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As an interesting little side-note to the latest whine-fest about how the intarnets are destroying journalism, this article at Newsweek whingeing about how bloggers aren't willing to give interviewers carte-blanche on their terms sure is a treat. Now, Winer is notorious for being touchy and tough to deal with, and Calacanis is not known as the nicest guy on the web either, but still, they have good reason to be suspicious. Most bloggers who have dealt with the media at all do, because they have in many cases learned from hard experience. Now that they have enough power to have some degree of control of how the media represents them, they're certainly justified in using it.

"The interviewer used to be in charge, but that's no longer the case," says media blogger Jeff Jarvis. "I can decide how long the quote is, I can make sure the context is accurate."

All this can be unnerving to someone (like, um, me) who has spent a career conversing with people on the other end of the phone line or lunch table. A live interview allows me not only to follow up quickly but to sense the verbal cues that direct me to more fruitful topics. In e-mail, people talk at you; in conversation I can talk with subjects, and a casual remark can lead to a level of discussion that neither party anticipated from the beginning. I am more likely to learn from someone in a conversation than in an e-mail exchange, which simply does not allow for the serendipity, intensity and give-and-take of real-time interaction.

We in the journalism tribe operate under the belief that when we ask people to talk to us we are not acting out of self-interest but a sense of duty to inform the population. It's an article of our faith that when subjects speak to us, they are engaging in a grand participatory act where everyone benefits. But these lofty views don't impress bloggers like Rosen. "You have to prove [you represent the public]," he says.

Yes, we do. But every time we lose the priceless knowledge from those essential, real-time interviews, our stories are impoverished, to the detriment of our readers: you.

There is a reason that bloggers feel like reporters have to prove that they represent the public and are acting in good faith. And that is primarily that almost all of us, or at least someone we know, have at one point or another naively and in good faith given an interview about blogs or online culture to some traditional media outlet, and upon reading the end-product, found it to be a total misrepresentation of the content of the interview given and the terms under which it was given.

Over and over again, I've seen reporters come into stories about blogging and other geeky lifestyle stuff with a pre-written thesis that they're seemingly determined to cram whatever their interview subjects say into, regardless of whether said thesis stands up to the reality of the people they are supposedly trying to learn about. In just the most recent of many, many examples that I know of, a friend of mine was interviewed about fantasy hockey. The reporter pitched it as sort of an expository/anthropological lifestyle piece, and said he just wanted some info on the appeal and mechanics and what have you of online fantasy sports. The finished piece focused almost entirely on gambling and addiction, which scarcely came up in the interview itself, and it had a real "look at the freaks!" feel to it, further reinforced by the photo (now gone, retrieved from archive.org) they published with it, which almost seemed calculated to make him look like a pathetic loner or something, which he (and most of us who are thriving in the online world) is decidedly not.

Seeing this kind of thing play out over and over again has made me increasingly suspicious that this happens constantly on much more serious subjects as well. Some of it may be simple ignorance, but ignorance is no excuse for how some of these things come out. More like incompetence that is in effect indistinguishable from malice, if we are going to be generous about motives here.

Isn't the job of a reporter to go out and find the facts, and then write a story, instead of pre-writing a story and then cherry-picking facts to flesh it out? Sure, to even have the idea of a story you may have to have an angle in mind, just like scientists have to have a hypothesis to work from, but when the facts don't bear your hypothesis out, you're supposed to rethink it. If you're not doing that, you're not seeking the truth, you're creating it from whole cloth. Insofar as their mission is to turn out journalists with the tools and mentality needed to seek the truth, journo schools are not doing their job, if the often laughable coverage of any of the subcultures and technological changes that I've been a part of and am semi-expert on is any indication.

Now, there are plenty of ways to begin to earn back that trust. Some reporters, (but not nearly enough of them) are doing a very good job of using the interactivity of the web to turn these things into a public dialogue, which eventually results in them getting it mostly right by the end of the discussion. Another way to do this would be to use these tools to provide much greater transparency to the whole newsmaking process. Frontline, for example, does a very good thing, in that they still make and edit down their show as they always have, but they then post the full interviews and lots of the other background that went into making it to their website, so anyone who wants the extra context can easily get it, and anyone who feels they have been misrepresented by the finished product can point to the original sources by way of defense and correction.

In the absence of the limitations and costs of print, this should be fairly trivial for newspapers to implement. It would increase trust immensely, and it would allow bloggers and others to dig around in the source material and find new angles and connections, and ultimately help the journalists to do their job and uphold their civic obligations. This is just one of many ways in which newspapers are failing to grok the potential of the new mediums and technologies available to them, and in doing so, endangering their own survival and failing the people they claim to work on behalf of.

[This is in response to a debate started here, and continued here, here, here, and likely lots of other places.]

As a child of the punk rock and "alternative" era, I do have some mixed feelings about this. I don't think authenticity is the sine qua non for good art, but it does matter sometimes. Perhaps in many cases it is necessary, but not sufficient? You can be as authentic as you like and make terrible art (just go to an open mic night anywhere for ample and excruciating evidence), but even very good art that either springs from an openly crass desire to cash in, or even from an authentic political or social worldview that I abhor, leaves me a bit squicked out. I can never quite get past the fact that Ezra Pound was a fascist. And then of course there is Leni Riefenstahl, but that's a more blatant and understandable case, but both are cases of factors beyond the just aesthetic and entertainment aspects.

In a case that's closer to the current debate, the Ramones have been brought up, but well, I admire them a lot less because they weren't satisfied with making great and very influential music and being able to put food on the table doing it... they had to be big fucking rock stars, and felt like they were failures in some way because they never made it to that level. I find that kind of sad and pathetic. It doesn't make me like Blitzkrieg Bop any less, but there are multiple levels on which you can appreciate art and artists, and on the level beyond pure pop bliss, it does diminish them a bit for me.

Insofar as the "punk ethic" matters, I think it does because it was a leap of imagination that created a space and a community where you could make your art and have an audience for it, without having to contend with a need to be a big fucking rockstar or to otherwise succeed in the larger capitalist system. It opened up a closed system to dedicated amateurism, in much the same way as blogging has opened up journalism and opinion. Abandoning the idea that the measure of good work was fame or money or a corporate imprimatur was important, and it allowed a lot of voices that would have never seen the light of day otherwise to be heard and in some cases to have a broad influence.

There are a lot of people who can make great art who don't have an aptitude for or desire for selling it and themselves, and the system of popular art at that time just didn't have a space for them. I think that context had more to do with Kurt Cobain's demise than anything. He just wasn't prepared to be famous, and really had no desire for fame, but he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when a small scene small blew up into a global phenomenon.

Others handled it far better and more pragmatically. Sonic Youth and the Flaming Lips have used their status very well to explore opportunities that they might not have been able to without the resources of a major label. Pearl Jam, though at this point their music bores the heck out of me, are really great about remembering where they came from and helping smaller bands to get heard and get paid, and of course their doomed battle against Ticketmaster was one well worth fighting. Bands like Bad Religion, Jawbox, and the Poster Children who went into the major label world with their eyes wide open and with a plan came out very well, ploughing the money from their major deal right back into their own label or studio to assure their future artistic independence and their ability to help other worthy voices to be heard.

Just like with the political tension between radicalism with purity/integrity and messy, pragmatic progressivism that works within the system, the latter is a tough balance to maintain, and the temptations of money and power can easily lead you astray if you start viewing them as ends instead of means, but the upside of the attempt is much greater than the ascetic and lonely way of the radical.

Now, I love a lot of popular art, and indeed a big motivation for a lot of popular art is making money, so there is a tension there. I think much depends on what kind of art you make. If a significant element of it is politically or socially conscious, then selling out is a relevant concept. It's hard for say, the Shins to sell out, because their music doesn't mean anything (aside: This is a big part of why Garden State is so cringeworthy. "The Shins changed my life?" Puhleeze.) aside from the personal meaning and the emotional resonance that individual people find in it.

So, selling out is relevant for Fugazi, but not so much for the Shins. Authenticity and independence is really important for socially and politically relevant or critical art. I'm not saying it's totally impossible to critique the system from inside it, but there is a reason beyond just aesthetics why Fugazi are relevant and Rage Against the Machine are laughable. I don't care if I hear Mogwai or the Shins backing a commercial, because it has no real bearing on the meaning of their music. However, when I hear the first two lines of "Fortunate Son" ripped out of context to sell all-American blue jeans, well, that's a bit more problematic, because that song meant something, and could still mean something in a larger cultural and political sense, and that use of it is a total distortion of said meaning.

However, perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind is that the punk/DIY movement and ethic and associated worries about selling out were a product of a specific cultural time and place, defined by a certain corporate media structure. Insofar as those values seem less relevant to this generation of artists, it may be a result of the changing media landscape. Post WWII, a corporate-owned, broadcast-based monoculture dominated American life. As I went into above, punk rock was so revolutionary because it was one of the first revivals of amateurism and folk culture in the face of that, and one of the first significant post-broadcast movements that reminded ordinary people that they could make art on their own terms in a way that was integral to the rest of their lives.

Now that the net has come along and communities for creation and channels for distribution of those things are ascendant and ubiquitous, the oppositional stance of punk as a throughgoing artistic ethic doesn't quite make as much sense anymore. I think some of it does still make sense somewhat as a political and social ethic, and I'm a bit disappointed to see very little in the way of political and social consciousness or questioning of corporate/capitalist values on the part this new generation of indie musicians and artistsand on the part of digital creatives more generally, but that's probably an issue for another post entirely.

Amanda of Pandagon's Vonnegut tribute post reminded me of another reason why he, and the literature of WWII in general, was very important.

what I find interesting about Slaughterhouse Five is that it's an angry protest against the historical revisionism that casts WWII as the "good" war.

This is vital, especially in light of what happened in the 90's with the ridiculously over the top mythologization of the Greatest Generation. It confused me a lot at the time, because all of the literature and history of WWII I had read up to then was nothing like that. And most of it wasn't written by professional intellectuals or mythmakers, but by people like Vonnegut and Heller who were working or middle class, and actually fought and saw what it was really like.

None of them seemed to have any illusions that WWII was anything but a senseless bloodbath and a tragedy for humanity in general. Nobody "won" that war. The very fact that it happened to begin with, and that humanity got to a point where things like London, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Rape of Nanking, and the Holocaust could occur was such an immeasurable tragedy and loss that no amount of heroism and courage could begin to overcome it. Pynchon, who was too young to actually fight in WWII, but who definitely understood it in the same way as Heller and Vonnegut, put it this way:

Yet the continuity, flesh to kindred metals, home to hedgeless sea, has persisted. It is not death that separates these incarnations, but paper: paper specialties, paper routines. The War, the Empire, will expedite such barriers between our lives. The War needs to divide this way, and to subdivide, though its propaganda will always stress unity, alliance, pulling together. The War does not appear to want a folk-consciousness, not even of the sort the Germans have engineered, ein Volk ein Fuhrer - it wants a machine of many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity... Yet who can presume to say what the War wants, so vast and aloof is it... so absentee. Perhaps the War isn't even an awareness- not a life at all, really. There may only be some cruel, accidental resemblance to life.

He saw the war as some sort of inhuman, irresistable force; machines and systems that we had unconsciously or inadvertently created had broken out of our control. From the literature that came out of it, to the countless grandparents who were not at all eager to even talk about what they had seen and done, let alone cast themselves as heroes, it's clear that many of the people who participated in it and saw the real price on all sides seem to have seen it similarly, and taken the same sorts of lessons from it that Vonnegut and the others who wrote the literature of the war did.

Failing to grasp those lessons is a lot of what got us into the mess that we're currently in. I think the 90's revisionism about WWII was really pernicious, in that it put forth this ideal of a great crusading struggle against evil, with America at its head. That was attractive to lots of people looking for meaning in post-post-everything life. They wanted to be part of a Great Unambiguous Struggle like their parents and grandparents were, to be swaggering heroes like their mythical forebears.

That's a significant piece of how we got from a limited fight against a bunch of dudes in caves in Afghanistan to a full blown Holy War. The only reason people can think it's plausible that Islamic Fundamentalism is an existential threat to our way of life is that they're looking at it through the lens of WWII. They wanted a Nazi Germany of their own to overcome, and, since no such thing existed, it had to be invented. Vonnegut and most of the voices of his generation knew that you should never wish for something like that. After all, they saw what that really meant, and what the true cost was.

This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don't think it's a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. - KV