for example, that many papers could have kept themselves relevant while hiding their best online material behind a pay wall. And the focus on cutbacks qua cutbacks seems off. The problem with The Sun isn't that it's cutting back; it's that it's so thoughtless about where it cuts. The Wire made a big deal about The Sun's disappearing international bureaus. (Eight years ago, it had outposts in five foreign countries. Now it has none.) But I would be happy to see the paper bring its overseas correspondents home if it would reinvest those resources in covering the city.

Instead, The Sun—which managed to find the money for an expensive redesign hated by virtually every reader in the metro area—no longer maintains a beat for each of the city's major regions. Now it has just one reporter covering urban neighborhoods. It has been closing its suburban offices, eliminating its Carroll County bureau last year and losing its Baltimore County base last month. (The former county is growing rapidly, and half or more of the paper's readers live in the latter.) When the Baltimore County staff moved to the paper's downtown headquarters, a company spokesperson told the local alt-weekly that the reporters are "not in their office most of the time anyway. They can go out to Glen Burnie or Reisterstown from here just as quick as they could from Towson."

For those of you who don't live around here: It is extremely unlikely that a Baltimore County reporter will have to cover anything in Glen Burnie, since Glen Burnie is in Anne Arundel County. To get from the old Baltimore County office in Towson to Glen Burnie, you must first move around or across an obscure little burg called the City of Baltimore. The fact that it is possible to be a spokeswoman for The Sun without knowing this speaks volumes.

This rupture between the paper and the region it covers is at the heart of Simon's critique, and it's here that I agree with him the most. It's striking how much of The Sun's coverage of Baltimore—especially, but not exclusively, the blacker, poorer parts of Baltimore—are written as though the subject is an alien landscape. But it shouldn't be surprising.

There are basically two ways to get hired at The Sun. The standard method is to learn your craft at a series of smaller papers around the country. The other approach is to come directly to the paper from an elite university. The Sun has found a lot of fine journalists through these routes (especially the first one). But there used to be a third road to the paper: from the city itself, getting started as a copy boy or some other low-level position and gradually working your way up the ladder.

It's valuable to have a number of Baltimore-bred correspondents who developed their skills and discovered their city at the same time. They have accumulated a wealth of local knowledge that can't easily be replaced. Not only is this now essentially closed as a path to the paper, but the reporters who entered the building this way, along with other experienced hands, have been leaving as the newspaper hires cheaper but greener outsiders to replace them. There are solid reasons not to staff a newspaper only with native talent, but there are solid reasons as well to make sure they're part of the mix—perhaps even for a special local outreach effort to find the next generation of copy boys made good. But that isn't part of the professional culture of old-media journalism, at The Sun or anywhere else.

This isn't intended as a nostalgic argument for bygone days. In some ways American journalism is better than it has ever been: There are more outlets to choose from, more ways to start an outlet of your own, more eyes monitoring the outlets' output for errors, omissions, and lies. The larger mediasphere has grown more open to outside voices, even if specific channels like The Sun have grown more insular and removed. For many topics, though not nearly enough, this means not just more commentary but more actual reporting.

But that makes it all the more important that a paper respond to that competition by doing the things an urban newspaper is best suited to do. And that means intimate, collaborative coverage of a city by people who know it well. The major problem with The Sun is that it doesn't seem to know what to do with the knowledge it has stored within its walls, and that it doesn't seem to have noticed how much of that knowledge has already slipped out its doors.

Jesse Walker is reason's managing editor.

"Someone Has To Start Wondering What the F Is Going On."

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EST

Ed Burns is co-creator of HBO's critically acclaimed series The Wire, now concluding its fifth and final season. Burns is also the co-producer of Generation Kill, a forthcoming HBO miniseries based on journalist Evan Wright's book about the first stages of the war in Iraq. Burns is also a Vietnam veteran, a 20-year veteran of the Baltimore police force, and a teacher in the city’s public schools. He’s an outspoken critic of the drug war, the growth of prisons, and the structure, incentives, and organization of police departments.

reason Senior Editor Radley Balko recently interviewed Burns via telephone. Responses should be sent to letters@reason.com.

reason: This season of The Wire focuses pretty heavily on the media. What do you think the media does well when it comes to covering criminal justice issues, and what do you think it does poorly?

Ed Burns: I think a lot depends on who’s doing it. In specific cases, you can do extremely well as a reporter. My problem is more with the basic philosophy of how it’s done. It’s like a laser beam. They cover a specific aspect, or a specific trial, or a specific murder in a way that simplifies things, that makes them very stereotypical. It only takes one sentence to name the victim of a crime and the street where the crime took place. So they’re really only reporting something that we know is going to happen—because the conditions are there to make it happen—but they doesn’t go beyond that. There’s no context in crime reporting. That’s the problem.

reason: Slate’s media critic Jack Shafer has said that the media is at its absolute worst when covering the drug war. Do you agree with him, and if so, why do you think that it is?

Burns: Take just the term “war on drugs.” I mean, they’re not warring on drugs. They’re warring on drug addicts and the users and the small-time dealers. They’re warring on neighborhoods. They’re warring on people who can’t stand up to them. They’re not warring on major dealers.

You can follow it in any city, I don’t care how small it is or how big it is. If the paper is pretty avid about covering who’s getting locked up, you’ll notice that they’re not getting the big guys. They’re not getting the big stakeholders.

I think their whole approach is almost as if they were trying to separate us, trying to separate the classes by saying, “Look what’s happened down there. Look at these people down there, these people and what they’re doing.”

When I was teaching, you’d have a kid in, say, his junior year of high school. And you’d give him a list of things he could possibly do when he gets out. He could be a doctor, lawyer, all this kind of stuff. We’d make one of the options “drug addict,” and there are kids who always check it off.

The media reports as if these kids have all of these options, and they consciously make this decision to become a drug addict, and to risk the consequences of going up to the corner and getting themselves killed. That decision was made for him long before that kid got to be in the 11th grade. A lot of guys don’t even get that far.

This idea that there are lots of options for these kids and they choose a life on the corner, that’s too simplistic. But it’s the way these things get covered.

reason: We interviewed your co-producer David Simon just before The Wire’s fourth season. He said that though The Wire may be cynical about institutions, it treats its characters with a lot of affection. But the last two seasons seem to have gotten even more cynical. Many of the characters who show promise seem to either succumb to character flaws, or actually get punished for doing the right thing. Are viewers to take anything away from The Wire other than that our major institutions are failing, and there’s little reason for hope?

Burns: Well, I don’t think there’s much reason for hope if you keep doing the same thing over and over again, even though you know it’ll never work. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said that if you get on the wrong train, running down the aisle in the opposite direction really doesn’t help. Basically that’s what we’ve done, we’ve gotten on entirely the wrong train, and we keep sprinting down the aisle in the other direction, trying to pretend that if we run fast enough, we can get it together and turn things around. We’re losing more than we’re winning, and there’s no reason for it.

I mean, if you go into West Baltimore, or East Baltimore, or any of these cities in the ghettos and you pick up a stone and you throw it, you’re probably going to hit a nonprofit. They’re all over the place. They aren’t working, because again we’re all on the same, wrong train. The nonprofits are fragmented. The whole thing is fragmented. It just doesn’t work.

So no. I don’t think we’re being cynical. I think we’re being factual. We’ve been fighting the drug war for 30 years. Thirty years of failure. But there’s some reason that we persist in this. What is it? We never explore why that is. But you just can’t spend this much money and get these few results and continue on like this. Someone has to start wondering what the fuck is going on.

reason: Critics have said the city of Baltimore is really the central character in the The Wire. Recently, we’ve seen some interesting developments in violent crime statistics. Large cities like New York and Los Angeles have continued with improvements that started in the 1990s, but smaller and medium-size cities like Baltimore, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis seem to be getting bloodier. Do you have any theories as to why that might be?

Burns: Yeah, sure, absolutely. I think New York’s murder rate is under 500 this year in 2007 and that’s out of a population of 8 million people. Baltimore’s murder rate was somewhere around 282 for a population of around 600,000 people. So we’re very close to New York just in raw numbers. The reason is that New York has an economy. There’s a vitality there. There are things happening. People have jobs.

In places like Baltimore, Detroit, and Cincinnati, the jobs that were there are gone. The manufacturing-based jobs are gone, and without that kind of job, it’s very, very difficult to jumpstart the economy. There’s no prospect for Baltimore having jobs in the near future. If you look at Baltimore now, what you’re seeing is a very decayed inner core. The east side of the city is being bought up by Johns Hopkins [the university and hospital]. They’re building a biotech park which is going to employ 6,000 people, but of those 6,000 people, you’ll be lucky to get three people who were originally from those neighborhoods. They just aren't qualified.

reason: You've said that too many narcotics police today have developed a gung-ho, cowboy mentality. You traced this trend back to the 1972 movie The French Connection. Could you elaborate?

Burns: Well, it’s just dumb. The Godfather, or The French Connection, which came out in the early '70s, those movies set the stage for both sides of the drug war. In The French Connection, [Detective] Popeye Doyle had this very cynical, harsh, rough, law-breaking type of drug style that sort of set the tone in how street narcotics guys work. Very flippant. What the movie didn’t pick up, and what you didn’t see, is all the intense surveillance and hard work that would go into a drug bust back then. But they put out the idea of this guy who cracks heads, especially in that scene they went and they shook the bar down. That became iconic. And that is the way the cops were afterward. I mean, you’d see white cops in black neighborhoods looking like Serpico, and they’re not undercover. It was just this mindset that took over of how you’re supposed to dress and act and the way you’re supposed to be.

The Godfather had a similar effect on the other side. It basically taught these emerging heroin gangs how to do business, how you set up your structure, with the code and the organization, the way you should have a boss, under-bosses—you know, capos. It got black, inner-city heroin dealers into the same mindset.

reason: How common do you think that is—drug dealers taking tips from the entertainment world? I’ve actually read that some dealers actually get advice from The Wire, particularly when it comes to communication systems they can use to evade police surveillance.

Burns: Well, if they’re looking at what we’re telling them, they won’t be learning much, because the technology has been out there. The Marlo Stanfields of today—those types of guys who I think of as mid-level drug dealers—there are just so many of them. They’re like the salmon going up the river. There’s really no way for law enforcement to stop all of these guys. There’s just too many of them. So the ones who take a modicum of precautions, the ones who are smart enough to stay low key, they’re completely under the radar screen, because it would just take too much work to even figure out who these guys are, and how to catch them. Only the really, really careless ones get caught.

reason: What effect do you think shows like Cops and Dallas SWAT have on police culture and police attitudes?

Burns: I can’t answer that question. I don’t watch any television.

reason: What’s your feeling on the militarization of domestic police departments, particularly as it relates to the drug war?

Burns: I think this whole thing was driven by the concept of numbers. You can quantify numbers, so if you’re in a war and you’re racking up numbers—numbers being arrests—it sets that military tone. Sort of like the way we’ve historically measured the success of wars in terms of casualties. The police departments that work in these hard neighborhoods are basically armies of occupation. Their job is to keep these people suppressed.

In Baltimore two years ago, they locked up 115,000 people from a population of 600,000. Now, let’s assume that they didn’t lock up anybody under the age of 8 or over the age of 70. They didn’t lock up that many white middle class people. That’s an awful lot of people from one particular group getting put behind bars. And many times, they’re getting locked up for things like sitting on the stoop drinking a beer, pissing in the alley, or just jaywalking in the street.

reason: The old “broken windows” theory, right?

Burns: [Laughs] Yeah. James Q. Wilson's trick. It doesn’t work. In fact, what it does do is alienate the police department from the community. So you’re an army of occupation, and because you’ve alienated the community, and you’re not getting any information. That’s a bad situation.

It’s the same thing they discovered in Iraq, oddly enough. Once they got away from the idea of suppression, they started getting much more information from Iraqis. The soldiers and Marines in Iraq basically use many of the techniques developed by law enforcement. They do the same type of searches. They gather the same type of information. They collate it the same way. They use cell phone data. They’re doing everything that law enforcement normally does. But they’re only successful when they’re connected with the people. In Baltimore, they’re not connected to the people because they’ve alienated everyone in the neighborhood.

So when you need to know something, when you need information, where do you go?

reason: What do you make of the "Stop Snitchin'" movement, the street campaign that discourages people from cooperating with police, which seems to have started in Baltimore?

Burns: Well, again, it’s something that’s incidental. It’s a symptom. If the police were connected, if the police were actively involved with the people in the neighborhood, the amount of information they would be getting would be so great that the whole idea of snitching wouldn’t be important. When I was a cop, having informants was a rare thing. They were looked down upon. I had sometimes as many as 50 guys working for me. I didn’t have to go out on the street. I could sit by the phone and just wait for the information to come. But you got that by being decent to people, working with them, helping them out on their little charges, stuff like that. That’s a lot of work and a lot of money comes out of your pocket to keep them happy and cooperative, but the amount of information you get back is profound.

Cops aren’t taught to do that anymore because today it’s all about numbers. You can get a number by just going up on the corner and grabbing somebody and getting a bag off of him. That’s the easy thing. If taking a guy in for drinking a beer on the street is a “1,” and catching the kingpin is a “1,” well, it takes two minutes to catch the guy with the beer can. It could take you two years to catch the kingpin. If numbers is all the department cares about, then the guy who pursues the kingpin is wasting his time.

And it is all about numbers. It’s how they talk, how they rate themselves. The fact that the murder rate in Baltimore stays constantly above the norm would be seem to be an indication that maybe they should try something different. But they’re bankrupt. They don’t have any idea what they need to do because they’re separated from the people. They’re not of the people. You’re policing as an army of occupation, not as police in the community. And that just doesn’t work.

reason: David Simon once wrote that you are “the living manifestation of lost wars,” since you were a soldier in Vietnam, a cop fighting the drug war, and a teacher in the public school system. Do you agree those three wars were or have been lost? Are there any institutional similarities you’ve observed that contributed to those three failures?

Burns: Well, we definitely lost Vietnam. And we lost Iraq. And we’ll lose any war where we allow an insurgency to exist. As for the war on drugs, I don’t think we’ll ever recover from the mindset we’ve gotten into to fight it. The educational system is an absolute and total disaster. And that of course is fueling the drug war, because there are so many kids who have no alternative but to spend their time on the corners.

The failure is institutional because no one sets out to lose these wars. This is dangerous stuff, self-defeating stuff. Education has no relevance. It doesn’t mean anything to these kids because they can’t connect to it. They spend those eight years or nine years in school because they have to. Of course, they have to learn something. And what they learn is how to sit quietly in a corner and make the school become a kind of training ground for the corners. The administration and the teachers basically become surrogate cops. And the kids play through these fantasies with the stand-in “cops” until they’ve tested their mettle enough to go up on the corners and try it with the real guys.

We’ve had 20, 30 years of this stuff, and 20, 30 years of spending billions of dollars on failed systems. And if you go to one of the private schools and see these kids in action and then go to an inner city public school, you can see the chasm. There’s separation even in the way of being, in the way they think, in how they operate. It’s profound, but it’s nothing new. We’ve been doing this for a long time.

reason: What reforms do you think are necessary? What can policy makers do to make public schools more effective?

Burns: Five years ago I couldn’t have given you an answer to that question. But I’ve learned about a program right now in Harlem. It’s been around for 12 years now. It’s called the Harlem Children’s Zone. The basic philosophy is so logical and so obvious. What works in the middle class is that you have input, the healthy positive input into an infant every day of that child’s life, as an infant and as a young child. Somebody’s always there. That’s how we raise our kids, and the success rate is very, very high. There are some failures in the middle class and the upper middle class, but the success rate is high.

That’s what they do in Harlem in the Children’s Zone—with about 35,000 kids. From birth, someone is with that kid until he gets out of college. They’re normal kids—not geniuses or anything—but they will be able to break the cycle of poverty and of drugs in those neighborhoods because those kids are not focused on drugs and poverty. They’re focused on the positive aspects that come from traditionally raising kids where you expect things from them. You tell them how good they are, you boost their egos, and you light the fires under them. That’s how you do it. That’s how it’s done in most middle class homes. I mean, that’s how simple it is. In Harlem, it cost them $4,500 a child.

And in talking with Geoff Canada, who runs the program up there, they’ve had 2,200 different groups—around 2,200 groups that have come to see their program. People who come to watch are impressed and want to go back to other states, to other countries, with the hope of implementing the program. Yet there isn’t another Children’s Zone that I know of anywhere in the country.

reason: Is that from a lack of funding?

Burns: From what Geoff surmises, it’s more about turf. If I come into your turf and let’s say you’re running a rehab center, or you’re running a day care program or whatever, that’s your little fiefdom, you know what I mean? That’s your little piece of the pie. You’re not going to give that up easily. You’re going to fight anything that tries to change that. You don’t want to be beholden to some bigger process, where you’ll then have to belong to something bigger and show results. No one wants to do that because they’re already not showing the kind of results that these types of processes require.

Maybe you’re showing anecdotal results. You know, “I saved this kid but I lost those 20 others.” These kinds of little empires are all over the place, and unfortunately, they have the ears of the politicians. It’s something where you have to almost come in and cut the Gordian knot and just do it. It makes absolute sense, but of course, we’re not focused on this, so we’re focused basically on surviving and shorter-term goals.

reason: You just finished shooting an HBO miniseries based on Generation Kill, Evan Wright’s book on the early stages of the Iraq War. You said earlier you believe Iraq is going to be a failure just as Vietnam was. Did you draw on your experiences in Vietnam at all in that project? Do you see many parallels between the two wars?

Burns: Just knowing the military was a big asset for me in helping to shape the series. The thing about Iraq is that it is the same scenario as Vietnam. There’s an insurgency that’s taken hold in the population, and once that happens, you might as well leave. There’s nothing you can do. And Iraq is getting ready to explode on us. Actually, it’s already exploded on us, but it’s going to continue to explode on us and we’re going to eventually be forced out. Or we’ll retire to these super bases and just try to drain the country of its oil. But we will never win the hearts and minds of those people. Fundamentally that was what we set out to do, to bring democracy to that country.

The same thing happened in Vietnam. These insurgencies are national movements. These people don’t want us in their country. And once that happens, once that mindset’s there, you know you’re in trouble. What we’re doing now is paying the Sunnis not to kill us. That only lasts for so long.

reason: How would you describe your personal politics?

Burns: Liberal. Liberal to radical. I’m pretty fed up with what’s going on.

reason: Is there any concrete policy you can think of that would lead to the more community oriented style of policing you’ve described?

Burns: You would have to change the nature of the institution. You’d have to stop making it a numbers game. Now, how do you do that with people who've been inculcated with this idea that it’s all about numbers? These guys have got computers, they've got charts, they’ve got all this kind of stuff, and it all revolves around locking people up. Clearly, that’s not the way to go. But it's how they sell themselves to politicians, and how they sell themselves to these community relation groups. This stuff is about locking people up.

The police should be focused on the most serious crimes, and in Baltimore the most serious crimes are murder, rape, and robbery. So you try to diffuse the other stuff, but you have to start putting your resources into those. Because if a person kills someone in the neighborhood, the neighborhood knows who did it. If the police don’t catch that person, and that guy’s walking around having beaten a murder, all the police credibility goes out the window.

It’s the same thing if you go up on the corner and you roust an addict while the guy sitting across from the addict has a gun. Everybody in the neighborhood knows he’s got the gun because he’s the bodyguard. And you don’t grab him. The people are thinking, well, maybe the dude is paying the police off. Why else would they grab the harmless addict but not the guy with the gun? Again, the problem is that the police are operating without information, and playing to the numbers. If I’m locking you up for petty stuff, you’re not going to be telling me shit. If I’m locking you up two and three times a month, you’re especially not going to tell me anything.

So how do you change all of this? You change the numbers game. You require police to reconnect with the people, and you start focusing everybody on the major crimes, the ones that make living very, very difficult—murder, rape, and robbery.

Radley Balko is a senior editor for reason.

Life Meets Art

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 17:10:00 EST

For you fans of The Wire:

The Philadelphia Inquirer is running a multipart series about Philadelphia's homeless, inspired by the gruesome death of a homeless man. This is delicious because the Inquirer's editor is none other than Bill Marimow, former Sun managing editor, nemesis of David Simon, and Simon's supposed model for managing editor Thomas Klebanow on The Wire. Klebanow, of course, is supervising the Sun's special homeless investigation, inspired by the gruesome deaths of homeless men.

The joke on the show, of course, is that the homeless series is nothing more than cheap Pulitzer bait, one habit of contemporary journalism that caused Simon to leave the field.

Oscar Roundup '08: Was There Blood?

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 00:03:00 EST

From Sunday's Baltimore Sun:

[U]ntil the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers settled their differences, it didn't matter how many times the Oscar folks assured everyone they had plans to meet any contingency. It didn't matter how many billboards went up along the freeways promoting Oscar as "The One. The Only." It didn't matter that streets around the Kodak Theatre were still scheduled to be closed the week leading up to today's ceremony.

What mattered was that the writers were on strike, which meant they wouldn't be around to craft all the show's witty banter.

In other words: The biggest winners this year were the writers, who were nearly shown up as superfluous. Without that tedious "witty" "banter," we would have had the most watchable Oscar night in years. Except, of course, for the songs and montages.

As for the awards themselves...I have a toddler, which means I don't usually see movies until they come out on DVD. So I haven't actually watched any of this year's Best Picture nominees. But I'll give a tentative cheer for the fact that the Academy chose to honor the film that seems most likely to be good.

Hippies in Space: Some '70s Flashbacks

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 10:21:00 EST

In the days before camcorders and YouTube, fans of countercultural DIY video put their hopes in Sony Portapaks and cable access television. Howard Rheingold has just posted one artifact from that era, shot in 1976 and starring a young Rheingold as "Howard K. Martian, extraterrestrial anthropologist."

On a related note (sort of), here's an online edition of Space Colonies, a book published in 1977 by the CoEvolution Quarterly. The Quarterly was a spinoff from the Whole Earth Catalog, which wasn't just a bible for the back-to-the-land movement but offered a helping hand to those who wanted to go up-to-the-skies.

On Super Tuesday, Silence Is Golden

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:11:00 EST

Comic genius and surprisingly savvy political observer Harry Shearer is the voice of Principal Skinner on The Simpsons, and the face of Derek Smalls in This Is Spinal Tap. He was also the impresario behind a video art exhibit consisting of dead time on cable satellite news feeds called Raw Feeds--the most famous clip of which was the infamous "John Edwards fixes his hair with a compact mirror" sequence. Now, he brings us the first in a series of Silent Debates between major presidential contenders. Shearer asks incisive questions and the candidates sit and fidget. Brilliant. Below, Hillary and Romney face off in a flurry of dead air and distracted looks:

Cross posted on reason.tv

'You Can't Turn Back the Ocean'

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 08:07:00 EST

Kurt Loder has been chronicling cutting-edge culture in the United States since the 1970s, first with the defunct rock magazine Circus and then during a legendary stint at Rolling Stone. Along the way, he co-authored Tina Turner’s memoir, which became the basis for the hit movie What’s Love Got To Do With It. In 1988 Loder joined MTV as a news anchor and now, among other tasks, serves as the channel’s film critic. His weekly reviews, available online at mtv.com, are as broad in their selection of films as they are incisive in their analysis.

Consider Loder’s take on Michael Moore’s health care documentary Sicko. “As a proud socialist, the director appears to feel that there are few problems in life that can’t be solved by government regulation (that would be the same government that’s already given us the U.S. Postal Service and the Department of Motor Vehicles),” wrote Loder, a military veteran, in June. “What’s the problem with government health systems? Moore’s movie doesn’t ask that question, although it does unintentionally provide an answer. When governments attempt to regulate the balance between a limited supply of health care and an unlimited demand for it they’re inevitably forced to ration treatment.”

Born in Ocean City, New Jersey, in 1945, Loder is unabashedly libertarian in his politics and optimisticin his cultural outlook. As part of the October conference “Reason in D.C.,” Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie interviewed Loder on the impact of technology (liberating), the rise of celebrity culture (noxious), the growth of the nanny state (really noxious), and the future of mass media (grim, but that’s a good thing). What follows is an edited transcript, with audience questions mixed directly into the discussion for readability. The full interview can be viewed at reason.tv; comments should be sent to letters@reason.com.

Reason: Major record companies complain they’re losing market share and revenue. Major daily newspapers say the same thing. Broadcast networks still command a huge audience, but it’s much smaller than before. The big outlets don’t seem to have the monopoly on audience they once did. Is the decentralization of audience, of culture, a good thing?

Kurt Loder: We’re better off with new technology. Music is proliferating in a way it never has before. CDs are over. DVDs will soon be over. You’ll download this stuff. I think it’s a good thing. Record companies will change. They’ll have to.

Copyright is going to be the big change. I think creators should be paid for their work. I’m on that side of the debate. If you make a record, you should be paid for it. Record companies do pay artists for the music they make, eventually. It’s remarkable how little
they pay them—initially, especially. If you’re a young band, you’re going to make nothing originally. Maybe on your third record, you’ll start making money. It’s pretty amazing.

We used to live in a command-media world. You had no choice but to look at NBC, CBS, ABC; there was nothing else. If you wanted big stories, you went to The New York Times or The Washington Post. I think blogging and the Internet have changed that entirely. They’ve shattered the monopoly on information.

To give just one example: The “Baghdad Diarist” in The New Republic [a soldier who wrote an article describing alleged bad behavior by U.S. troops in Iraq] was a total fraud. It was exposed by military bloggers who came out and said this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. That wouldn’t have happened 20 years ago.

Reason: As a journalist, how do you feel about the audience fact-checking you? And having direct access to you?

Loder: Some people are always going to call you an idiot. Some people are going to say you’re great or you’re an asshole. You have to get used to that. But that’s good too. It’s good to hear directly what people think. It’s good to get rid of filters. I think we live in a great, hopeful age for media. I think it’s the best of all possible times.

Anybody can be heard now. You put something out into the ocean of the Internet, and it bounces all over everywhere because things can be passed on so well. It’s a great time to be a filmmaker because the technology we have allows you to make films and upload them, and people can see your work. You can make digital music and upload it, and people will hear it. This is the golden age of communication.

Reason: One of the great bogeymen of contemporary media discourse is the consolidation of media ownership. MTV itself is part of a giant conglomerate. Why shouldn’t fewer companies owning more outlets be worrisome?

Loder: MTV is part of Viacom, which controls Paramount, and so on and so forth. It’s the evil empire, right? But these giants—Time Warner, Viacom—are facing an upstart culture now. Things are coming from the ground up, and they can’t really deal with it all. They’re very upset about their content being taken and simply uploaded on [the video sharing site] YouTube. Viacom has a billion-dollar lawsuit against YouTube.

They can’t really fight it. They have to become part of it. They have to buy part of it.

Reason: Should we worry about attempts, whether legal or technological, to clamp down on culture?

Loder: You can’t turn back the ocean. I don’t think there can be a clampdown. You can’t go back to three channels and two or three national newspapers. It’ll never happen again. There’s too much good journalism online. I love newspapers and magazines, but I think they’re on the way out. And that may not be a bad thing.

Reason: Do you worry about the fragmentation of culture? Some critics worry about what’s lost from the time when we all had to listen to the same stuff or see the same stuff.

Loder: I think one reason that things are so fragmented is that there’s no talent that can unify the world like the Beatles did. The Beatles appealed to everybody, even old people. Nowadays, you can talk about bands where they are always compared to something else. “It’s like nu-metal, but it’s death metal with touches of ska”—that sort of thing.

But as long as you don’t have this monolithic critical culture defining what things are, you’re going to have to go and seek out music for yourself. Things will be a little splintered until something comes around that is unifying. We’re still waiting for that day, but in the meantime there’s still lots
of good music around. But you have to go look for it. It’s not just going to be force-fed to you, although God knows people will try to do that.

Reason: Some of the same technology that allows us to express ourselves more freely also means the state can surveil us more easily and effectively. You’re very outspoken in your opposition to the rise of surveillance cameras in your hometown of New York.

Loder: [New York Mayor] Michael Bloomberg wants more and more surveillance cameras. There are already quite a few, but he’s inspired by London. Britain is so ahead of us in terms of surveillance and the nanny state. Bloomberg was recently in London, talking to his opposite number, Ken Livingstone, and he was thrilling to all the surveillance cameras. There’s one on every corner, on every bus, on every subway. Bloomberg said, and I quote, “We’re way behind. We do have to catch up.”

This is a scary guy. I understand the fear of terrorism, but people don’t seem to fully understand what would happen if this surveillance regime passed into the hands of less benign people. You have to look ahead to that, and no one does. There are 4 million surveillance cameras in Great Britain. We’re heading in that direction.

Reason: Why is that scary?

Loder: I don’t want people watching me.

Reason: That’s a curious statement coming from a guy on MTV.

Loder: Very well. I don’t want the government watching me. There are cameras that issue tickets if you’re going through [yellow] lights. Soon they’ll be able to tell if you’re smoking in your car or using a cell phone. You’ll be getting tickets for this. It’s already happening in Europe. Do we want it to happen here? I don’t think so. You always have to keep an eye on the state.

Reason: How do you feel about other nanny state issues? Smoking bans, trans fat bans, you name it; these are all part of reality in Bloomberg’s New York and, increasingly, other parts of the U.S. and the West.

Loder: Bloomberg most recently started a crackdown on Mister Softee ice cream trucks in the city. Now if you want to sell ice cream, when you pull your truck over to the curb, you’re not allowed to ring your bells. What can you say about this sort of thing? It’s amazing that people don’t rise up with pitchforks.

You can just go on and on and on. Calabasas, California, has become a city where you basically can’t smoke. The whole secondhand smoke thing is ridiculous. I understand people not liking smoke. But there should be places where, if the owner doesn’t mind you smoking in his bar or restaurant, you should be able to do that. What’s wrong with that?

There are really interesting contrasts. I think San Francisco just started its first injection room, where the city will provide people with nurses to shoot people up with heroin. So you’ll have a clean environment to get high in, but it’s still illegal to smoke in bars. I just don’t understand.

Reason: How do you define yourself politically?

Loder: I think people should be free to do what they want to do. I think it’s very simple. I don’t think anyone puts faith in the Republicans or the Democrats. You know, Warren Beatty once said something very good. Seriously. Somebody asked him if we needed a third party in this country, and he said, “I think we need a second one.” I think that’s true.

Reason: Where did your politics come from?

Loder: I grew up on the Jersey Shore, on a little barrier island. The Atlantic Ocean was on one side, the bay was on the other. Everyone there hunted and fished and clammed and got crabs out of the bay. And one day my brother told me someone had come down from the Bureau of Petty Harassment or something and they measured the temperature of the water and had decided it was a little too warm and a certain type of bacteria might incubate in it and there was a chance that might harm the clams. And so, from now on, no one was supposed to take clams out of the bay anymore. Which everyone ignored. And no one died. That was before the government got tenacious about this stuff. So I thought that was pretty stupid right there.

Later I got a draft notice, which focused my thinking.

And then one day, I was working for a newspaper in New Jersey and this flyer came across my desk from the local Libertarian Party. At the top, it said, “Free Love and Free Markets.” And I thought, “That’s some pretty interesting territory.” And that’s pretty much where I am.

Reason: How’s your ideology received at MTV?

Loder: I don’t go around preaching it. I mean, people know what I think. People in the media are sort of liberal. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that. It’s a liberal world. I don’t know why that is. Maybe they all go to the same school or something. As [ABC News’] John Stossel says, this is the water they swim in, and they don’t even notice it. But not everyone in the media is liberal. Apparently at The Wall Street Journal, there are a lot of Democrats on staff.

Still, they let me do what I want to do. I’ve got to give them that.

Reason: How do your views play with your younger colleagues at MTV? What political trends do you see among the kids who watch MTV?

Loder: It’s hard to generalize about younger people because they’re all different. I think you’d be surprised at how many people are not entirely, screamingly liberal. When I reviewed Sicko, you’d be surprised at the number of people in my company who emailed me and said, “You know, you got that exactly right. I’m glad somebody finally said that about this guy.” You never know where support is going to come from.

Reason: Rock and roll has always been viewed as an instrument of rebellion. Yet it seems that performers are increasingly establishment in their views, and unapologetic about inflicting their politics on their audiences. They’ve gone from saying “Don’t trust anyone over 30” and “Down with the man” to defending Social Security and pushing for national health care. What do you think about that?

Loder: I don’t remember Elvis Presley telling us what to do about global warming. Nobody should ever expect millionaire celebrities to save the world. I don’t know if you remember the Time magazine that had Bono on the cover and asked, “Can Bono Save the World?” Well, the answer is no.

All these people seem to have an opinion. I find it boring myself, but if you’re 15 years old, you might find it rousing. I have no need for it.

I think we should realize that rock and roll is something that happened, and it’s over, like the folk music period. There’s rock, which is something different, which is something that is usually taken to be what happened after the Beatles became more self-conscious. Today, when kids who are 19 have a band, they walk into the room and sign a record contract; they arrive with lawyers and publicists and all the stuff. It’s hard to be rebellious with that. Bands will say they want to change the world and “down with the man,” and they’re working for Time Warner.

Again, don’t trust anything celebrities say. They’re not going to save anybody’s world. Not even their own, often.

Reason: You’ve suggested reasons for concern about freedom. But you’re optimistic about the future, about American life and American culture. Why is that, if some things seem so dire?

Loder: You have to be optimistic about the human endeavor, I think. There are always creative people. I think the only thing we have to worry about is people who would oppress us, which would be the government. Only the government can censor us. Only the government can take from us. I’ve never really believed in government. I don’t think you can. I believe in people, and the good they’ll do.

Humping in Media Accounts

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 22:52:00 EST

So the number one story of the night is Hillary Clinton's comeback, and the number two story is John McCain's comeback. But I'm still stuck on Ralph Reed's comeback. Jack Abramoff's favorite Christian is sitting on CNN's panel of analysts, pattering away like a respectable public figure. I don't watch much cable news anymore, so someone out there will have to tell me: How long has this been going on? Is it a new development? Was Dan Rostenkowski unavailable?

Aliens Stole My PSA Money

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 19:52:00 EST

Students for Sensible Drug Policy reports that the omnibus spending bill the House has approved and the Senate is considering cuts funding for the federal government's obnoxious anti-drug ads by 40 percent, allocating half of what the Bush administration requested. (Congress had to get the money for projects like the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service somewhere.) Here SSDP briefly reviews two decades of anti-drug propaganda and questions Slate writer Seth Stephenson's judgment that the latest batch of TV spots is "very possibly the most effective, and least offensive, anti-marijuana campaign ever created."

Anarchy Swings

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 16:47:00 EST

Writing in The New York Sun, Will Friedwald explains what made Spike Jones great:

Jones...brought two major innovations to American pop. The first was the idea that sound effects used on radio and film soundtracks, when used in tempo and rhythm, could become an essential part of the music; instead of building to a rim shot or a clarinet break, Jones would punctuate a melody with a gunshot, a cowbell, a car backfiring, or a woman screaming. Ornette Coleman once expressed admiration for this element of Jones's performance -- the idea of dissolving the barrier between noise and music -- and one can imagine John Cage or the avant-gardists of any other musical epoch feeling the same way.

Before Jones, nearly every bandleader played novelty songs, but they were considered the low-slung end of the music business: Jones discovered that it was possible to extract great comedy from great music, from Tchaikovsky (as in "The Nutcracker") to Johnny Mercer ("That Old Black Magic" and "Laura"). Jones also played silly songs, but he was funniest when he took a piece of real music and relentlessly gagged it up -- not just with garbage cans, barking dogs, bird calls, and falling anvils, but with a band that sounded like Salvador Dalí's idea of Dixieland.

A new DVD collection, Spike Jones: The Legend, collects four hours of Jones' TV specials from 1951 and 1952. Friedwald doesn't care for Jones' television series of the late '50s, writing that it "reduced Jones's inspired lunacy to mere grist for the variety-show mill, with guest stars and sketches that were almost never as funny as we'd have liked them to be." But he loves these earlier programs, especially the first one in the set: "This hour-long show is easily the most entertaining piece of visual footage that Jones and his band, the City Slickers, left us. As time passed and he did more television, the more like everyone else Jones became, but this first show is more or less a camera pointed in the direction of Jones's legendary touring stage show."

All the bits that you've heard about are here: the bass saxophonist who sends a frog flying out of the bell of his instrument; trombonists whose trousers fall and rise according to the pitch of the note they play; two headless dudes enjoying a pantomime conversation; the bass fiddle that gives birth to a midget; two chickens serenading each other to the tune of "Holiday for Strings," as if to illustrate that hope is the thing with feathers or that they know why the guy in the bird suit sings; the harpist on the sidelines of the action who spends most of the show knitting and puffing on a nasty-looking stogie during her own solo. You can't trust any instrument: Everything from the piano to the violin is liable to explode at any moment.

Then there's the ringleader himself, who, when he isn't conducting a classical piece with a toilet plunger for a baton, chasing a chorus girl with a giant sword, or parading in mermaid drag, is a remarkably understated presence, looking on from the side with a David Letterman-like smirk.

This clip is pre-TV, but it should give you the flavor of Jones' work:

Elsewhere: Kevin Grace mocks me for something I wrote about Jones.

Celestial TV Jukebox

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 10:01:00 EST

First The Daily Show, now South Park:

MTV Networks plans to make every clip from every episode of the hit animated comedy "South Park" available for free online next year as part of a strategy to reach consumers everywhere.

The decision from the biggest division of media conglomerate Viacom Inc follows on the heels of the "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," whose popularity online has helped boost television viewership....

"One does not diminish the other by any stretch of the imagination. That is kind of our hat trick," MTV Networks Chairman and Chief Executive Judy McGrath said at the Reuters Media Summit in New York on Wednesday.

Whole story here. South Park's site is here. Reason coverage of South Park here, here, here, and here.

[Hat tip: Baked Penguin.]

Syndicalism on Sunset Blvd.

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 16:28:00 EST

The L.A. Times' Patrick Goldstein argues that the writers' strike "is about new media yet both sides seem to be following old-school models." He proposes an alternative:

The stars became free agents long ago. In the last few years, with billions of private-equity dollars flooding the business, the studios have lost their lock on financing too.

All that's left is marketing and distribution. It's hard to equal the way studios launch their summer popcorn extravaganzas with a $40-million marketing blitz. But as more entertainment migrates to the Internet, where distribution is basically free to anyone with a computer, the studios will lose that monopoly as well. If the last couple of weeks are any indication, with clips from out-of-work comedy writers popping up every day, the Web could be littered with new must-see video sites by Christmas. Remember: After barely a year in existence, YouTube was bought by Google for $1.65 billion. On the Internet, good ideas travel fast....

The WGA is fighting the good fight. But the glory days of "Norma Rae" are gone. Real change in today's world comes from the energy and ideas of entrepreneurs, not from labor negotiations. To take control of their work, writers have to cut out the middleman.

Goldstein isn't anti-strike, by the way. He thinks it could be the crisis that forces the issue:

This kind of creative freedom already exists in Silicon Valley, where the creators of product are its owners. Software entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, who helped found Netscape, makes an eloquent argument on his blog that a prolonged strike could undermine the studios' control of production and distribution, ushering in a new showbiz model built in the image of Silicon Valley.

Andreessen's argument is here.

There's plenty to quibble with here. But Goldstein's column and Andreessen's post are the most thought-provoking things I've read about the strike, even though neither answers the most important question: How many episodes of King of the Hill are already in the can?

[Hat tip: Sara Rimensnyder.]