Identity Crisis
The primary thesis of Wires and Lights is that entertainment media tells the most about a people because it tries to tell us what we want to hear. So what does this season of American television tell us about Americans?
Culturally, Americans are going through an identity crisis. Beliefs about who we are as a people are being challenged and shattered left and right. Of course we want to believe that regardless of past imperialist adventures, the United States is a force for good in the world, and at heart an honorable nation. Even in the face of growing economic inequality we want to believe that the U.S. is an economic bastion and a beacon of prosperity. But seeing the abuses of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and the financial Hindenburg that is Wall Street—well, the comfortable truths we relied on are revealed to have never been true in the first place.
Hu Jintao Just as Surprised as You About YouTube Being Blocked
This morning, Chinese President Hu Jintao called an emergency press conference and expressed shock at accusations that the Chinese Government was somehow responsible for the recent blockage of YouTube.
The Loss of Soft Power: It Begins
About 5 months ago, I posted an article, The Loss of Soft Power, about how China’s rise in soft power would eventually meet the same problems that the United States had to deal with decades ago. Namely, that in times of duress, China would come first, and that Chinese companies would either have to back out of their riskier investments, or China would have to send in military forces.
Well, a recent Department of Defense study entitled “Military Power of the People’s Republic of China 2009” says that China does not have the capacity to send troops abroad anytime within the next decade, so China won’t be sending soldiers in to protect their investments anytime soon. Because of that, Chinese companies are starting to back out. Here are some key sentences:
China has backed away from some of its riskiest and most aggressive plans, looking for the same guarantees that Western companies have long sought for their investments: economic and political stability.
Cover to Cover
The most recent cover of The Economist was quite an interesting one: an homage to Saul Steinberg’s iconic New Yorker cover in which a distorted map of the world showed the streets of New York dominating the environment, with the rest of the United States an afterthought and China (along with Russia and Japan) mere blips on the horizon.
The Economist‘s cover does not have the United States as a corresponding blip—instead it’s depicted as a ruined land, with Wall Street a sinkhole, the Statue of Liberty a beggar, and swaths of homes foreclosed. The blips for China are Africa (land of natural resources) and Europe (land of designer handbags).
Toward a Less Flat World
The weakness that the global supply change has displayed will surely mean changes for the world. As Thomas Friedman has argued, the world has become much flatter in the past few decades. The growing trend of pursuing a first-world living, the globalization of commerce, and the export of certain cultural icons worldwide has had startling implications. But as the global economy, for the first time in decades, begins to shrink, one wonders if this means the end of other trends as well.
The News is Pasteurized
Last Thursday on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show Jon Stewart interviewed CNBC financial host Jim Cramer for the good part of a half-hour. It was a culmination of a week-long series of segments in which the The Daily Show attacked CNBC, a financial news network, for failures to responsibly or accurately report on the economic meltdown or any of its warning signs.
Afterward, the majority of news outlets framed the interview as a personal victory of Stewart over Cramer, the end of a “war of words” or the clash between two media personalities, saying that “Stewart won by knockout” or that “Stewart wrecked Cramer.” The fact that the news media focused on the personalities and less on the substance of the interview only reinforces a point made by Stewart
Security Checkup
Last fall, when the days began cool, I stopped going through security checks. I still carried my messenger bag with me, but now I could hide it under a peacoat and pass unmolested into the subway. It was great, until I realized that someone with a bomb could probably do the same thing.
Homogenizing News
I had a very frustrating conversation with a Chinese woman once. She was a bright, intelligent person, web-savvy (she was a computer programmer), and on her way to Redmond to work at Microsoft. We began talking about the news, and I may have said some disparaging things about the reliability of the Chinese media. What surprised me was the sudden vehemence of her reaction. She was quite offended by the insinuation that the Chinese media was not trustworthy, and countered by telling me that the Western media was just as biased and unreliable. “How do you know that what they say is true? So how can you say that what the Chinese media says is not true? Maybe it’s not always completely true, but the West is just as bad.”
The End of News Freedom?
No, The New York Times will not die. Neither will The Washington Post; at the very least, their robust national circulation and storied history will make them viable—if not necessarily profitable—arms of whatever multinational conglomerate currently owns them or may own them in the future. No, what we should be worried about are the Chicago Tribunes and the Los Angeles Times of the nation, the Houston Chronicles and the Sacramento Bees. The non-national papers are the ones that will suffer the most from the current newspaper crisis, and in some ways they are the ones most critical for the lifeblood of the American journalistic institution.
The End of Free News
Recently, there’s been quite a spate of articles proclaiming the death of news as we know it. Newspapers are teetering on the edge of financial insolvency, shedding staff like bad dandruff, and bemoaning the popularity of aggregation sites like The Huffington Post (or, for example, our own site). A number of suggestions have been floated to solve the problem, mostly involving making people pay for the news access that they currently get for free on the web. But will this alone be enough?
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