Tag Archives: media

ESCAPE FROM TV-VILLE

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Over at Dissent, I have a follow-up piece on class on TV, responding to Alyssa Rosenberg’s critique of my original post:

As she points out, not all portrayals of rich people reinforce conservatism. On the other hand, where our culture is conservative about class, it’s usually in leaving it unmentioned. For every joke about the excesses of the super-rich, there are hours of TV quietly reinforcing the idea that being poor or deeply economically insecure is an aberration. And when we do see self-identified working class characters show up on TV, too often it’s as the bearers of “cultural” conservatism, making a guest appearance to complain about gay people hitting on them or immigrants speaking Spanish in public (not that there are too many of either on network TV).

Check it out.

Update (7/19): Here’s an interesting e-mail I got from someone considering the impact the TV-ville economy had on him when he was growing up:
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WELCOME TO TV-VILLE, POPULATION: PEOPLE RICHER THAN YOU

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At Dissent, I break down the numbers on the jobs TV networks buy scripts about:

Imagine you live in a town of 174 people called “TV-ville.” Each person living there represents one of the pilot scripts bought by the four big TV networks for the upcoming fall season. (I’ve culled these from a list recently published by New York magazine, which has a brief description of each of those scripts. The 174 scripts I have included were those that mentioned someone’s job.) If you ever need law enforcement, you’re in luck. TV-ville is home to twenty-three cops, and if that’s not enough to make you feel safe, there are also seven CIA and FBI agents to back them up, as well as victimologists, spies, and fourteen investigators (public and private). If you get sick, you have twenty-four doctors to choose from. If you need to sue, you can call one of the town’s eighteen lawyers. But there’s a downside to living in TV-ville: It may take a while to get a table, because the whole town only has one waitress.

Here’s the rest.

BEING UNDOCUMENTED IS NOT A CONFLICT OF INTEREST

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Monday Daniel Denvir wrote an excellent takedown of the journalists attacking Jose Antonio Vargas for the crime of Reporting While Undocumented. Vargas came out as an undocumented American in a New York Times piece last week. What I find most striking about the attacks on Vargas is the tension they reveal on the boundaries of perceived American normalcy.

Take this Romenesko piece published last week: “Vargas wrote at least 4 stories about immigration for San Francisco Chronicle, not 1.” The alleged offense is that Vargas continued writing about immigration and undocumented immigrants after, according to his editor, he had said he would stop to avoid a conflict of interest. Romenesko is run by the Poynter Institute, which exists “to ensure that our communities have access to excellent journalism—the kind of journalism that enables us to participate fully and effectively in our democracy.” Rather than counting how many times an undocumented immigrant wrote about other undocumented immigrants, it would be more interesting to see them explain what problem – if any – they think readers should have with it.

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EARTH TO A PATRONIZING PLANET

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The Netroots Nation conference has traditionally been an occasion for mainstream media types to take a whack at the unreasonableness of the left. Michael Grunwald offered up, if not a classic, a fairly representative example of the genre on Swampland yesterday. Take this paragraph designed to dispatch left criticisms of Barack Obama with patronizing parentheticals:

It’s true that President Obama is not as liberal as some Daily Kos bloggers would like him to be. (Although he has blogged at Daily Kos.) He continued some of President Bush’s national security policies. (Although he did end the war in Iraq.) He ignored left-wing calls to nationalize troubled banks. (Which turned out to be the right call.) He’s pushed for middle-class tax cuts and public-employee wage freezes that his base dislikes, and he’s outsourced most of the Republican-bashing that his base craves. (Which may be why he’s way more popular than his party.)

Let’s take the parenthetical potshots one at a time:

It’s true that Obama has posted on Daily Kos – although the most prominent instance was when he took to Daily Kos to criticize progressives for being too hard on senators that backed John Roberts (more on that one here and here).

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JIM CROW: NOT JUST DRINKING FOUNTAINS

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There’s a lot of silliness in this Politico piece reporting that Republicans (and one anonymous Democrat) would like Debbie Wasserman Schultz to be less strident in criticizing them. It’s worth noting that whereas Republican Chairman Michael Steele took hits in the media for criticizing Republicans, Democratic Chairwoman Wasserman Schultz is now taking hits for…criticizing Republicans. But what’s most pernicious in Molly Ball’s article is its selective memory about Jim Crow:

The congresswoman’s latest blunder came Sunday, when she said on television that Republicans “want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws and literally — and very transparently — block access to the polls to voters who are more likely to vote for Democratic candidates than Republican candidates.”

The equating of state legislatures’ efforts to require voters to show identification with laws that required separate schools and water fountains raised hackles, particularly in racially sensitive Democratic circles, prompting a quasi-retraction from Wasserman Schultz.

This raises the perennial question: Is it better to be obtuse intentionally or unintentionally?

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JOURNAL BURIES BOEING LEDE

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Jim DeMint Communications Advisor Amanda Carpenter yesterday tweeted a link to a Wall Street Journal story on a motion filed by three South Carolina Boeing employees working with the National Right to Work Foundation. Boeing, as I explained in this piece, is charged by the NLRB’s General Counsel with retaliating against union members in Washington State by transferring a new line of airliners to South Carolina. The three workers, at least one of whom was active in campaigning to get rid of the Machinists union at the South Carolina plant, want to intervene in the case in defense of Boeing. Carpenter is presumably tweeting (on her personal feed) the article because she likes seeing Boeing employees siding with the company (at least three, that is). But I’d say the most revealing piece of the WSJ story is buried in the sixth paragraph (emphasis mine):

When Boeing bought one of the pre-existing 787 facilities in the state, the production employees working there at the time were represented by the Machinists union and Boeing was “more than willing to work with” the union, the motion says. Still, one of the three employees now seeking to intervene successfully led an effort to decertify the union at that plant in September 2009, in part to improve Boeing’s chances of building the new facility, the motion says.

So one of the Boeing workers thought going non-union would improve the chances of Boeing moving production to South Carolina. How does that help Boeing’s case that it doesn’t retaliate against union activity? Would be interesting to know if any Boeing management suggested to this worker that getting rid of the union would be seen favorably by the company. (That could have been grounds for another Unfair Labor Practice charge). Maybe the Journal could do a follow-up story on the topic.

I tweeted at Carpenter yesterday to get her take on this part of the story, but so far no response.

Update: The NRWF motion is on-line. In his declaration, Dennis Murray says
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WHAT IF PAUL RYAN PROPOSED A HEALTH INFLATION TAX ON SENIORS INSTEAD?

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In honor of Paul Ryan, I have a thought experiment up on the Washington Monthly blog:

“My fellow Americans, it’s time for straight talk, tough decisions, and tight belts. Health care inflation is a prime driver of our long-term debt. That’s why I’m going to save Medicare with my Health Inflation Tax. It’s a simple solution: each senior will just have to pay a tax equal to the increase in the cost of their Medicare to the government beyond 2.7% a year. So if your individual Medicare costs us 10 percent more next year, your tax will cover three-quarters of the increased cost of your care (the other quarter is on us!). Here’s the best part: if you want lower taxes, you just need to use less healthcare. And you can be proud knowing that as your Health Inflation Tax goes up and up, Medicare’s net cost to the government will never increase by more than 2.7% again. Now let’s come together and get my Health Inflation Tax passed. No demagoguery allowed.”

How popular do you think this plan would be? Would it have gotten the same forty Senate votes Ryan’s plan did on Wednesday?

Read it here.

LABOR BOARD DEFENDS WORKERS, CONSERVATIVES FREAK OUT

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My new piece debunking right-wing rhetoric about the NLRB’s Boeing complaint is up on Counterpunch and Common Dreams:

During the Bush years, many progressives gave up hope that the government could really make companies pay when they broke the law. Now a big company may have to pay a big price for illegally punishing workers. Last month the National Labor Relations Board, the federal body that enforces labor law, issued a complaint charging that Boeing illegally transferred the production of a line of aircraft out of Washington State. Boeing is accused of transferring the production to punish the workers there for going on strike. Punishing workers for union activity is retaliation, and it’s illegal. If Boeing is found guilty, it could be made to transfer the whole production line back. Naturally, the prospect of the Labor Board seriously enforcing labor law has Republicans freaking out…

Right-wingers are rising to defend Boeing, bash the NLRB, and blame Obama. But rather than debate retaliation against workers, conservatives want to conjure phantom menaces: bureaucrats micro-managing production, Democrats punishing “Right to Work” states, and union bosses paralyzing job creators.

Check it out.

Update (5/29): It’s now up on Talking Union and ZNet too.

DAYENU, PAUL RYAN!

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Peeling through all the layers of deception and immorality in Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan requires a modern dayenu:

If he cut taxes further on the rich but didn’t end Medicare, it would have been enough.

If he ended Medicare but didn’t end Medicaid, it would have been enough.

If he ended Medicare and Medicaid but didn’t claim he was protecting them, it would have been enough.

If he claimed he was protecting Medicare and Medicaid but didn’t claim it would boost employment, it would have been enough.

If he claimed it would boost employment but didn’t claim unemployment would fall to 2.8%, it would have been enough.

If he planned to cut taxes for rich people and end Medicare and Medicaid but didn’t call it a deficit reduction plan, it would have been enough.

FROM THE COMMENTS: BI TV

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That last post draw a bunch of comments, mostly thanks to Michael J.W. Stickings’ link from Crooks and Liars (thanks!). A few favorites:

Alek Felstiner posted on Facebook:

This is why Tim Bayliss was such an uncomfortable character for everyone else on Homicide. I think, related to your point about lesbianism not being “sex,” there’s a sense in which male homosexuality is contaminant (except perhaps, notably, in prison, where the concept of masculinity is by necessity revised, and that revision recognized and tolerated on the outside), whereas female homosexuality is tangential and easily disregarded – if not encouraged and fantasized-over.

I make that point because most narratives, especially on TV, are about redemption. Ending up in a heteronormative relationship is a satisfactory conclusion for a mainstream American audience, but it only really works if it’s a woman (who finally finds the right man). A bisexual man eventually finding the right woman doesn’t offer the same narrative closure, because he’s already been “contaminated.

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WHY SHOULD THEY GET WHAT WE TOOK AWAY FROM YOU?

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Was recently listening to the journalists on Slate’s Political Gabfest pondering why union density is so much higher amongst public sector workers than the private sector. None of them mentioned the most important difference: It’s harder for a government to get away with running a terror campaign against the union.

There’s more oversight and accountability to restrain public sector management from threatening workers for union activity, implying benefits to keeping out the union or danger with it, holding captive audience meetings against the union, or just firing union leaders. Only some of these tactics are even illegal. And bosses get away with those all the time. (Check out this reportfrom Human Rights Watch, or this one from Prof. Kate Bronfenbrenner). Consultants get very wealthy guiding companies on how to run fear campaigns against employees trying to organize. It’s a lot harder for the TSA to cut anti-union consultants a check than it is for Wal-Mart. When it comes to organizing, the fundamental difference between public sector and private sector workers is that public sector workers have a better chance at organizing free from fear. So lots and lots of public sector workers do.

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12 MOST FRUSTRATING MOMENTS OF “WAITING FOR SUPERMAN”

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The 12 most frustrating things I saw – or didn’t see – watching Waiting for Superman:


– The way Davis Guggenheim used the kids’ stories. Each of the kids was sympathetic, and they dramatized the deep inequality of opportunity in America. But neither the kids nor their parents got much chance to talk about what they thought would make their school better or worse. Instead we got Guggenheim intoning that if this girl didn’t get into a charter school, her life would basically be hopeless. If Guggenheim believes that these kids are suffering because too many of their teachers should be fired but won’t be, why not let the kids say so? If he believes these kids are suffering because teachers or administrators have low expectations for them, why not let the kids say that? And if the kids instead talked about classes that were too big, or teachers that were overwhelmed or undertrained, or being hungry in class, that would have been interesting too.

– Something that sounded like Darth Vader’s Imperial March played over slow motion shots of Democrats appearing with members of teachers’ unions. This was especially agitating watching the movie as the Governor of Wisconsin is trying to permanently eliminate teachers’ bargaining rights in the name of closing a deficit he created with corporate tax cuts.

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