Weekend low point

Filed under “Too many things considered” is the Sunday All Things Considered story on brothers John and Hank Green. These two snooze-inducers “realized their relationship had become nothing more than a series of text messages and e-mails” so “they began posting video blogs for each other on YouTube.”

What’s wrong with this story? Where do I begin:

The entire premise makes an enormous but common category error. NPR unthinkingly buys the dumb idea that exchanging recorded, non-interactive video clips is new and that its newness makes it uniquely qualified to help these text-message-addled brothers re-connect. Well, I have another technology they should learn about that’s even more amazing. It’s called the telemaphone machine, or something newfangled like that, and I hear tell that you can actually say something into it and have a person on the other end respond immediately! Then you talk again and then they do! Imagine the revolution we’ll now be able to have! No more of those awful, stilted, waaaaay too much information one-way YouTube video clips. Soon you’ll be able to actually ask the person you are talking to about the things you are interested in in the order you want to hear about them instead of having them describe their trip to the grocery store! And, no tedious, painstaking editing and uploading of video clips! You just talk! What a future!

[editor's note: I was way too harsh on the content of these guys' videos and their viewers based on my understanding of them from the story. After actually watching some of them I took out that paragraph.]

As a blogger I often get this creepy feeling that one day everyone will have a blog. They won’t have time to read anyone else’s, just narcissistically manage their own little garden of superficia and knit rhetorical cozies in which to store their quotidia.

This will make the blogosphere about as useful as a map of the United States that is EXACTLY THE SAME SIZE AS THE ACTUAL UNITED STATES.

1:1 Scale adds nothing and is really hard to fit in the glove compartment.

Tuesday ME Hi/Lows

Low Points:The theme today is meta: talking about talking about stuff.

Baseball! Baseball! (I’ll write about my weariness over NPR’s obsession with baseball in a future post.) Today they talk about baseball officials testifying before congress, when, in fact, they should be talking about why they should be wasting time talking about talking about baseball.

Another low point: Talking about the ridiculous, media-created kerfuffle about whether or not Hillary gives enough responsibility for civil rights victories to Martin Luther King. Please find something less stupid to cover or skip election coverage for the day.

High Point: Gwen Thompkins’ unblinking, poetic, nightmarish story about election-related tribal violence in Kenya. I’m as jaded and horror-numb about insoluble African tragedy as anyone, but this report, prosaically entitled “Kenya’s Parliament to Convene First Meeting,” ripped that emotional scab right off. Her lovely clear, calm voice recounting this gruesome story with telling details (“missing eight teeth”) and vivid sound clips should send everyone to their keyboards demanding news agencies double funding for actual reporting. This was an old-school NPR pre-produced report, not the usual so-called “two way,” which is when a reporter in the studio asks agreed-upon “give us a sense” questions to another reporter on the scene. I hope she wins an award for it.

Monday ME Low/High Points

Low Point: Cokie Roberts, Matriarch of the Roberts family NPR Dynasty, and her autonomic meaningless poll result recitation.

Quote:

“Even the pollsters will tell you not to focus on the horse-race and look at the other things…but the horse-race is irresistible.” Did New Hampshire teach them nothing?

High Points: Report on the Sacramento River Delta describing the enormous and inevitable problems there. Chillingly calls to mind the prescient and lengthy NPR reports on New Orleans’ vulnerability to Hurricane flooding prior to Katrina.

Also shades of Zwerdling (see previous post) when a Hillary Clinton recording was played in which she called the office of the president the “highest and hardest glass ceiling.”