Monthly Archives: July 2007

A is for Alzheimers, F is for Fake

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Paul Wat­son first brought Bri­tain docu-soap in 1974 with a twelve part series, The Fam­ily. He also made Aussie-based tit­il­later Sylvania Waters. His latest film, Mal­colm & Bar­bara: Love’s farewell, is an alto­gether more sober affair about a mar­riage end­ing as hus­band Mal­colm dies of com­plic­a­tions arising from Alzheimers.

ITV will air it on August 8th, and (accord­ing to the Tele­graph) their pub­li­city claimed the doc­u­ment­ary “ends when Bar­bara calls Paul to ask him to come as Mal­colm is about to die … In mov­ing scenes, Mal­colm is sur­roun­ded by his fam­ily and Bar­bara strokes his head as he passes away.”

The Guard­ian takes up the story:

After the press screen­ing on July 18, journ­al­ists were left with the impres­sion that the scene ended with the film­ing of his moment of death, as the shot froze on Mr Pointon’s still face.

How­ever, it is now under­stood that this foot­age of Mr Poin­ton slip­ping into a coma, with the rest of his griev­ing fam­ily around his bed­side, was filmed two and a half days before his death.

Mr Shaps [ITV Dir­ector of Pro­grammes] today said: “The film maker respons­ible, Paul Wat­son, has now con­firmed that the film does not por­tray the moment of Malcolm’s passing, which was in fact some days later.

“This will be made clear at the end of the film on trans­mis­sion and should have been made clear earlier.”

How did this come to light? Well, in a glor­i­ous piece of mor­al­ising com­ment­ary promp­ted by the selling of the film, Minette Mar­rin unleashed a ser­mon on the fear­ful­ness of death, which led to Pointon’s brother Gra­ham writ­ing to set her straight, as you can see below.

So what do we make of Wat­son? Back in 1995 he told the Inde­pend­ent:

People accuse me of manip­u­la­tion and I admit to manip­u­la­tion — in the cutting-room. It’s called edit­ing. If you shoot 10 shots, what do you do? You exer­cise pre­ju­dice, pas­sion, cer­tain pro­cliv­it­ies. You build up an authored view. Hydro­gen and oxy­gen on their own are bor­ing, inert gases. Whack them together and who’d have thought they’d make this thing we all need called water? I’m inter­ested in put­ting the essence of some­thing in a sequence.

I’m a devi­ous, sub­vers­ive, dif­fi­cult sod of a film-maker, because now I know my craft skills so well I can make people five days later feel the hid­den agenda to a film. Hid­den agenda sounds so Machiavel­lian, but it isn’t.

I would guess that Wat­son thinks that Alzheimers is import­ant, that the only way to get atten­tion for the story was through a gim­mick (death on cam­era), and that every­one con­cerned thought the film’s mes­sage about the dis­ease and its con­sequences more import­ant than the death itself. Once again, it is the selling of a film that seems to mislead.

And now Mal­colm Pointon’s passing, hav­ing been grist to the mill of TV’s death– depict­ing insens­it­iv­ity, is reground at the stone of TV fakery. And Paul Wat­son is a lat­ter­day Clif­ford Irving.

And mean­while — some­where out there — Minette Mar­rin rolls up another half-understood tragedy and pre­pares to dis­charge another cannonade.

The wisdom of Neil Postman

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Mike Rosen­blum has been riff­ing over on his blog about Neil Post­man and the U.S. pres­id­en­tial debates. Back in the day, Post­man wrote 1980s media clas­sic Amus­ing Ourselves to Death, which blames tele­graphy for all our mod­ern woes.

IMO, before the tele­graph, inform­a­tion over­load came in the the form of reli­gious works (try read­ing the Bible over break­fast, mak­ing sense of it, and then using its pre­cepts as a prompt for action — you’ll schism your­self before you’ve even reached the gospels).

Still, if you haven’t read Post­man in a while, dig him out, if only for nug­gets like this:

How often does it occur that inform­a­tion provided you on morn­ing radio or tele­vi­sion, or in the morn­ing news­pa­per, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would oth­er­wise not have taken, or provides insight into some prob­lem you are required to solve?

…most of our daily news in inert, con­sist­ing of inform­a­tion that gives us some­thing to talk about but can­not lead to any mean­ing­ful action … the situ­ation cre­ated by tele­graphy, and then exacer­bated by later tech­no­lo­gies, made the rela­tion­ship between inform­a­tion an action both abstract and remote.

For the first time in human his­tory, people were faced with the prob­lem of inform­a­tion glut, which means that sim­ul­tan­eously they were faced with the prob­lem of a dimin­ished social and polit­ical potency … For the first time, we were sent inform­a­tion which answered no ques­tion we had asked, and which, in any case, did not per­mit the right of reply.

Helen Thomas

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Sits at the front of the White House press brief­ings. She was forty when John F. Kennedy won the pres­id­ency, and he was the first pres­id­ent she repor­ted on. George W. Bush prob­ably won’t be the last.

For an 86 year old she’s pretty act­ive. Just the other day she spoke at a fun­draiser for the Planned Par­ent­hood of Greater Iowa group. Here’s what she said:

“It seems the present con­ser­vat­ive [U.S. Supreme] Court is tar­get­ing Roe v. Wade and there’s not much you can do about it unless Con­gress is will­ing to deal with these touchy sub­jects,” she said. “Without pres­sure, I doubt they will.”…

“People were say­ing dur­ing the Reagan admin­is­tra­tion that this was about the Supreme Court,” she said. “I wasn’t sure at that time what they meant. But the truth is that the court is their one last resort to push their agenda. It is their one last resort to prevail.”

“Let’s return to the true ideals of the Bill of Rights,” she said. “The issue is not the right to live. The issue is the kind of life. The issue is free­dom without gov­ern­ment or out­side interference.”

Anti-abortion cam­paigner Jill Stanek picked up on this speech in her blog. Here’s what she said:

What goes around comes around, Helen. In that circle of life, you’re a little too close to a time when you’re going to be as help­less as those pre­b­orns you advoc­ate killing…

The first ques­tion eld­erly people seek­ing med­ical treat­ment should be asked is if they are pro-life or pro-choice. If they answer the lat­ter, they should be moved to the back of the line.

A touch­ing trib­ute to one of journalism’s octo­gen­arian work­ers. As a card-carrying athe­ist and former choir­boy, here’s a few words from Cor­inthi­ans, Jill — “and the greatest of these is love.”

Of course, like all texts it’s open to inter­pret­a­tion. In this case I think Jill’s inter­pret­ing the New Test­a­ment as mean­ing “spew hate-filled invect­ive.” I don’t care which side of the line you want to come down on regard­ing abor­tion, but ped­dling threats dressed up as com­ment­ary seems to me to rub the line right out.

Still, God bless her. And if I can annoy people like Jill at Helen’s age, God bless me too.

The talk radio formula

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Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio is one of my favour­ite media movies. Eric Bogo­sian plays talk show host Barry Champlain. Only the polit­ics tell you that it was made in 1988 (instead of a con­ser­vat­ive blow­hard, Bogo­sian plays a mor­ally bank­rupt lib­eral). See­ing it again the other night reminded me that the for­mula for talk radio has changed little in a quarter of a cen­tury. Except, per­haps, that it’s become slicker, and more pro­fes­sional — there is now a for­mula you could actu­ally write down.

On which topic, there is a bril­liant 2005 essay on talk radio by David Foster Wal­lace, but it sits behind a pay-wall at the Atlantic. Now I sub­scribe, and per­haps you do too, but if you don’t and the excerpt below doesn’t remind you that some things are worth the price of admission…well, noth­ing will. (BTW it deals with the behead­ing of Nick Berg in Iraq.)

John Zie­g­ler, who is a talk-radio host of unflag­ging industry, broad gen­eral know­ledge, mord­ant wit, and extreme con­vic­tion, makes a par­tic­u­lar spe­cialty of media cri­ti­cism. One object of his dis­gust and con­tempt in the churn so far has been the U.S. net­works’ spine­less, pat­ron­iz­ing decision not to air the Berg video­tape and thus to deny Amer­ic­ans “a true and accur­ate view of the bar­bar­ity, the utter deprav­ity, of these people.” Even more out­rageous, to Mr. Z., is the main­stream media’s lack of out­rage about Berg’s taped murder versus all that same media’s hand-wringing and invect­ive over the recent pho­tos of alleged pris­oner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, which he views as a clear indic­a­tion of the deluded, blame– America-first men­tal­ity of the U.S. press. It is an asso­ci­ated con­trast between Amer­ic­ans’ mor­ti­fied response to the Abu Ghraib pho­tos and reports of the Arab world’s phleg­matic reac­tion to the Berg video that leads to his churn’s cli­max, which is that we are plainly, unam­bigu­ously bet­ter than the Arab world — whereupon John Zie­g­ler invites listen­ers to respond if they are so moved, repeats the spe­cial mne­monic KFI call-in num­ber, and breaks for the :30 news and ads, on time to the second…

Depend­ing on one’s polit­ics, sens­it­iv­it­ies, and tastes in argu­ment­a­tion, it is not hard to think of objec­tions to John Ziegler’s cli­mactic claim, or at least of some urgent requests for cla­ri­fic­a­tion. Like: Exactly what and whom does “the Arab world” refer to? And why are a few edit­or­i­als and man-on-the-street inter­views suf­fi­cient to rep­res­ent the atti­tude and char­ac­ter of a whole diverse region? And why is al Jazeera’s show­ing of the Berg video so awful if Mr. Z. has just cas­tig­ated the U.S. net­works for not show­ing it? Plus, of course, what is “bet­ter” sup­posed to mean here? More moral? More dif­fid­ent about our immor­al­ity? Is it not, in our own his­tory, pretty easy to name some Berg-level atro­cit­ies com­mit­ted by U.S. nation­als, or agen­cies, or even gov­ern­ments, and approved by much of our popu­lace? Or per­haps this: Leav­ing aside whether John Ziegler’s asser­tions are true or coher­ent, is it even remotely help­ful or pro­duct­ive to make huge, sweep­ing claims about some other region’s/culture’s inferi­or­ity to us? What pos­sible effect can such remarks have except to incite hatred? Aren’t they sort of irresponsible?

It is true that no one on either side of the studio’s thick win­dow expresses or even alludes to any of these objec­tions. But this is not because Mr. Z.’s sup­port staff is stu­pid, or hate­ful, or even neces­sar­ily on board with sweep­ing jin­go­istic claims. It is because they under­stand the par­tic­u­lar codes and imper­at­ives of large-market talk radio. The fact of the mat­ter is that it is not John Ziegler’s job to be respons­ible, or nuanced, or to think about whether his on-air com­ments are pro­duct­ive or dan­ger­ous, or cogent, or even defens­ible. That is not to say that the host would not defend his “we’re bet­ter” — strenu­ously — or that he does not believe it’s true. It is to say that he has exactly one on-air job, and that is to be stim­u­lat­ing. An obvi­ous point, but it’s one that’s often over­looked by people who com­plain about pro­pa­ganda, mis­in­form­a­tion, and irre­spons­ib­il­ity in com­mer­cial talk radio. Whatever else they are, the above-type objec­tions to “We’re bet­ter than the Arab world” are calls to account­ab­il­ity. They are the sort of cri­ti­cisms one might make of, say, a journ­al­ist, someone whose job descrip­tion includes being respons­ible about what he says in pub­lic. And KFI’s John Zie­g­ler is not a journ­al­ist — he is an enter­tainer. Or maybe it’s bet­ter to say that he is part of a pecu­liar, mod­ern, and very pop­u­lar type of news industry, one that man­ages to enjoy the author­ity and influ­ence of journ­al­ism without the stodgy con­straints of fair­ness, objectiv­ity, and respons­ib­il­ity that make try­ing to tell the truth such a drag for every­one involved. It is a fright­en­ing industry, though not for any of the simple reas­ons most crit­ics give.

It’s a long, thought­ful essay — give it a go.