Opinions

Sarah Palin was right: Lamestream media needs a long look in the mirror

No small part of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's considerable fame is attributable to her taking on the lamestream media, because the lamestream media in large part sucks, and we all know it. Period. End of story. You can stop reading now, and bounce on along to the next lame story. Many of you will, your self-perceived, common-sense conclusion having been confirmed in once sentence above.

Sadly, that conclusion also happens to be the right conclusion in this case. And you're not alone in thinking the media lame. Everyone frets over that fact these days, most especially the media itself.

"...People are leaving (our stories) without even starting," writes Farhad Manjoo in Slate. "What's wrong with them? Why'd they even click on the page?"

Come, come now, Farhad. It's not nice for one reporter to say another's question is stupid, but that question is stupid.

We know why people click on a page. They click-in because they see something they think might be interesting.

And they click-out just as fast because it wasn't.

Who has time?

Confession time: That quote from Manjoo above? Almost didn't get to it. It was too far down in the story, and I was ready to click out. His story was one of the many somewhat interesting stories on the web last week.

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There are about a gazillion stories out there every day that fit this description. Who has time to read them all or any?

Editors -- a significant number of whom are quite simply stupid, one of the reasons the lamestream is lame -- have long thought the answer to your lack of reading time is to make stories shorter and less interesting.

Give Manjoo credit for at least debunking that idea early on in the missive aptly titled "You Won't Finish This Article."

"I'm going to keep this brief," he writes in the opening sentence, "because you're not going to stick around for long. I've already lost a bunch of you. For every 161 people who landed on this page, about 61 of you — 38 percent — are already gone."

Junk junkies

So much for making stories better by making them shorter. More than 40 percent of you aren't going past the first couple of paragraphs, according to Manjoo, who gets into a whole bunch of numbers and metrics and yadda, yadda, yadda. Go read the story if you want. Most of you won't.

Who the hell has time to worry about why the lamestream is lame? Even most of the people in the lamestream won't read Manjoo's story. Why? Because deep down it doesn't really interest them. Because in the dark corners of their brains, the corners to which some of them never admit, they're really more interested in Bristol Palin's latest TV show or their favorite hobby or who knows what.

It's true. Part of the problem is us -- you, me and Jack and Jane over there -- online readers all. A lot of us are junk junkies, celebrity or otherwise. We are. We're more interested in the activities of famous people we don't know than in most issues.

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld became hugely famous for a TV show he himself described as being "about nothing." "Duck Dynasty," another TV show, is now hilariously following in his footsteps.

People appear to like nothing on the tube or online. Maybe it's the need to escape, to distract ourselves, to free our minds from the difficult process of thinking by reading about the most vapid nothingness.

Sarah Palin is the perfect vapid nothingness. Shut up all fans who've never tried to have a conversation with her. She is not one of America's great intellectuals. Her intellect barely matches that of the stereotypical Kentucky hillbilly, which is not to badmouth the non-stereotypical Kentucky hillbilly.

There are some pretty smart people from Kentucky, as well as from Wasilla, Alaska. And, just to be clear, great intellect is not a necessity of politics. Plenty of politicians have succeeded without it.

Consider Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, who once asked NASA whether the Mars Pathfinder took a picture of the flag that Neil Armstrong left behind. Hint, hint: Armstrong planted the flag on the moon in 1969. The Mars Pathfinder landed on Mars, a planet some distance beyond the moon.

Or Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who during a Republican presidential debate observed that "I will tell you: It's three agencies of government when I get there that are gone: Commerce, Education and the -- what's the third one there? Let's see. ... OK. So Commerce, Education and the -- ... The third agency of government I would -- I would do away with the Education, the ... Commerce and -- let's see -- I can't. The third one, I can't. Sorry. Oops."

By comparison, it doesn't sound so bad to be spitting out some gobbledegook, as Palin did, about how "as Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America, where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there, they are right next to our state."

And in fairness to Palin, it doesn't take great intellect to govern well. Plenty of politicians have succeeded without it, and Palin did a decent job in her short run as governor of the 49th state.

But let's get real for a minute here. Nobody is interested in Palin because of how well she performed as governor, or because of her big ideas -- I dare you to find one -- or because of her political savvy -- she's had precious little political success, although she has shown the good sense to to avoid running for anything since the failed bid for vice president.

The latter would at least seem to illustrate she's smarter than some of her harshest critics believe. And even they ought to be giving credit, though they're not, for the instinctive canniness that told her she'd hit the jackpot in celebrity lottery.

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Remember Kate Gosselin? Kevin Federline?

If that happens to you in America today, the great trick is see how long you can remain famous for nothing but being famous. Can you say, Kate Gosselin, Octomom, William Hung, Paris Hilton, (insert name) Kardashian, John Bobbitt, Tonya Harding, Kato Kaelin, Anna Nicole Smith, Kevin Federline, Elin Nordegren, and On-and-On?

No, there is no weird-named dude now famous for being called "On-and-On," but there could be. That's where we're at today. The country is full of people famous for nothing, and many of us show an inordinate interest in them.

Among the top stories being teased on the homepage of Bing.com today, "Elin hates Lindsey" -- Elin being the aforementioned Nordegren, the former nanny who became famous for being the wife of golfer Tiger Woods; and Lindsey being Lindsey Vonn, who achieved her fame the old-fashioned way by earning it as a high accomplished alpine skier.

Along with "Elin hates Lindsey," Bing's screen roll of things in which one should be interested included "Bristol Wife Swap." The Bristol there would, of course, be the daughter of Sarah who is famous for, in order:

1) Being the daughter of Sarah

2) Being a pregnant, unwed teenager while her mother was running for vice president

3) Being engaged to baby-daddy Levi Johnston (now also famous for nothing)

4) Dumping Levi

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5) Co-starring in "Sarah Palin's Alaska"

6) Boot-strapping Sarah Palin's Alaska to co-star in "Dancing with the Stars", and yadda, yadda, yadda.

And we all love her for it.

This appears to be what people want, and given what the online media is, this is what you will get. That is a good thing, a very good thing if you believe in the capitalist system.

Possibly not so good if you're one of those socialist viewers of public television, but so what? In the long run, all things live or die in the markets -- both economic and politic. Even public TV seems to have caught on.

It sometimes even illustrates that you don't need to do vapid crap to succeed. Old friend John Larson, a former anchorman in Anchorage, actually hooked me into watching a "Need to Know" show about manufacturing in Ohio just the other night. It was a well-balanced story about the loss of American jobs to foreign competition and the return of some of those jobs now taking place. Yes, shocking as it is, despite all that cheap labor in China and elsewhere, some jobs in the business of making things are actually coming back to America.

Good journalism

Charles Fishman wrote about this at length in the December issue of "The Atlantic" magazine under the headline of "The Insourcing Boom."

I read the whole story because I'm interested in American jobs, and there's the good news. Some good journalism does keep people reading to the end. Some good journalism -- despite the gnashing of teeth by those inside and outside of the lamestream -- will sell.

Whatever the meaning of "good journalism" might be.

Now, thank you, Fred, for hanging with me all the way to end of this. Love you, buddy.

Contact reporter Craig Medred at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com

The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, e-mail commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com.

Craig Medred

Craig Medred is a former writer for the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Dispatch and Alaska Dispatch News. He left the ADN in 2015.

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