When "60 Minutes" Asks for My Contacts...

David,

To your point on venomous: You can't play chess with someone who only allows checkers to be played.

I've seen it happen too many times before, particularly with big TV networks. You usually gain nothing by sitting down at that table, except tarnished credibility in the end. On rare occassions, the bargain with that devil may advance a bigger cause, but that's only because you have figured out how to upset the checker board.

"Sources" who play ball with big network shows need to know the truth behind the curtain. They can easily wind up ruined in the end, because the networks cut (or shoot) and run -- on their timetable, with their agenda, without regard to authenticity, often leaving a path of wreckage in their wake. They want faces, action and visuals, even if that sometimes means the people and lives behind those faces pay a dear price for that network prize. It's passed off as "getting the story"; in reality, it's usually all about getting the big ratings and career pay-off.

Again, I qualify that opinion by pointing out that there are exceptions, even in the network world. But those exceptions don't approach any story on the path this producer chose. They know the rules of chess.

In the case of this 60 Minutes encounter, as I see it, the stakes are too high to feign professional courtesy, to try to accommodate the freight train, because it will certainly run you over without a pain of guilt.

There is no honor among thieves, truly; and that is what you are dealing with in the real game much of the time. People who have bought into the checkers media world get ahead by jumping over things in their way on the way to getting crowned -- so why make it easy by bending over for them?

And though you may have interpreted my suggestion that the producer be dropped in the middle of Bolivia to fend for herself as a notion laced with venom, it really would be the best thing for her revival as an authentic journalist. The experience might actually help her learn to appreciate chess; then we can really begin to relate with her within the depth of perception required in the authentic game.

And unlike checkers, where the goal is to charge forward relentlessly to become a king, chess has the much more subtle message that kings have little power without the help of the other pieces on the board.

I think this is a great discussion. Thanks for offering constructive critique, David. Sorry I haven't participated yet but I've been on the road all week with limited online access.

David writes (about my exchange with a 60 minutes producer):

I am not scolding anyone here, just posting my view of the tone and why I think that it might not be productive.  Sure it's therapeudic, but for whom?  I doubt that Ms. Producer finds any help in it at all.  (Which really is too bad :)...

And David adds:

I am not inspired by self-gratification through looking down the bridge of one's erudite nose at the pathetic rats in the race.  (That is part of what isolated the heartland of America INTO the Republican Party.)

Al comments:

I heartily agree with the second point - that an often snobby discourse toward those in the rat race by some activists or journalists pushes otherwise good people into reactive political positions... Such as when folks are derided for eating at fast-food restaurants, or listening to pop music, or still using Windows PC operating systems that are not as "PC" as Macs.... or whatever... Yeah, there is a snobbery and I've seen it and felt it a lot this week as I'm behind enemy lines (that is, North of the Border)...

On the other hand, what class of professionals is most responsible for the negative messages toward working and poor folks that permeate our cultures? It's the Commercial Media professionals, that's who! And, by and large, producers, editors, reporters, etcetera, are college educated, many have degrees, most grew up in privilege, and they spend their workdays finding new and exciting ways to kick other people, with less privilege and opportunities, when those other people are down.

The 60 Minutes approach to the people of Rio de Janeiro (like the Independent of London article that the TV show wanted to retread) commits that "downward nose" offense very steeply.

I identify more with the folks in the favelas of Rio than I do with some desk jockey at a Commercial TV program. I never graduated college. I don't own property (and I have none awaiting me from any possible inheritance). I don't (and won't) wear a tie: not even in court! Although I worked many years in the cubicles of the Commercial Media (print, TV, radio and Internet) I don't identify with this class of upscale mutant wage-slave careerists, most of whom dream that Santa will bring them a job at the New York Times in order to impress their rich parents and relatives.

But, as we used to say in the 70s, "oppression is often internalized." Activists, change-agents, even alternative journalists, dedicate hundreds of hours a year of free, unpaid, labor to helping the Commercial Media do its job... All under the pretext of trying to make the Commercial Media reports better... Even some Authentic Journalists are often confused... They sometimes think that their work is only "successful" if it gets picked up and stolen, then, by Commercial Media...

So, for the past five years or so, I've been involved in an educational process, through Narco News, and through my work in the years before that (see The Medium Is The Middleman), to try and share what I learned inside the bellies of those Commercial Media beasts and help others better navigate the electronic jungle that is dominated by them.

To educate (Abbie Hoffman taught me) you have to entertain. You have to grab people's attention and keep it, but not in banal ways that cut against the revolutionary message. So I increasingly use these Commercial Media people as props, or what the humorists call "straight men." Think of Groucho Marx as Rufus T. Firefly bouncing off Mrs. Teasdale, the upscale (and uptight) symbol of wealth and boring power in some Marx Brothers films.

It is still (sigh) sadly rare that change agents or other journalists take on the Mrs. Teasdales of the Commercial Media in ways that remind the public that they are not almighty and that they do not have our interests at heart.

Part of the group I'm reaching with such tactics are journalists of conscience inside the Commercial Media systems, as a tweak and reminder that there is nothing "essentially good" nor even situationally good about their employeers or the organizing principle (make money!) of their news organizations. But mainly I'm speaking not to the 60 Minutes producer (my prop) but to the large swathe of regular folks out there in the Narco News readership, to dissuade them of the myth that we always have to "play nice" with the Commercial Media.

So, anyway... It's not impatience (although impatience is often a good thing when it comes to making political and social change)... It's theater... The "teach-in" has a stage, it has lighting, it has sound... but it needs its Mrs. Teasdales and I'm very lucky to be fed a steady stream of them to bounce off of in order to make this show more educational and interesting to the multitudes of people who really do count.

And it's not poking fun at her or them because she's inside the rat race... To the contrary, it's on behalf of those of us who are more its indentured servants on the mouse wheel, to defend us from the college-miseducated elites of the Commercial Media, who, as even the right wing has noticed, are socially more liberal, but economically more authoritarian, than the public at large. A very strange bunch, those Commercial Media elites... and lazy too! Groucho awaits his next satis-fried customer!

a few random notes: recognizing and acting on the necessity to send in the clowns of one variety or another isn't always  diagnostic of  lack of patience, as Al points out.  there's a personal and collective mental health day implicitly and greatly needed that is sometimes best addressed through some well-placed satire or facetiousness or even sarcasm.  Shakespeare was not the first in the history of theater to throw in a bit of foolery, often with the high and mighty inverting into the fool, when the drama got too heavy. and the nature of really reporting the news is to deal with the almost unbearably heavy.

  Jill Nelson was just on Pacifica Radio yesterday, talking about turning to writing fiction as an antidote for the way that being a journalist and studying and exposing some really nasty stuff pisses her off as an unavoidable side effect. (her latest novel is about a fictitious bordello-for-female-clients in Reno, and it sounds like fun; take that any way you may choose.)

the truth is not always entertaining; it can be totally disgusting in fact, as anyone who follows the news can tell you. and the act of using humor, including barbed humor, to invert the more hirrifying aspects of the truth is an ancient social ritual that serves a vastly important function.

some of my old friends have heard me quote the original PL Traver creation, Mary Poppins ( a far more complex and bitchy and ultimately wise character than any Disney movie could ever protray) as telling the Banks children, "Patience?  I have the patience of a Boa Constrictor.  I merely Speak my Mind."  (capitalization quite important to the message here, IMO.)

could a person get a bit psychoanalytical and say that in having a chuckle at the expense of the straight-line lady here, I'm allowing Al to express some of my own impatience or hostility or aggression by letting him do the twitting of Mrs. Tisdale?  sure, if you want. it can also be argued that perhaps enjoying  this relatively harmless diversion makes it easier to endure for the long haul, which is where patience comes in handiest and/or most important.

I repeat, you laugh, or you die. it's not really a patience issue for me in the last analysis, though I do understand what you're saying.

as far as making fun of people who eat in fast food restaurants is concerned, Bill Clinton was by far the funniest of all Mac-aholic types from my perspective, mostly because he could damned well afford a more genteel, if you will, food addiction. it's not just about prepacked fast food.  remember the fun at least some of the public had with Richard Nixon's dietary habits (catsup on cottage cheeese.)how the powerful feed themselves can be howlingly funny.

and on that note, I break for lunch. I'm a rather patient soul despite the amusement I take in Al's ways of speaking quite bluntly to his straight-line folk, but not so much when I'm hungry. and could (and do)people make fun of MY hippie-food lunches! let 'em, but I gotta eat.

 hasta la victoria siempre, no mayo, no pickle,

Judith