You’ve just gone live with a lurid story over how Stephen Hawking visits sex clubs.
How in God’s name is this anybody’s business? I mean, part of me cringes even bringing it up because it just gives more exposure to this garbage, but I do so because I think it brings up a wider issue worth addressing.
Y’know, years ago–before any and all sense of privacy and decorum was crushed into non-existence–if this crap had crossed the desk of any responsible news editor, he would have taken one look at it and asked a simple question: “Is this news?” And by “news,” he would have meant information that was covered by the public’s right to know.
The answer in this instance would have been an uncategorical “no.” He would have tossed it. He might even have upbraided the reporter for wasting his time with such garbage. He would have said, “This is tabloid crap.”
Remember tabloid crap? The tabloids were considered the nadir of journalism. They weren’t even seen as real newspapers. Any serious journalist wouldn’t have been caught dead writing a story that would have been front-page fodder for the likes of the National Enquirer.
I know it makes me seem like some sort of elderly coot if I wax nostalgic for “the old days,” but you know what? Journalism used to mean standards. Integrity. An understanding that just because something was known to the news organization, it did not automatically have to become known to the general population. Here’s a rule of thumb: if you can’t imagine Walter Cronkite reporting the story–if you simply cannot hear these words coming out of his mouth–then chances are it’s not worthy to be disseminated. Assuming people remember who Walter Cronkite was.
And do not, Huffpo, just shrug and say, “Don’t kill the messenger.” That’s not it. What’s intrinsically wrong with killing the messenger is that the poor bášŧárd had no choice. He was handed a message by his king or queen or warlord or emperor or whatever and told, “Deliver this.” You don’t kill him because he was simply doing his job and you’re just pìššëd øff at the guy who sent him with the message. This–this right here–was not something you were obliged to do. The public had neither right nor need to know this. It will have no impact on their lives, affect nothing. It’s just opening a peep show into someone else’s life that is none of the public’s gøddámņ business.
You’re better than this, Huffpo. Or if you’re not, then you dámņëd well should be. More and more, the term “responsible journalism” is becoming an oxymoron. True journalism balances the public’s right to know against the the public’s need to know. If the story doesn’t fit both criteria, it should be spiked, if for no other reason than sheer human decency.
PAD
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Peter, the tabloid crap never went away. It just easily transitioned from the paper to the website.
And with the internet, there’s often no semblance of journalistic integrity to hold anybody back, not when it’s a race to be the first to report on something, anything.
So, to that end, Huffington Post apparently wants to be more tabloid than real news. The entire Gawker network has been at it for years. TMZ, dozens of others.
What used to bring eyeballs is now all about whatever can bring clicks to your website.
As a former newspaper editor, I’m glad more and more every day I am no longer in the business. The goal of the media today is no longer to inform the general public so that decisions can be made. The goal of today’s media is to titillate, to get as many viewers or readers as possible. Some of this is due to the transition to a 24-hour news cycle, but a lot of it is simply brought upon by corporate interests. In general, I have nothing against corporations, but journalism should, at least in theory, rise above quarterly expectations.
Sadly, there ARE no more news outlets. Everything has devolved into “infotainment.”
Blame the public somewhat, as this is what they demand – but blame the media outlets mostly, because THEY HAVE TRAINED THE PUBLIC TO WANT THIS.
Newspapers are apparently a dying format – and this is obviously because they are not supplying a product that the public wants. Online news sources see this, and so start trending to what the public wants – without realizing that THEY are the standard that they try to live up to.
CNN, Fox, even local TV news – none of it has much to do with news anymore. It’s the latest entertainment “news”, or the most current attention-grabbing crisis, of the political travails and travesties (but mind you, with no real data supplied about the events around the same.)
What I wouldn’t give for a news program that just actually delivers news anymore. I mean, in addition to “The Daily Show”…
I remain,
Sincerely,
Eric L. Sofer
x<]:o){
The Bad Clown…
“and so start trending to what the public wants”
A wise man once wrote that “what interests the public isn’t necessarily what’s in the public interest.” Too true.
Stan Lee once said (possibly not verbatim here), “Don’t give the readers what they ask for. Give them what they want.” The implication is that they don’t know exactly what they want… and that can certainly be writ large on the news observing public.
I remain,
Sincerely,
Eric L. Sofer
x<]:o){
The Bad Clown…
The Huffington Post hasn’t been “better than that” in quite some time – well before Arianna sold out to AOL, decided she was never going to pay any of her non-celeb contributors even though she was raking it in herself, and courted her celebrity buddies to engage in woo-woo pseudo-science and, essentially, gossip.
On a related note: Holy cow, Stephen Hawking and sex clubs?!?!
as soon as i see his name, i think ‘science,’ so my brain changed ‘club’ to ‘cube’ and my mind went off on a tangent trying to figure out what a sex cube could possibly be and whether or not I could afford one.
On a side note, if you’ve ever wondered why comics never got any respect for so many years (and still don’t from some people), it’s because the first strips appeared in newspapers that were tabloids, or regarded as tabloids. The papers published by William Randolph Hearst especially bore that distinction, and he went on to create King Features.
Then, when comic books began to appear and started publishing original material, they were written and drawn by many people considered to not be good enough for the newspaper strips.
And that’s why some people today still consider comics “low entertainment.”
This may make me a terrible person, and it certainly isn’t worthy of newscasting to use this against the man, but I’m glad Stephen Hawking has a good time once in while.
Eh…
We’ve had this discussion before here. There is no “news” industry anymore. Not in any true sense of the word. As I’ve mentioned before, Roger Ailes let slip a doozy some time ago now on a Sunday chat show while defending Beck’s antics. He stated that he (Ailes) wasn’t in the news business, he was in the ratings business.
While it might be fun to bash Fox News with that quote, the sad truth is that he was speaking for the heads of just about every news organization out there right now. They’re not in the news business, they’re in the ratings business. And the key to ratings is not stodgy old men sitting against a black screen having an informed and intelligent debate on the days events or a lone news reader in a basic studio reporting on just the facts.
To get ratings, you have to be entertainment. If you can’t be entertainment, then you go for the salacious. And this is not going to change except to maybe get worse.
Part of the problem is that the news industry is either owned by corporations that want them to be profit generating entities or they’re owned by people that want them to be profit generating entities. Whether internet or television, profit comes from ads, ad revenue is based on ratings/readership and that is based on what kind of bait you use to hook viewers/readers. And, sadly, real news and real journalism isn’t anywhere near the top of the list of best bait.
And it’s not their fault. It’s the fault of the audiences.
You can chastise Huffington Post for this, but, really, what are they going to do these days? They could be the absolute best example of real journalism on the web or real journalism in general and they would have almost no reader base whatsoever. The readers would flee in droves and cite the boring nature of its work as the reason. You can’t even do an old style editorial program today. Seat four men dressed in suits down at a large table in a black room and have them calmly and respectfully discuss and debate issues instead of screaming, talking over each other or spinning and making stuff up while factoids fly across the bottom and side of the screen and the ratings would nosedive by the second episode and it would be off the air by the third episode. Why? Because it would commit the greatest sin of all in modern news; it would be boring.
The masses don’t want to have to be given straight news and then sift through facts and make informed opinions for themselves. They want sound bites and predigested talking points delivered with an opinion already firmly in place that is designed to reinforce their desired worldview and make them feel good about what they want to believe about others and the world. Barring that, the masses want trash. And they make the trash high rated program blocks and profitable ad blocks.
News is dead. Or, if it’s not actually dead, it’s in a coma and on life support and just waiting for the rest of the family to come along and order the doctors to unplug the machine.
In other trash “news” related items, Andrew Breitbart is dead.
http://biggovernment.com/lsolov/2012/03/01/draft/
He stated that he (Ailes) wasn’t in the news business, he was in the ratings business.
I recall hearing Rush Limbaugh say job was “to get the most people listening as possible and to keep them listening as long as possible” (as best as I can remember his exact words). I was impressed with his frankness and momentary honesty.
Like Rush, the folks behind “journalism” today know exactly what they’re doing and why. Even (especially) when they would absolutely insist that that isn’t what they’re doing.
They could be the absolute best example of real journalism on the web or real journalism in general and they would have almost no reader base whatsoever. The readers would flee in droves and cite the boring nature of its work as the reason.
I’m not sure that’s true. I expect readership could drop, but I’m not sure it would be in droves or leave them with an insufficient number of visitors.
It would mean a change would have to be made in their expectations of what their “circulation” would be. But I believe there is an audience out there for actual, responsible news and analysis and if a news site catered to that audience they could be modestly successful.
“Sure, I could make a lot more money if I converted my used book store into a multi-plex cinema, but I do okay selling my wares to the bibliophile crowd.”
“Sure, I could make a lot more money if I converted my used book store into a multi-plex cinema, but I do okay selling my wares to the bibliophile crowd.”
Thing is, a lot of companies CAN’T do that. They were bought out in highly leveraged deals where there’s so much debt to service that they can’t do ANYTHING that doesn’t maximize revenues. That’s part of the price, IMAO, of so many media conglomerates.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/03/01/farewell-to-andrew-breitbart-most-fearless-person-ive-ever-known/
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Jerry, a feel your snide aside regarding Mr. Breitbart is in poor taste. “Trash news” really is subjective.
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The same people wo want to trash Breitbart and, to a lesser extent, people like John Stossel are the same people that celebrate their tactics as good, old-fashioned journalism if they were if they were investigating corporations or a froup like the NRA.
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In fact, Stossel won multiple Emmys investigating “Big Business”. Once he set his sights on debunking supposed truths about everything from the validity of global warming to the effectiveness of affirmative action, the Emmys stopped and he was declared a “flat-earther”.
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That he is the object of such scorn says something about how many in the media do have “lockstep thinking” – and double standards.
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And getting back to Breitbart, while he is a favorite target, (I’m going to have to get used to saying WAS) his work should not be dismissed so easily. Hëll, “The national Enquirer” has had more “hard news” scoops in the past few years than the traditional media – John Edwards being a prime example.
Breitbart wasn’t shy about expounding on his low opinion of people after they died (Ted Kennedy being a prime example) so I can’t be upset if people want to emulate that kind of behavior (and Jerry was pretty mild compared to some of the glee I’ve read today). I’ll keep it in mind if they subsequently get huffy about some other affront to common decency but it’s fair game.
(In fairness to Mr Brietbart, he never killed anyone and lied about it.)
Jerome,
First, it wasn’t a “snide aside” in the least. It was an observation on breaking news of the day.
And while the label of “trash news” may be subjective in some arenas, Andrew Breitbart engaged in a lot of it from just name calling to promoting the James O’Keefe videos and defending the false narrative that they created and O’Keefe when his tactics and the lies he was telling were coming out to acting like slime and flashing the Wiener pictures to the webcam of a horndog morning talk radio show.
I’ve never found Breitbart or the way he handled himself professionally to be particularly impressive or much beyond the level of a jr high school kid.
Besides, it was actually relevant to the discussion. Breitbart, if my memory serves me well, help to found Huffpo.
Given his age, and the fact that he was expected to die sometime in his 20s or 30s (most ALS patients don’t live nearly this long), I’m cheering Dr. Hawking on. You go, Steven!
OTOH, the descent of news reportage in this country, just since I started paying attention to it (sometime around Watergate), is appalling. The contrast in evening news programs is particularly notable; our local ABC affiliate does a good newscast, with little editorializing, and avoiding loaded language. Then, in the middle of it, we get half an hour of ABC Evening News – which is mostly about political partisanship, with highly slanted language, or “human interest” stories, fluff that would have been thrown across the studio by Cronkite or Murrow.
Now git offa mah lawn, yuh dern kids!! [shakes cane]
“Given his age, and the fact that he was expected to die sometime in his 20s or 30s (most ALS patients don’t live nearly this long), I’m cheering Dr. Hawking on. You go, Steven!”
Yeah. this story is the first time I’ve ever felt the word “handicapable” actually made sense. Usually it just feels like a bizarre feel-good spin on what is a physical detriment.
I quit reading the Huffington Post for kind of a silly reason, but I think it comes down to the same basic problem of sensationalism and “anything for a click” that you’re talking about. The inciting incident was when I read an article about some new “inventions,” one of which (if I remember correctly) grew meat from a powder and then cooked it. Wow! Meat from a powder! That’s amazing!
Except that when I read the whole article, there was no explanation as to how the meat would grow from a powder. I mean, that was the important part, wasn’t it? I had to leave the article and do some searching on my own to find out that they had not, in fact, invented meat-powder. Just a device to heat up the meat-powder, should someone ever figure out how to make it. The article was so misleading that I vowed never to take the Huffington Post seriously again.
“anything for a click”
You got it – it’s all about generating impressions for the banner ads on the article page
Journalists attempted to set professional journalistic standards after World War II, and, in retrospect, actually succeeded quite well — for awhile. The regression during the past 20 years has been nothing short of breathtaking from this journalist’s point of view, and it really looks like the profession has made a big 180-degree turn and is now barreling back to the days when Yellow Journalism was king.
I’m not sure why this “news” bothers anyone. Last I checked, strip clubs are perfectly legal. To me it’s nothing more than “Peter David seen entering a grocery store”.
You are correct that it’s nobody’s business and it’s not news. However, many of the lies presented as facts on some news sources bother me a whole lot more.
This appears to at least be true. Worthless, but true. Now talk to me about Fox News and their lies and my feathers get ruffled.
Gossip news are garbage, but some people like to be fed garbage. What can you do, PAD? Talk about journalistic integrity all you like, I don’t blame them for giving people what they want.
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In my personal opinnion, the only case where a celebrity sex life may be of public interest is in the case of hypocrites who champion “family values” legislation while living hedonist lives in secret. THOSE guys deserve to be exposed. I am also okay when the celebrities themselves talk about it. In all other situations, I think it’s garbage, but like I said above…
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I also have to ask, is it any more sordid to publicize the sex life of Stephen Hawking, just because he is handicapped? I think it’s pretty depressing that this industry exists in the first place, but if other celebs are fair game, so is Stephen. He doesn’t need special treatment. Perhaps people are supposed to be shocked, because wheelchair-bound people aren’t supposed to have sexual appetites? Or their appetites shoud be more of a secret than the appetites of other people? That is a puritanical position, IMO.
but if other celebs are fair game, so is Stephen
Why should celebs be considered fair game? I question your premise.
I’m not sure if they’re fair game. Perhaps they’re not.
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But I don’t see why we should get *more* indignant about Stephen Hawking having his sex life made public than any other celebrity. Is it because he is a scientist? Is it because he is handicapped?
“But I don’t see why we should get *more* indignant about Stephen Hawking having his sex life made public than any other celebrity.”
We shouldn’t and I doubt that Peter is. This looks like it’s just the semi-regular tipping point of being fed up. All of hit that point, but we don’t address every example of the thing we’re complaining about. We just comment on the thing that finally hit out “fed up” point.
But Peter has complained about this kind of thing before. I remember he did a post about a “news” article that declared that a particular Hollywood starlet said that she liked smoking pot and wondered then how in the hëll that was news.
Why would anybody expect decency from the Huffpo?
What made me mad was a headline on it the other day that said, “Dakota Fanning is legal now!” What.The.Hëll? I could expect that on the countless fanboi sites that exist, but not on something like HuffPo. Maybe it’s because I raised 2 daughters, but that sort of headline just creeps me out. Or maybe I’m too old for the interwebs…
Couldn’t they just say: “Dakota Fanning can now vote”
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On a tangential note to the main topic I hate when a site has an article that can clearly fit in one page and they split it in 5 pages just to get you to click next and refresh new ads.
They picked that healine, I strongly suspect, not just because she was some young Hollywood statrlet turning 18, but because of the publicity surrounding her rape/sex scenes while still relatively young.
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So another way to interpret the headline would be, “Finally, Dakota Fanning can be judged on her work as an adult instead of the sensationalist crap we kept highlighting while she was a legal minor.
Saw the same thing today (Thursday) about Justin Bieber.
I think that part of the problem is that there are no state funded news services in America. The NL has three Government funded channels and the UK has the BBC. Maybe I’m wrong, but it feels like the decay of the News services has – because of this – been much slower in this these countries. Maybe the US could benefit from this as well.
Wouldn’t the PBS news hour count? I mean, yes they get donations, and a lot of PBS stations now air commercials, but still….
And certain groups in this country want to defund PBS, NPR, etc, because the news presented isn’t biased in their favor.
Right, we need Pravda.
They say every people has the government they deserve. I think every people also has the media they deserve. If you set up a government-funded news service in the US, it’s very likely that no one would watch it.
Like I said, the PBS news hour. Also, Frontline, Washington week in review, etc. Last I checked, those were still watched…
Yeah, for me the final nail in the coffin of “respectable journalism” was the rise of the Stalkerazzi with their justifying cries of “We’re just giving the public what it wants!”. No, you’re TELLING the public what it wants, waving around covertly taken salacious photos until enough people bored with their lives say “More, please!”. Sadly, the availability of their “product” exploding exponentially with the growth of the internet made it easier for people’s attitudes to go from “Eh, celebrity private lives. Who cares?” to “Wait… I can download candid shots of a half naked Angelina on the beach?”. I don’t think I’m exaggerating here when I equate it to a modern day “Christians Vs. Lions” show for the media-dulled masses; somebody’s going to enjoy seeing someone taken down as long as it isn’t them.
People can always choose not to buy a service they really don’t want. People in a business have no obligation to educate the public on the nuances of good taste.
If he walked in now THAT would be news.
Otherwise it’s just garbage.
PAD, I’m disappointed in you. Here you spend all this time ranting at the HuffPo for covering Hawking’s sex life and you COMPLETELY ignore the death of Davy Jones.
Let’s get our own priorities in order, shall we?
(Being just a touch snarky, folks.)
Perhaps it will soothe your judgement of PAD’s priorities to know that he posted about having seen Davy Jones and that his death sucked yesterday via Twitter and Facebook? It was at 2:46 PM if that will help – seemingly pretty shortly after the news went public.
Feel better now?
Well, seeing as I use neither Twitter nor Facebook, not really.
PAD could’ve just as easily put this open letter on Facebook and he could’ve spent half-an-hour or so breaking this “open letter” into Twitter-acceptable portions.
(As I noted, my original comment was being a bit snarky.)
On the other hand, this reminds me of a story from one of Richard Feynman’s autobiographies. Late in his life, he got into drawing and doing art. He started frequenting a Pasadena strip club in the afternoons, where he got free ginger ales for some reason, was otherwise generally left alone, and could alternate from doing physics to sketching the unclothed female form.
There was an attempt to close the club, and it turned out that Feynman was the only “regular” willing to testify in court that it met community standards, as he commonly saw lawyers, doctors, politicians, etc. frequent the club. All the rest were worried about their reputation.
I’ve read that Feynman played the bongos at a strip club (which is *not* a euphemism for something else!) but I don’t know at what stage of his life that was.
I remember that; I think it was in “What Do You CARE What Other People Think?”, since it was so appropriate to the tone of that one.
As for the main story — falls into series “who gives a crap?” territory for me. (Meaning the Hawking stuff.) Journalism is not in wonderful shape these days, that’s for sure.
Has anyone noticed how much attention HuffPo has generated from just one article at just one website.
Thank you for letting me state an obvious truth.
To begin with: I would not deign to call it “journalism.” It may pass for “journalism” (I elect to use italics here for the simple purpose of identifying it ~ to be kind and polite ~ “muckraking sensationalism,” although much closer in truth, lends an element of the fantastical that does not quite hit the mark. My preference … you may disagree.) and, it may be called such in earnest by those who wish it to be so. However, it falls woefully short of qualifying as such. Whatever standards that were once dutifully applied are disregarded more and more these days.
In today’s world, the public is fed a steady diet of short, encapsulated 30-second sound bites designed to promote a sense of style and glitz over anything of real substance. The world of George Orwell’s “1984” is far closer to home than realized.
Oh sure, some of the facts may be there in print but, invariably I have found there to be a far better understanding of facts to be had if one does a little bit of checking up for themselves. Interesting, how much gets left out ~ or, in some cases, gets written in ~ in the rush to entertain which has become the name of the game these days.
Would you meddle with the primal forces of nature, Mr. David?
I’m more surprised by the idea that anyone thinks the Huffington Post is “better than thaT than I am by Mr. Hawking’s escapades.
If I could put forward an alternative take on all this, perhaps we are actually in a Golden Age of journalism, where an individual has the opportunity and means by which they can find information on virtually any topic, be better informed than most of the great thinkers of our history could ever have dreamed of being, and even have the ability to be a mover and shaker by applying all that info and doing some investigative reporting on their own. No gatekeepers, no real ability on the part of the rich and powerful to spike stories, a platform that can reach virtually every person on earth…
Of course, one must have the discipline to separate the wheat from the chaff. All of this will result in an amazing amount of chaff.
Umm, Bill, did the computer eat some of your post? I don’t understand that first sentence in the slightest.
I think it should read … “is ‘better than that’ than I am by…” It reads okay to me that way, at least.
Obviously, Bill can and should correct me if I’m wrong.
Yeah, Tim got it right…my laptop has a habit of doing things to me as a write, like jump around the cursor until a perfectly sane paragraph of 18th century Bavarian economics reads like a William Burroughs cut and paste special. But this goof was probably just me in a hurry.
Mr. Mulligan,
Why should we believe anything you say when you tell such obvious lies and think we won’t notice? There is no such thing as a a perfectly sane paragraph of 18th century Bavarian economics!
When stories like this make the news cycle, I wonder what important things are going on that AREN’T getting reported…
It’s not that people don’t report them..it’s that viewers/listeners don’t pay attention to them.
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A story comes on talking about how 73% of black babies are born out of wedlock and how this affects society, poverty, etc.
There’s a collective yawn across the country.
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But how many more people do you think watched the numerous reports/retrospectives on Whitney Houston
PAD’s right that tabloid crap like the Stephen Hawking “story” isn’t news. Fortunately the paper I write for doesn’t publish garbage like that.
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Rick
Y’know, I would really enjoy having a couple beers at a strip club with Hawking. Or without him for that matter…
Count me in!
I think a large part of the problem is that being a reporter, especially online, isn’t a profession. Not too long ago in order be a reporter of any kind there was a long path of training that started going to college, then an internship and finally a big break after working behind the scenes for years. Journalism was a vocation that required years of training and practitioners of it were all highly paid pros so there were rigorous standards.
These days anyone with access to a computer can easily reach thousands or even millions and become a reporter. This missive alone is going to be reads by dozens maybe hundreds of people. Not that this is all bad as social media has done a lot more good than harm in empowering the individual but anyone can be a journalist today which leads to the “news” we are inundated with as a society.
Not trying to be argumentative, but I’ve read examples of journalism from many eras of history, from the 1860’s all the way through to today, and from what I’ve seen, sensationalistic crap of one stripe or another has ALWAYS made it into the papers, even the legitimate ones. Mainstream news sources often shied away from stories about the sex lives of public figures in the past only out of the fear that they might hurt sales by offending readers (no longer a terribly great concern) than out of any question of whether it was legitimate news or not. Remember, it was newspapers that made folk heroes out of the likes of Jesse James and John Dillinger, and that more or less helped perpetrate the Spanish-American War. I have to think that the notion of journalistic integrity, while certainly practiced by SOME journalists, is largely the invention of nostalgia.
I do agree with you though, whole-heartedly, that what Stephen Hawking does in his spare time is not only not news, but nobody’s dámņëd business.
You do understand that the Huffington Post is in business to make money and not deliver the news?
You are mistaking a liberal-capitalist organization for one organized for a social purpose.
If they make more money this way, the best you can hope for is an insincere apology.