New York Times reporter David Carr (12/19/11) takes a look at comedian Louis C.K.'s recent decision to webcast his own comedy special:

A scabrous and successful champion of the everyman, Louis C. K. decided last week to go direct with his fans: no cable special, no middleman, just a simple download for $5 on his website to see his comedy show Louis C. K.: Live at the Beacon Theater.

The show could be viewed as the consumer wished, with no rights protection or expensive subscription. A buy-it-and-watch-it proposition, no cable company involved. He was also, of course, enabling people to watch it free--without digital rights management, it was there for the pirating--and some went right to the torrent sites and did so.

How many people did? Close to 200,000, which means the comedian could earn somewhere in the neighborhood of $750,000. But more interesting was his take on the modern media landscape:

"OK, so NBC is this huge company and they have all these studios and these satellites to beam stuff out," he said, "but on the Web, both NBC.com and LouisCK.com have the same amount of bandwidth. We are equals and there are things you can do with that. This has been a fun little experiment."

That, in a nutshell, is what the discussion about net neutrality should be about.

New York Times media reporter David Carr has written some interest pieces on Occupy Wall Street. His piece today tries to work out where things go from here, but one comment in the piece about how Occupy Wall Street compares with protests of the past caught my attention:

There were citizens screaming invective about the rich while being confronted by the police in riot gear, the kind of spontaneous uprising we have not seen in almost half a century.

Huh. This is used to explain why the mainstream media found OWS so newsworthy.

But I remember things like this happening, way back in 1999-2000.

From David Carr's piece on Glenn Beck in the New York Times today (3/7/11)

"When I first came here," he told his audience on Wednesday, "I had this pie-in-the-sky belief that if I told you the truth, if I verified all of my facts and double-checked, and we could make that compelling case with facts to back it up, the journalists in other places would get curious and they’d use their resources and they’d investigate and they'd prove it right and they'd show it too." Then he shook his head and laughed bitterly.

There's nothing to say about that, really. Everyone should read James Wolcott's wonderful piece in the new Vanity Fair on the cable news culture of the moment. On Beck:

Even in a clown era, Beck is an unlikely crusade leader. Round and beige, he resembles one of the squeamish pod sperm awaiting launch instructions upstream in Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex. Like radio god Rush Limbaugh, Beck combines the roles of pedagogue and demagogue into a single luncheon meat, slathered in blather. But where Limbaugh stays on track in the radio studio, taking a single theme and pounding it flat, Beck is a grab-bag collage artist of half-baked ideas and lore, grafting bits of history and chunks of speculation into a clanking Frankenstein monster with Barack Obama's face sewn onto Karl Marx’s head and one arm raised in permanent Nazi salute--"liberal Fascism" as an evil action figure.

As Wolcott goes on to argue, the fact that Beck's rhetoric doesn't make sense is precisely the point: "Incoherence isn't a bug in Beck's software program, it's the primary directive."

The New York Times' David Carr (9/20/10) compares involvement by media figures in politics--exemplified by CNBC's Rick Santelli and various Fox News figures fueling the Tea Party movement, and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's dueling answer rallies to said movement--to "a football game where the reporters and commentators, bored by the feckless proceedings on the field, suddenly poured out of the press box and took over the game." Writes Carr: "In politics, it seems as if the media is intent on not just keeping score but also calling plays."

Regardless of what one thinks of any particular media figure's political advocacy, it should be remembered--in a nation that was basically imagined into existence by a political commentator named Thomas Paine--that there is nothing at all unusual or alarming about people writing and talking about politics in the hopes of affecting the course of political life. Indeed, that's the most obvious reason to become a political journalist, and the assumed role of journalism that underlies the First Amendment. It's only the corporate media tradition of trying to conceal the political opinions of journalists in the hopes of marketing the broadest possible audience to advertisers that makes it seem natural to think of journalists as people who ought to confine themselves to "keeping score" rather than getting directly involved in the sport of politics.

There's been an awful lot written about the Washington Post and David Weigel. The short version of the story: Weigel was hired by the Post to do blogging/Internet reporting on the conservative movement. This bothered some on the right, since Weigel's left-libertarian politics made them think he was out to get them.  

Weigel evidently had strong opinions about some of the people in that movement; when some of his messages to a liberal-leaning email list were leaked, his time at the Post was over.

David Carr at the New York Times wrote a thoughtful column (7/4/10) about the Weigel controversy, noting that Weigel "probably could have survived if he had slammed Rachel Maddow or had some fun at Al Franken's expense."

Carr adds that "if you dumped every reporter who ever sent a snide message or talked smack in private, there would be nothing but crickets chirping in newsrooms all over America." Weigel was hired precisely because he had strong opinions and could also produce interesting, substantive reporting; the Post seems to think the problems with the former mean they must live without the latter.

After quoting Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli saying, "We can’t have any tolerance for the perception that people are conflicted or bring a bias to their work," Carr proposes "a little thought experiment":

What if a reporter made a wildly inappropriate video suggesting that the secretary of state, who happens to be a woman, should drink Mad Bitch beer? Surely that reporter would be forced to apologize to Hillary Rodham Clinton before walking the plank. Yet when this happened, Dana Milbank, the longtime Washington Post star who made the video, remained a prized political writer at the paper. (The "Mouthpiece Theater" video segments, mercifully, have been canceled.)

 Indeed, one can recall that the lesson Dana Milbank drew from the Mad Bitch fiasco was that other people on the internet are mean-spirited.

In his front-page profile of movie industry blogger Nikki Finke, New York Times media reporter David Carr (7/17/09) can't resist a self-congratulatory dig: "Her liabilities in the world of print--a penchant for innuendo and unnamed sources--became assets online."

Those familiar with the print media world may recall that unnamed sources are not exactly unknown there. To find an example, I didn't have to go farther than the first half of Carr's own article, where he has a paragraph full of anonymous attacks on Finke:

"I'd prefer not to ever deal with her," said a senior communications executive at a studio who declined to be identified. Many others declined comment saying, variously, "she gave me a nervous breakdown," "she terrifies me," and "there's no percentage in me saying anything to you about Nikki no matter what it is."

Hmm, anonymous sources suggesting dire things about a subject without providing any specifics--in other words, innuendo. Are these liabilities in Carr's print-media world...or assets?

Is the total frenzy over post-Thanksgiving shopping a recent creation? That's what David Carr writes in the New York Times today:

Media and retail outfits are economic peas in a pod. Part of the reason that the Thanksgiving newspaper and local morning television show are stuffed with soft features about shopping frenzies is that they are stuffed in return with ads from retailers. Yes, Black Friday is a big day for retailers--stores did as much as 13 percent of their holiday business this last weekend--but it is also a huge day for newspapers and television.

In partnership with retail advertising clients, the news media have worked steadily and systematically to turn Black Friday into a broad cultural event. A decade ago, it was barely in the top 10 shopping days of the year. But once retailers hit on the formula of offering one or two very-low-priced items as loss leaders, media groups began to cover the post-Thanksgiving outing as a kind of consumer sporting event.