palewire / tv

The CSPAN2 Book TV Bus has a MySpace page.

26-Feb-08

And it’s a 21-year-old female. Fill in your own smart ass remark.

The Tony Wilson Corollary.

19-Aug-07

One of the more enduring lines from John Ford’s Westerns is a maxim offered by Carleton Young in the “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” Young plays Maxwell Scott, an aging newspaper editor confronted with facts that contradict one his community’s most cherished beliefs. Rather than print the ugly truth, he elects to destroy the evidence. His justification:

This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

I thought of Young’s line today while trolling the web for old video and news about Tony Wilson, the infamously impish founder of Factory Records who died this past week.

Over on YouTube, I found a snippet from a television retrospective of his career. It focuses on his success promoting pathbreaking pop groups like The Sex Pistols, Joy Division, New Order and The Happy Mondays.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFndQ379ICw[/youtube]

While there are some fun moments with the man himself, I was struck by how heavily the producers relied upon clips from “24 Hour Party People,” the excellent biopic about Wilson starring Steve Coogan.

Nevermind that the movie was a work of fiction. Or that Coogan’s version of Wilson is an unreliable narrator with a nearly pathological commitment to self-mythologizing. When a moment calls for video to illustrate qualities of Wilson’s personality or events from his life, the producers jump for the legend more frequently than the fact.

And, as much as this tweaks my inner journalism professor, I think I can understand where the TV producers were coming from. I’ll try to offer it here as a 2007 update to Ford’s maxim.

This is TV, stupid. When the tape is hot, run the tape.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tca2JkjsZHU[/youtube]

This is TV, stupid.

22-Apr-07

It’s an unsettling thing that success can so easily be made to look like corruption. You’ll find a good and pretty darn funny example in The TV Set, a smart ring-up of the vulgarities of network television I caught tonight at E Street Cinema down by Ford’s Theatre.

While hardly a new theme — artist meets suit, integrity meets compromise — I enjoyed how the conflict was brought to life by dramatizing the way coercion and criticism can be cloaked in the rhetoric of persuasion and euphemism.

When the imperious network executive (Sigourney Weaver) wants to dumb down the pet project of an earnest writer (David Duchovny), she doesn’t directly confront him with her demands. His will is slowly bent through a series of passive-aggressive maneuvers that erode his resistance and are undertaken with a smile sandwiched between empty compliments. Looming at every turn, of course, is the unspoken knowledge that one side of the table is holding all of the cards.

Unlike other recent workplace satires like The Office or Dilbert, where bureaucratic gamesmanship and corporate happy talk are depicted as the shield and song of the incompetent, The TV Set aims to show how it can also be the sword of the ambitious and the powerful. Plus it’s really funny.

See his work

25-May-06

I work as a reporter, albeit a somewhat unconventional one. My job calls on me to specialize in what is often called computer-assisted reporting. That’s a funny phrase — have you ever heard of a computer-assisted photographer or a computer-assisted architect? — but what it means is that I use computers to collect, organize, analyze and present large amounts of information. Databases. Maps. Web Toys. Scripts. That stuff.

While I’m excited by the journalistic potential of new technology, I have an abiding admiration for the virtues of traditional reporting techniques, which I plan to continue using wherever I work.

I’m employed at the Los Angeles Times, a daily newspaper and 24-hour Web site based in Southern California. Nothing I write here should be interpreted as the opinion of that organization.

Before working at the Times, I worked on data projects at The Center for Public Integrity, covered state politics and elections in Jefferson City, Missouri, helped produce long-form documentaries for cable channels like CNN and Discovery Times, and pitched in on some television and newspaper reporting in Chicago. I earned a master’s degree from the Missouri School of Journalism — where I worked at the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR) — after receiving my undergraduate training at DePaul University.