There was a time when if something big, something really big, happened, then you knew that event was going to be the cover story for both Time and Newsweek. Sometimes, if there was a photograph that had become an iconic image for an event, it might even be the cover for both magazines -- remember Oklahoma City? the photograph of the fireman carrying out the tiny child? that image was the defining one for the event, and it made the cover for both magazines.
No more. I can't decide whether the rule is that both magazines can't have a hard news cover in the same week, or that neither of the magazines is willing to have a hard news cover two weeks in a row.
This week is a perfect example. Newsweek's cover last week was Martha Stewart. This week the cover is just what you'd imagine. Last week Time had a cover story on Iraq. And so it's cover is this. Charming picture, but how is this news? Now, if you go to their home page, you see this. Which at least suggests they have the grace to be embarrassed about it.
They're such dopey articles, even the ones on that are supposedly hard news, that they're unreadable. At least the women staying home with the kids article is honest about its audience. Call it inoffensive, in a way the others are not, with their clumsy and gruesome earnestness.
Compare, say, a blog like Belmont Club http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/ who writes like Walter Lord sometimes, with some genuinely literate thought.
You know, I couldn't even stand Time and Newsweek in high school, and thought, well, maybe it's an adult thing and I'll grow into it. Just the opposite, it became more insufferable.
They're selling magazines and the biggest reliable audience determines what they write. The news posture is a marketing gimmick to flatter the audience. I suppose you could analyze it as various failings in journalism, but that's not what they're _trying_ to do. So the analysis comes up pretty empty in the end, and the only thing that you get is some gesture of disgust for it. You and I are not their audience.
Long ago I figured out why reports of air crashes were always, always, impossibly wrong. It's because any technical detail puts the audience off. They were _not trying_ to get it right. The airplane took off and the motor stalled. Right, the audience thinks, that's happened to me too going up hills.
Still, there's enough news input to blog about and produce decent thoughts about, so somebody somewhere is still in the business. Read Aviation Week for air crashes
Posted by: Ron Hardin | March 20, 2004 at 06:51 PM
You know, the mainstream media finally discovering that kids do better with a parent is actually pretty remarkable news. Kind of reminds me of the "Dan Quayle Was Right" cover on another magazine a while ago.
Posted by: tbrosz | March 20, 2004 at 08:55 PM
The mainstream media discovered a bigger market for mother at home. No other fact was discovered. The audience in turn is not so much interested in the conclusion as in going over the social complexities again and again (``how like my own life''), eternally. But they buy the stuff, so there it is.
It's not even a question of majority rule. It's a question of how big the minority segments are, and which minority is the biggest. That's what's selected for content by the surviving publications.
Most people don't read the stuff at all, and wouldn't read it no matter what they wrote. So they don't affect what goes into the publications.
It's all not completely divorced from what you might call the facts of the content, but it's pretty loose.
Chiefly, though, it's now permissible to think that there's a positive to mother-at-home and a negative to mother-at-work, and not only for children. The revision though is not likely to find a new territory free from the two polar choices that make the simplest story.
You could find one in an interview between Jacques Derrida and Christie McDonald in an ancient issue of _Diacritics_ (v.12 n.2 p.66 Summer 1982) but it would be hard to popularize. Roughly that women don't have a place, they make places; which is where the new feminism has to go, to align with actual interests. It awaits its poet, is all.
Vicki Hearne, an author driven by some aspect of this puzzle, and having nothing to do with children, wrote a couple of beautiful essays on it, one in _Bandit_ (``Beastly Behaviors'') and the other in _Animal Happiness_ (``Beware of the Dog''); yet her Amazon reviewers seem to hate her. So she seems like a popularizer to me, but apparently not everybody.
The idea is to take women seriously.
The media take nobody seriously. That's not what they do. They sell audience
Posted by: Ron Hardin | March 21, 2004 at 05:43 AM