Sacred Highs

NPR's Dick Meyer has a column at their web site, called Against The Grain. It's described as "a mix of sarcastic sociology and comic moral philosophy that occasionally descends into political commentary." His most recent piece, "New Lows In TV Advertising," complains about an advertisement for K-Y gel that ran after a rerun of Seinfeld that Mr. Meyer and his son were watching. Cue the requisite public despair over the "inexorable degradation of our sensibility, manners, idealism and common sense," with extra points awarded from including his son for a "but think of the children," angle. I don't know if he wrung his hands, too, but I wouldn't be surprised.

"When nothing is off-limits, when nothing is sacred, when nothing offends, then nothing is, well, sacred. Who wants a world where nothing is sacred?" Meyer asks, plaintively.

Raises hand.

Or more accurately, I don't want to live in a world where being offended and declaring things off limits becomes an obligation, where we no longer own a sense of propriety, because the sense of propriety owns us. Things should not be sacred simply because we feel a need to have things be sacred. Things should be sacred because we understand the benefit to ourselves, our community and/or our society in making them so. When that benefit is no longer present, the sense of sacredness goes away. As well it should. We have slaughtered sacred cows that prior generations of Americans held dear, and not only barbecued them with relish (but never with sauce), but counted those would object as backwards. We should not be above such treatment ourselves.

Figured That Out, Did You?

I could mock Byron York's opinion piece in the Washington Examiner, where he seems to be stating that President Obama's overwhelming support within the African-American community makes current polling numbers somehow unreliable.

But David Weigel, over at The Washington Independent, does a much better job than I ever could.

Sometimes things are best left to the professionals.

In fairness to York, his point seemed to be that while African-Americans support President Obama personally, they might not actually be as in favor of his policies as that support suggests, and so using approval numbers to gauge support for policy might produce skewed results. But, if that was his point, he made it so poorly that it's a marvel the column made it into print. And of course, that would also raise the question of whether or not personal (or racial) antipathy on the part of much more numerous White voters would have the opposite effect. So perhaps a more intelligent piece would simply have dealt with the difficulty of assessing support for policy solely by attempting to judge the popularity of the policy maker. But where's the controversy in that?

Of A Feather

Duck...

Duck... (well, a Coot, actually...)

Goose!

You know, I never understood why being tagged the Goose was such a bad thing...

Irony Watch

The United Kingdom charity Women's Aid, an anti-domestic violence group, released a public service announcement to raise awareness of domestic violence. But Clearcast, which must above advertisements for British television, wouldn't approve the announcement.

The reason (you know what's coming) - it was too violent. Seemingly despite the fact that Clearcast itself seems to understand that one of the places where a certain level of violence is acceptable is in public service announcements.

The fact that Clearcast seems unwilling to grant a waiver in a circumstance that they themselves specifically noted might call for one is beyond strange. It seems unlikely that whoever made the decision did so to prevent people being informed about domestic violence. But once you decide that something is so off-limits that even cautionary tales go too far, how does one advocate for change?

Today, on CrimeWatch!

In local news, a man who stabbed a church's therapy cat with a knife could possibly spend as much time in jail as a group of teenagers who robbed and beat a man who later died. The stories shared the busy Crime and Justice beat stage with the arraignment of a man charged with attempting to kidnap a boy from Pike Place Market, and a judge wrestling with whether to have a convicted rapist committed to an institution now that his sentence is up.

If there's one place where I feel the news goes all out to manipulate the audience, it's with crime stories. And today, the manipulation dial was set all the way to "manhandle." From placing the story of the sentencing of the teens and the charging of the man who attacked the cat one after the other, to an interview with a sobbing rape victim who decried as an injustice the fact that her attacker might be set free after having done his time, to the ever-popular child-in-peril story, our local ABC affiliate may as well have also been running free advertisements for the local torch and pitchfork emporium.

This bugs me, because there are no easy answers to any of this, despite what the standard emotional reaction might be. Each of the cases so quickly trotted out on this evening's news raises some really serious questions. And the news reporting offered no answers beyond a knee-jerk reflexive sense of gross miscarriage of justice. Worse yet, by tomorrow, some other story will be the flavor of the day, and these will be more or less forgotten. While "coverage that’s utterly trivial and that poisons public understanding of crucial issues" may be "rewarded by the market," Matthew Yglesias is correct to point out that this isn't a good reason for the coverage to be this way. But I don't know how you solve this problem - businesses act in a way that's rewarded by the market - that's pretty much the central defining characteristic of a successful business. Only by making news not a business can you get around this. And that leaves us with a public that's effectively willfully manipulated and misinformed about important issues. That can't end well.