Month: May 2003

Massive Media

Post author By
Post date May 29, 2003

“Awful Things Will Happen”

On June 2nd, the five appointees who make up the board of the FCC will decide the future direction of American media. The implications are enormous.

by Neal Hickey

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) whacked a hornet’s nest with a stick on September 23, 2002, when it announced that it would take a hard look at all of its controversial rules on media ownership. On that day, Michael Powell, the commission’s chairman, invited comments from the public about who can own what and how much in the media business. Instantly, the hornets began to swarm.

By the deadline for submissions (February 3rd), oceans of legal briefs had poured in from unions, trade associations, consumer activists, think tanks, academicians; the Newspaper Association of America, National Association of Broadcasters, Newspaper Guild, National Organization for Women, Sony, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, National PTA, American Psychological Association, National Association of Hispanic Journalists, United Church of Christ, and roughly 13,000 other groups and individuals.

All of them pointed out, in differing ways, that the FCC was embarking on nothing less than the most massive reexamination of media ownership rules in the agency’s history and that the outcome could have the most profound effects on how Americans get their news and information. Many of them argued that loosening the rules would cause a far greater concentration of media power in the hands of fewer and fewer huge companies — even more concentration than already exists — and the withering away of competition and diversity of viewpoints. Powell said that he and his fellow commissioners would review all the comments and evidence and hand down the new rules in late spring.

Opposition to the proposed rule changes has steadily gathered momentum, binding together a broad and diverse group of allies. The last round of public hearings in San Francisco and Los Angeles, on April 26th and 27th, attracted a large number of both ordinary citizens and activists speaking out passionately against media consolidation. Thus far, however, there is little indication that Powell has changed his mind. Over the same weekend, he told the Newspaper Association of America convention that the FCC plans to remove the cross-ownership ban which prevents newspapers from owning radio and TV stations in the same area. But with the FCC decision a week away, the fight over the future of U.S. media is growing ever more urgent with each passing day.

It is a strange battle, in a way, pitting journalists against their bosses, breaking up old alliances, and gathering momentum as the day of reckoning approaches.

In mid-January, Senator John McCain, the new chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, grilled all five FCC commissioners about the “monumental decisions” they were about to make that “will shape the future of communications forever.” Democratic senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota called for more voices in the nation’s media, but not from “one ventriloquist.” Powell pointed out that reviewing the rules is mandated by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, requiring him to reexamine FCC regulations every two years and get rid of the deadwood. Also, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has ordered the FCC to justify several of the rules or junk them.

Powell’s view is that much ownership regulation no longer makes sense because it dates from the era when channels of information were scarce. Now, cable, the Internet, and direct-broadcast satellites are commonplace. Powell has been at pains to reassure his critics that he plans no scorched-earth policy that would lay waste all regulation. But defenders of the public interest — Consumers Union, Consumer Federation of America, the Center for Digital Democracy, and many others — fear that the FCC, with its GOP majority (three Republicans, two Democrats), will predictably facilitate Big Media’s yen for the “efficiencies,” the “synergies,” and bottom-line values that come with gigantism. They fear those values will prevail at the expense of what’s best for people who want to know what’s going on in the world.

“Awful Things Will Happen”

One of the most contended of the FCC regulations forbids a single company from owning a newspaper and a television station in the same community. The Newspaper Association of America, whose member papers account for almost 90 percent of U.S. daily circulation, is ferociously campaigning to exterminate that rule. The 27-year-old ban is so archaic that it should end “without further comment or analysis,” says the NAA’s brief, because a mountain of evidence proves that cross-ownerships improve the quality and quantity of news and public-affairs reporting without posing any real threat to competition and viewpoint diversity. John Sturm, president of the NAA, points to 40 communities in the United States that have cross-ownerships (which existed before the rule or got special waivers). No harm, he insists, has come to the public in those markets. “Our opponents’ arguments are all theoretical — no data, just words. ‘Awful things will happen,’ they warned. Well guess what? Nothing awful has happened. Case closed.”

That doesn’t satisfy Linda Foley, president of the 35,000-member Newspaper Guild, who contends that more cross-ownerships means jobs will be lost and news consumers will receive a more homogenized diet of news and opinion. “The biggest impact,” she says, “is that we would have fewer and fewer people on the local level deciding what the news agenda is.” The NAA-Guild difference of opinion dramatizes an unbridgeable chasm: The owners of newspapers generally want the ban lifted and the journalists who work for those papers generally don’t. Reporters, columnists, and editorial writers — predictably — tend to think it’s an unwise career move to publicly oppose their bosses’ position on the matter, which may be why journalists have mostly failed to inform Americans about what’s at stake here.

A few do speak out. At Knight Ridder’s Philadelphia Inquirer, Henry Holcomb, a business writer, told the Columbia Journalism Review he worries about a corporate mentality that may try to “squeeze as many dollars as possible” out of a newspaper/TV combination and “blur all of the distinctive ways we try to stimulate and inform the public.”

One voice in the wilderness among newspaper proprietors is Frank Blethen, publisher of The Seattle Times. “Our opposition to cross-ownership runs against our own business interests,” he says. Repeal of the rule would substantially increase the value of the Times. “It would eliminate a competitor and give us more control over the marketplace. If that’s all we cared about, we’d be for it. The Blethen family could benefit financially from repeal of cross-ownership,” he says, “but I guarantee you that the citizens of Seattle would not benefit from it.”

Large newspaper chains and TV station groups covet these combinations out of self-interest, not the public interest, Blethen says, because owning lots of media in one market lets you control advertising rates. “It’s the public company mentality, that you have to keep getting bigger as the only way to drive earnings, stock prices, and the CEO’s stock options.” Editors of chain-owned newspapers are mostly silent about cross-ownership, Blethen says. “We’re creating a whole generation of publishers and editors who don’t have the independence to speak out on these issues on behalf of the public.”

New Sources of News?

In 1978, the Supreme Court, in FCC v. National Citizens Committee for Broadcasting, wrote: “It is unrealistic to expect true diversity from a commonly owned station-newspaper combination. The divergence of their viewpoints cannot be expected to be the same as if they were antagonistically run.” But backers of deregulation are fond of pointing out that the Internet, cable, and direct broadcast satellites offer an array of choices that didn’t exist a few decades ago. Hold on, says the opposition: Virtually all of the major Internet sites that people use for news are owned by Big Media; the editorial content is indistinguishable from what those broadcasters and newspapers put out.

On the cable side, concentration is already apparent: Two companies, Comcast and AOL Time Warner, serve 40 percent of cable households. All of the cable news networks — CNN, CNN Headline News, Fox, MSNBC, CNBC, CNNfn — are owned by three conglomerates: AOL Time Warner, GE, and News Corporation. Direct broadcast satellites? Two companies control virtually the entire industry, and recently, one of them (EchoStar) tried unsuccessfully to buy the other (DirecTV).

The 1996 Telecom Act lets media companies like Viacom, GE, Disney, and News Corp. — which own, respectively, CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox — accumulate stations to their hearts’ content, as long they reach no more than 35 percent of U.S. households. The networks have lobbied furiously to own more stations because many of those local outlets have huge profit margins of 40 percent or more and because owning them would give the networks more power over what gets on the air nationally. To bolster their push to lift the ownership caps, networks claim that their owned-and-operated stations produce better local newscasts than independent stations do. At the moment, CBS owns 21 stations; ABC, 10; NBC, 13; and Fox, 33. Most other commercial stations have affiliate contracts with a network but are owned by companies like A.H. Belo, Hearst-Argyle, Cox, and Post-Newsweek. Station groups like those think the TV networks already have too much influence and believe that letting them gobble up more TV stations will give them a stranglehold on programming — news, public affairs, and entertainment.

The dispute has driven a wedge between the National Association of Broadcasters (whose board of directors is dominated by independent station owners) and the big TV networks, causing CBS, NBC, and Fox to quit the NAB in a huff. Dennis Wharton, an NAB vice president, says: “We think the 35 percent cap has been good for localism.”

The affiliated stations argue that independent stations are far more able than network-owned stations to preempt the network’s prime-time programs when a major news story of local importance breaks. Networks often use sanctions built into affiliate contracts to muscle stations into running the network’s menu of entertainment shows instead of local news coverage. In September 2002, CBS strong-armed a Florida affiliate into airing the season premiere of 48 Hours instead of an important gubernatorial debate. NBC, during the 2000 political campaign, pressured its affiliates to run a baseball playoff game instead of a presidential debate. ABC’s affiliate in Dallas, home of American Airlines, had to fight the network for a few minutes of airtime during Monday Night Football halftime to present local news updates on the November 12, 2001, crash of an American Airlines jet.

As with most of the ownership rules, the underlying debate is less about principle than about whose financial ox would be gored if the 35 percent cap were eliminated or eased. Affiliates (but not network-owned stations) collectively haul in tens of millions of dollars every year for renting their airtime to the networks. That so-called compensation is found money for the affiliates and goes straight to the bottom line. They don’t want to lose it. Networks, on the other hand, say they can’t afford to pay it any longer and want to stop. Thus, the more stations a network can own outright, the more it can improve its revenue stream, eliminate compensation, and obviate those pesky preemptions that undermine audience ratings and advertising income.

Public advocates are especially averse to the notion of one company owning two television stations in the same community (so-called duopolies) and to letting any of the Big Four TV networks — CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox — buy out one of the others.

In 1999, the FCC relaxed its rules to allow common ownership of two TV stations in the same market as long as one of them isn’t among the community’s four leading stations. About 75 such duopolies exist. For journalists, that often means combining news staffs and resources, reducing the richness of a community’s news diet. In Los Angeles, for example, CBS’s two stations share a news director, and so do Fox’s. In New York, Fox’s two stations will soon be under one roof.

The NAB recently upped the ante and began campaigning for triopolies in areas where stations are on shaky financial ground. (Viacom’s president, Mel Karmazin, told a media conference in December: “How dare they say you can have only two stations in a market?”)

“A Tragic Mistake”?

At a Columbia law school forum in January, FCC chairman Powell confessed he is no fan of Congress’ mandate that he review media ownership rules every two years. It’s “regrettable and destabilizing,” he said, to go through this torturous process so often. He added: “There will be rules when this is done, [but] there won’t be a rule that lets one person own everything.”

That reductio ad absurdum was marginally reassuring to his opponents, but they hoped Powell would remain tightly focused on the crucial underlying principle: that the whole point of devising public policy is to do what’s best for the people, not to guarantee corporations their desired “efficiencies” and “synergies,” which is none of the FCC’s business. As USC’s filing to the commission put it, the agency’s mandate to regulate is driven by the First Amendment rights of the public, not the media owners.

The Newspaper Guild’s comments to the commission are equally unambiguous: “Media owners claim that relaxation of ownership rules will allow them to realize ‘synergies.’ [But] the commission’s charge is to protect and enhance media diversity, competition, and local identity — not efficiency.” Once upon a time, says the union, broadcast stations competed for audience by doing the best possible local news. But media companies that dominate a market have little incentive to spend money on enterprise reporting and investigations.

Allowing further media concentration would be a “tragic mistake,” says veteran editor Gene Roberts, now a journalism professor at the University of Maryland. “Communities deserve to be looked at with different eyes. Even with the best integrity and most solid news principles in the world, what looks like a story to one person may not to another.” Easing the rules, says Roberts, is “just going to make an already bad situation even worse. There’s very little news competition in most parts of the country, and we’re about to have even less.”

That’s how it looks now, anyway. Five unelected appointees, whom most Americans have never heard of, will make those decisions in the next few days. If they get it right this time, the hornets won’t swarm quite so furiously two years from now when the rules come up for review all over again.

Neil Hickey is editor at large for the Columbia Journalism Review.

Why Worry About Who Owns the Media?

by Eli Pariser

It’s like something out of a nightmare, but it really happened: At 1:30 on a cold January night, a train containing hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic ammonia derails in Minot, North Dakota. Town officials try to sound the emergency alert system, but it isn’t working. Desperate to warn townspeople about the poisonous white cloud bearing down on them, the officials call their local radio stations. But no one answers any of the phones for an hour and a half. According to The New York Times, 300 people are hospitalized, some are partially blinded, and pets and livestock are killed.

Where were Minot’s deejays on January 18, 2002? Where was the late-night station crew? As it turns out, six of the seven local radio stations had recently been purchased by Clear Channel Communications, a radio giant with over 1,200 stations nationwide. Economies of scale dictated that most of the local staff be cut: Minot stations ran more or less on autopilot, the programming largely dictated from further up the Clear Channel food chain. No one answered the phone because hardly anyone worked at the stations any more; the songs played in Minot were the same as those played on Clear Channel stations across the Midwest.

Companies like Clear Channel argue that economies of scale allow them to cut costs while continuing to provide quality programming. But they do so at the expense of local coverage. It’s not just about emergency warnings: media mergers are decreasing coverage of local political races, local small businesses, and local events. There are only a third as many owners of newspapers and TV stations as there were in the 1970s (about 600 now; over 1,500 then). It’s harder and harder for Americans to find out what’s going on in their own backyards.

On June 2nd, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is considering relaxing or getting rid of rules to allow much more media concentration. While the actual rule changes are under wraps, they could allow enormous changes in the American media environment. For example, one company could be allowed to own ABC, CBS, and NBC. Almost certainly, media companies will be allowed to own newspapers and TV stations in the same town. We could be entering a new era of media megaliths.

Do you want one or two big companies acting as gatekeepers and controlling your access to news and entertainment? Most of us don’t. And the airwaves explicitly belong to us — the American people. We allow media companies to use them in exchange for their assurance that they’re serving the public interest, and it’s the FCC’s job to make sure that’s so. For the future of American journalism, and for the preservation of a diverse and local media, we have to hold the FCC to its mission. Otherwise, Minot’s nightmare may become our national reality.

Opinion

Burning Mississippi

Post author By John Branston
Post date May 29, 2003

Mississippi, it’s often said, is stuck in the past. But is any other state so constantly reminded of the worst elements of its past by authors, journalists, and moviemakers?

Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy by Paul Hendrickson, a former feature writer for The Washington Post who now teaches writing, is the latest exploration of the desegregation of Ole Miss in 1962 by James Meredith. Just two years ago, Nadine Cohodas plowed much of the same ground in The Band Played Dixie. Newspaper reporters revisit the story on increasingly frequent “major” anniversaries or whenever Meredith makes a ceremonial visit. Sometimes the mere revival of the periodic controversy over the Colonel Rebel mascot is enough of an excuse to dust off the story.

The desegregation of Ole Miss isn’t the only target. The 1964 murder of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County has been the subject of a book and two movies, Attack on Terror and Mississippi Burning. The assassination of Medgar Evers and the long-delayed trial of Byron De La Beckwith were made into the movie Ghosts of Mississippi. An effort is under way to reopen the 1955 murder case of Emmett Till. If it is reopened, a movie won’t be far behind.

Other states have unsolved murders and travesties of justice, but they don’t capture the national imagination — or at least the imagination of writers and editors and publishers — the way Mississippi does. I worked in Mississippi for three years, and my wife’s family lives there. The surest way to get national attention for a story was to write about civil rights and the Ku Klux Klan. Anniversaries generated articles which generated books which generated movies which generated more articles and books until a new genre was created: Mississippi porno.

Hendrickson does an exhaustive and, ultimately, exhausting examination of the seven Mississippi sheriffs in a semifamous magazine photograph taken days before the rioting in Oxford that killed two people and tore the campus apart. While one of the lawmen seems to be showing off his batting prowess with a stick or club, others sneer or grin in apparent approval.

That picture may well be worth 1,000 words. But Hendrickson takes 300 pages documenting what happened to the sheriffs (two of whom were alive and willing to be interviewed by him) and their children to explore the legacy of racism. In some ways, Sons of Mississippi is a companion book to David Halberstam’s 1998 book The Children, about the black college students who desegregated the lunch counters in Nashville in 1960.

But unlike Halberstam’s Children, who included future Washington, D.C., mayor Marion Barry and future congressman John Lewis, these seven old racists did nothing remarkable with their lives. The two surviving sheriffs turn out to be somewhat conflicted about their past but not all that different in their racial attitudes from what we’ve learned about some of the cops in, say, Chicago, South Boston, or Los Angeles. Hendrickson gains the trust of the families and former colleagues of the seven sheriffs and chronicles their dinner-table conversations and reactions to the picture and its aftermath. Surprise! The children got on with their lives, no matter how hard Hendrickson tries to tie their fate to a 40-year-old picture of their fathers.

The most extraordinary person in the book is Meredith, who might be leading a quiet life in Jackson, Mississippi, if writers did not insist on making him an American icon. Hendrickson is the latest to chronicle Meredith’s failures as a political candidate, crusader, businessman, aide to Jesse Helms, and university lecturer. But Meredith was a very competent writer, and his autobiographical book, Three Years in Mississippi, is must reading. Everything else on Ole Miss in 1962 is an epilogue.

Hendrickson pays homage to the standard good guys, including Ole Miss history professors David Sansing and the late James Silver and the late writer Willie Morris. This is Mississippi by the numbers. He talks with former Mississippi governor and historian William Winter about sheriffs and the black-market whiskey tax that put as much as $100,000 a year in fees into their pockets. (As state treasurer in the Fifties, Winter was also a fee-paid official and profited from the bootleg-whiskey tax before abolishing it, but Hendrickson gives him a pass.)

The photograph itself is seriously misleading. Whatever their mindset, the sheriffs were not in Oxford to give James Meredith a beating. As Hendrickson notes, they were at a conference and did not take part in the rioting. Meredith surely went through hell but was not physically beaten by anyone. The picture is arguably less famous than one taken three years later in Neshoba County of Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Cecil Price, laughing and sharing a bag of Red Man chewing tobacco during a court appearance. Price was convicted of conspiracy in the murders of three civil rights workers (and the picture became a derisive poster about law enforcement on college campuses).

Different lawmen, different circumstances, but all “sons of Mississippi,” then and forever, in the eyes of the national media.

Tags James Meredith, Paul Hendrickson, Sons of Mississippi, Three Years in Mississippi

Letters To The Editor Opinion

Postscript

Post author By Flyer Readers
Post date May 29, 2003

Arts Council

To the Editor:

No one can sing the praises of Amelia Barton and the Arts Council’s Center for Arts Education enough (“Artrageous?,” May 22nd issue). Barton and her staff built a program that people from all over the world came to see because it was a model of success for the children it served.

In such a highly competitive world, the schoolchildren of Memphis and Shelby County desperately need any advantage that a program such as the CAE can bring them, not to mention the opportunities it brought to teachers to expand their tools for teaching. Barton devoted years to building relationships with local artists, educators, school administrators, and national agencies because she knew how important that spark of interest in creating can be to children, especially disadvantaged children, in helping them build successful lives.

If the Memphis Arts Council is to truly serve Memphis, it must provide arts education to those most receptive to it and in need of it our children. As for Amelia Barton, Anne Davey, and Kay Ross, their next employers should count themselves lucky to have such dedicated, enthusiastic, and creative people on their staff.

Peggy McKnight, Coordinator

Vascular Biology Center of Excellence

UT Health Science Center, Memphis

To the Editor:

Without hearing the Greater Memphis Arts Council’s perspective on what happened to the CAE, it is difficult to figure out what has happened. But where was the outcry when Mayor Wharton announced he was wiping out county funding for the arts? Where was your reporter when the city announced it was recommending a cut in GMAC’s funds? This is an extraordinarily tough time to raise money, and all nonprofits are challenged to question not just the “how” of their operations but also the “what.”

The nonprofit organizations GMAC raises money to support make up an irreplaceable part of this city’s cultural ecosystem. They are the largest employers of artists in Memphis. They provide the space, the training, and the professional support for artists to practice their craft.

Your reporter quoted Crittenden Arts Council executive director Janine Earney as saying that “companies want to fund something worthwhile, that’s making a difference, and that’s having an impact on children.” She goes on to ask, “Are you there for education or are you there just to fund other [not-for-profit] organizations?”

What a false choice she lays out. GMAC’s funding for Ballet Memphis, the Memphis Symphony, Playhouse on the Square, and other organizations does fund education. Check out the theater classes for kids at Playhouse or its children’s shows or its pay-what-you-can performances. Or visit Ballet Memphis studios where children learn ballet alongside the professionals, perform in The Nutcracker and even become members of the professional company.

As a long-ago member of the GMAC board, I would make the case with my colleagues that we sometimes approached the arts as if they were “good” for all those people with no options children, seniors, poor people. Any program that walked through the door with one of those labels received special handling. The rest of us were just fine without the arts.

That is so untrue. I rediscovered the thrill, the provocation, the beauty, the contemplation of the arts as an adult. Adults and children, rich people and poor people, young and old all need the arts. I hope those of us who care will all pull together to generate the money and attendance the arts need to thrive.

Carol Coletta

Memphis

Chastises Branston

To the Editor:

For someone who has spent much of his professional time chastising others for failing to “get it right,” I was surprised to see John Branston (City Beat, May 22nd issue) refer to the Hatikva as the Jewish national anthem. The Hatikva is no more the Jewish national anthem than the Star Spangled Banner is the Christian national anthem. The Hatikva is the national anthem of Israel a sovereign nation, I might add.

Susan Adler Thorp

Memphis

Film Features Film/TV

Tickled Pink

Post author By Bo List
Post date May 29, 2003

It’s the ’60s. The early, innocent Kennedy ’60s. No hippies yet, no Vietnam. Well, of course, there was Vietnam; it just didn’t register on the American consciousness yet. Modern color has taken some interesting turns: pinks, aquas, teals abound. Women still wear hats — big hats, crazy hats. America is still run exclusively by stuffy, old white men, and sexism is the code of conduct in the workplace. Good times.

RenÇe Zellweger is Barbara Novak — small-town Maine girl who has formulated a chocolate-based three-step system of independence for the modern female and called it “Down with Love.” By step three, the self-made girl has penetrated the workplace, started a career, and has all the sex she wants without risking falling in love in the process. Simple. If it were 2003, Novak and her pink hardback book would be on Oprah getting told “You go, girl!” until the obvious emotional and biological ramifications of such a philosophy came to pass. As it is not yet the Johnson administration, Novak’s ideas are slow to catch on with the stuffed shirts of her publishing house but quick to catch fire among contemporary women. It’s not long before Novak is a household name and women everywhere are saying “Down with Love!”

Enter Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor), a playboy journalist who specializes in exposÇs and makes the mistake of standing up interviews with Barbara in favor of a series of trysts with a gaggle of flight attendants (separately, not en masse). So incensed is Novak with Block’s playboyishness that she humiliates him on TV by naming him as one of “those” men who “change women as often as they change shirts.” The result: No woman wants to be with Catcher, since Catcher is a player, and no man wants Barbara because she has liberated women. Catcher devises a plan: He will disguise himself as a chaste Southern gentleman, make Barbara fall in love with him, and then expose her for committing her own worst sin: love. All the while, Block’s publisher/best friend Peter McMannus (David Hyde Pierce) is trying desperately to woo Barbara’s editor/best friend Vicki (Sarah Paulson) in a role-reversal of their own — McMannus wants marriage, Vicki wants sex, as any upright “Down with Love Girl” would.

I hope that the Flyer readership is familiar with last year’s stylistic masterpiece, Far from Heaven. That film, a meticulous homage to films of the 1950s (particularly those of melodrama auteur Douglas Sirk), reproduced color palettes, camera angles, music, and a style of acting thought long extinct in order to get to greater truths underneath the artifice. This is the funny version of that same notion, getting to greater laughs by looking through the lens of a defunct point of view — the bouncy, cocktail-y preamble to the sexual revolution that was the early 1960s. Helen Reddy wouldn’t sing “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar” for a few more years, but the seeds were planted and sprouting by the end of Kennedy’s presidency.

But forget about politics and sociology when trying to enjoy this film, which is as light and colorful as cotton candy. Which is to say, sugary and weightless but fanciful. Down with Love is a confection — sweet junk food for the mind and heart. Like the Rock Hudson/Doris Day movies that inspired it, Down with Love pokes only the gentlest fun at its source materials — the end to the crassly sexist 1950s archetype of the working father and the housewife mother, for one — and sticks to the basics of a good time: mistaken identities, good-hearted deception, and, underneath them all, love.

McGregor and Zellweger both are excellent in the Hudson/Day roles, providing just the right mix of sexy and silly. Both actors are particularly adept at filling roles that require a strong suspension of disbelief from the audience (McGregor in Eye of the Beholder, Moulin Rouge; Zellweger in Nurse Betty, Chicago), and so it is very easy for us to believe what they portray: innocent sex kittens romping about in the ’60s. When the movie gets a bit more serious toward the end, it is a little hard to buy into the script, which has them falling into real love — not just lust — but this is no fault of the actors, who smile and moon like two teenagers. They are beautiful together, and those fans of their previous, respective musical endeavors will be delighted to know that they sing in this one too. Frasier‘s David Hyde Pierce shines as the would-be-gay publisher pal, playing the role that Tony Randall would have had opposite Hudson and Day — and Randall himself appears as a chairman of the board. He has my favorite line: “That pink book is ruining my life!”

Leave the tissues at home, but bring a date — and chocolate. — Bo List

Are you there, God? It’s me, Bo. A few questions, God. Number one: Why, oh, why did I get that $30 parking ticket in Chicago last week? I was only a few minutes late back to the meter. And, Lord? Dear Lord — why have I gained back those 10 pounds I so proudly lost over last semester? I haven’t been eating that poorly and getting that little exercise lately, have I? And why, Lord, am I romantically unsuccessful? Is it because I actively seek out the depraved, unattainable, or otherwise troublesome? And, God, why am I so po’? Is it because I have chosen a career in the arts and, additionally, cannot manage my money well? Dear God, it’s just not fair!

The above is an actual transcript of my nightly prayers. In fact, with the topical exception of the parking ticket, it is repeated night after night, since I always lose and then gain 10 pounds, go on crazy dates (no offense to the notable exceptions in my readership), and waste my money on baubles and fast food (see: weight gain). God’s nightly answer? “Free Will, my son. Free Will.” My favorite smug response to a complaining friend: “Free Will would have you do something about that.” Free Will is a co-star, so to speak, of Bruce Almighty, and the basis of its thin, amusing theology.

Jim Carrey is Bruce Nolan, colorful TV news reporter for a station in Buffalo. He has ambitions of becoming anchor but is relegated to the world of fanciful puff pieces, like Buffalo’s biggest cookie or the anniversary of Niagara Falls’ “Maiden of the Mist” tour boat. Bruce wants to be covering the big news, and a retiring station mainstay means that a job will be open soon. But Bruce loses it to a snide competitor (and better anchor, by the way) on a very bad day, and even though he generally has things pretty good (Jennifer Aniston is his girlfriend, y’all), Free Will makes him screw it all up by going nuts and calling his colleagues at the station a name that begins with “F” and ends with “ers” during his live broadcast from the Falls. D’oh!

Bruce has a bone to pick with God (Morgan Freeman), and at the end of this bad day, after wrecking his car, he yells at the sky, finally giving Him a piece of his mind. What does God do? He pages Bruce. Yep — on a pager and summons him down to a strange office building where he offers Bruce a job: God. Yep, Bruce thinks he can do it better? Fine. God’s taking a vacation.

Bruce begins his reign as the Almighty a little shakily, freaked out at a nearby diner. Conveniently ordering tomato soup, Bruce summons the verve and omnipotence to part it, Red Sea-style. After this singular sign of godliness, Bruce is ready for the world, doing what every red-blooded American boy would probably do first with His abilities: lifting women’s skirts and landing a hot car. Trouble is, Bruce is so self-centered about what he wants in his own life that he neglects his responsibilities as Lord. Example: He pulls the moon closer to make a sexy evening more romantic, never mind the floods he causes in Japan as a result. And he becomes so obsessed with getting that piddling anchor job that he forgets how to be a good boyfriend, ultimately losing his loving girlfriend amid his ambition and Godly distractions. Can he make her keep loving him? There’s only one thing Bruce can’t do: change Free Will.

Bruce Almighty is a very pleasant return to form for Jim Carrey, after a less-than-dynamic stab at being a dramatic leading man. (Save your sympathy, Free Will had him intentionally star in The Majestic.) This movie is very much in the vein of Liar Liar, wherein mild supernatural elements change the life of a shallow, rubber-faced lout and make him a better man. As always, Carrey overdoes to the point of annoyance. Bruce is already weird and hyper before anything strange happens to him at the start of the film. He would do well to practice for later dramatic attempts by playing real humans in his comedies.

Bruce Almighty, though, does take a dramatic turn at the two-thirds point and could have veered toward maudlin excess, except for some actual real acting by Carrey and Freeman done very simply in a short scene where they just talk to each other. This is refreshing after an hour and a half of Carrey’s histrionics and biblical hooliganism. Freeman, always a class act, makes a great God — and I hope that the real God is as understanding, patient, and forgiving of my misuse of Free Will as Freeman.

Amen. — BL

Music Music Features

Only the Strong Survive

Post author By Andrew Earles
Post date May 29, 2003

History and logic dictate that the phrase “a night of comedy and music” cause trepidation. Images of Dread Zeppelin, Weird Al Yankovic, Adam Sandler, and Tenacious D can raise hairs, not to mention red flags. But perhaps the two connected, separate-but-equal events arriving in Memphis Friday, May 30th, can do a better job of uniting those often incompatible forms. Hopefully, a transition from the futuristic good-time boogie of the Melvins to the “post-comedy” of an after-party with stand-up enigma Neil Hamburger will be a welcome influx of pure entertainment. Or maybe it will be the scariest evening Memphis has experienced in ages.

Though partially responsible for rap-metal, Mike Patton has nevertheless evolved into a fringe-music chameleon far removed from his earlier days fronting Faith No More and Mr. Bungle (the latter of which he still fronts). Co-founding Ipecac Records in 1999, he swiftly assembled a roster of new and established noiseniks in need of a like-minded home. Three of these artists — Dalek, Tomahawk, and the Melvins — will make up the version of Geek Fest 2003 (yep, that’s the real name) making it to the New Daisy Theater Friday, May 30th.

Dalek will open the show with a sucker punch of hip-hop truly deserving of the adjective “underground.” With sheets of musique-concräte noise, verbal hostility, and metropolitan psychedelia, Dalek unite such influences as New Kingdom’s over-the-top abrasiveness, Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad, Can, and the sonic beatdown of early Swans and EinstÅrzende Neubauten. Properly puzzling, the combo has opened for everyone from De La Soul to the Dillinger Escape Plan.

I’ll confess that I haven’t exactly been plagued by the question “What would a noise-rock dream team of 1993 sound like today?” But in case I’m flying solo, the majority will find their gratification in Tomahawk. Kevin Rutmanis (the Cows, Melvins) on bass, Duane Denison (Jesus Lizard, Scratch Acid) on guitar, and John Stanier (Helmet) on drums all try to make sonic sense of Patton’s polyoctave throat acrobatics. It sounds exactly like the sum of its parts: Jesus Lizard aggro-surf guitar, asphyxiating drum and bass typical of its bygone era, and Patton gluing it together with a Mr. Bungle-esque vocal agenda with the edges softened and elongated, resulting in music that manages to sound of a piece without losing its goofy irreverence.

As for Tomahawk’s co-headliners, I’ve seen a nice cross-section of Melvins’ shows over the past decade and not once have they disappointed. Like Fugazi and, to a lesser extent, Sonic Youth, the Melvins have spent the past 18 years calling their own shots while also managing to achieve a respectable level of popularity in the process. Their humble beginnings were uneventful: great band, relative obscurity, old story. Following the example of expiration-date-era Black Flag, the Melvins gained an early notoriety for slowing down and stretching the Black Sabbath sound to such extreme lengths that they could fit an entire musical idea in between each riff. Repetition is the secret of the sound, whether creeping along or adopting the pace of Slayer. (The common, unresearched myth has it that the Melvins are always slow.) The trio also pioneered the act of packaging obscenely heavy music in sleeves adorned with flowers, bunnies, and icons of positive pastel thought.

Along with the Wipers, the Melvins were an antecedent that Kurt Cobain openly worshipped, and his name-dropping helped the band land an early-’90s major-label deal. After a dismissal three albums in, the Melvins landed back in indie-land feet first with dignity and sound intact. A little label-hopping ensued before the band emerged on Ipecac with a three-album wake-up call in 1999 (The Bootlicker, The Maggot, and The Crybaby). Several live records popped up before 2002’s Hostile Ambient Takeover and a collector-taunting shower of limited-edition-series singles earlier this year. Knowing what to expect from the Melvins is not part of the plan (this is a band prone to piggyback “traditional” albums with full releases of harsh white noise or playful covers), but the band’s erratic nature never precludes a great live show.

For showgoers looking to extend the festivities, the Hi-Tone CafÇ is throwing an after-show party that offers a Geek Fest-related comedy nightcap in the form of quasi-/semi-/okay-maybe-not-so-legendary stand-up comic Neil Hamburger, who will take the stage shortly after the New Daisy show concludes.

Hamburger is a loose affiliate of Ipecac Records and Mike Patton — the label reissued Hamburger’s 1993 debut Great Phone Calls — and Hamburger’s impressive discography of proper stand-up comedy releases includes such unforgettable party classics as Bartender, the Laugh’s on Me, Left for Dead in Malaysia, Raw Hamburger, and last fall’s Laugh Out Lord. Hamburger’s act takes the past 50 years of nightclub laughs, puts its ass in lights, and pelts you with every ugly detail. It’s a send-up, a tribute, and an honest attempt all rolled into one. Currently living in Australia, Hamburger is in the States for a monthlong residency at the Knitting Factory L.A. after the much-ballyhooed May 12th appearance on The Jimmy Kimmel Show, which had Howard Stern — though not a barometer of good taste — playing the audio on his radio show and name-checking the heady days of Andy Kaufman. In other words: Get ready to put that funny bone in a sling — you’ll have a giggle fever of 105 and issues that require tissues!

Geek Fest 2003

with The Melvins, Tomahawk, and Dalek

The New Daisy Theatre

Post-Geek Fest After-Party

with Neil Hamburger and Automusik

The Hi-Tone CafÇ

Friday, May 30th

Music Record Reviews

Short Cuts

Post author By
Post date May 29, 2003

Electric Version

The New Pornographers

(Matador)

In this era of musical overproduction and a thousand blooming indie scenes, catchy pop-rock records just aren’t that hard to come by anymore. But somehow the New Pornographers, a seven-member indie-rock “supergroup” (composed of people from bands –Zumpano, Destroyer –the Pornographers have since surpassed on the recognizability scale, with subcultural celeb and solo star Neko Case as a ringer) are different. A onetime side project for nearly everyone involved, the band (named after a Jimmy Swaggart book that proclaimed rock-and-roll “the new pornography”) emerged as an instant cult fave with their 2000 debut Mass Romantic, a title that captures the band’s giddy sound better than a thousand words ever could. And while the follow-up, Electric Version, may not contain anything quite as striking as Mass Romantic‘s standout single “Letter from an Occupant,” it is perhaps a fuller, more consistent record.

But what makes Electric Version a great pop-rock record isn’t what it sounds like –on one level it sounds like a lot of other good pop-rock records you’ve heard –or what it says (the lyrics are literate, elliptical, worth puzzling over, and almost entirely beside the point) but what it feels like, which is a contact-high based on an ecstatic illusion of discovery. What comes out magical in the music made by these seven people is their enthusiasm for and delight over their own mastery. They clip off riffs, dive into choruses, high-step through bridges, fall in love to the sound of their own vocal harmonies, and lean hard into hairpin hooks not just like hearty explorers trekking through virgin territory but as if they’re actually inventing all these familiar pop-music tropes on the fly. And they seem so wrapped up in what they’re doing that they inevitably win the listener over in the process.

But there is one element to this musical mix that is formally extraordinary, and that’s the egalitarian group vocals, Case sharing the mic with male singers Dan Bejar, Carl Newman, and Kurt Dahle. Almost every song on Electric Version features a multiplicity of voices, with the background vocals dipping in and falling back in ways that seem entirely instinctual and spontaneous. The most ear-popping example of the band’s vocal interplay is on the relay-race vocals that drive “The Laws Have Changed.” One of the male voices sings the first two lines; then all the singers drop in for the next line, Case’s crystalline siren-call shooting across the top; then, suddenly, every voice except Case’s drops out, emphasizing the beauty of her voice in this setting all the more. And this effect, in different permutations, is repeated throughout Electric Version.

And the appeal isn’t just sonic: There’s a sexual utopianism, a palpable agape, in this mix of voices that one realizes is extremely rare in all of pop music. The only other examples I can think of are a few other fine indie bands (Imperial Teen, Papas Fritas), a few Sly and the Family Stone singles, and some very old-school hip-hop. (Let us now pay respect to “That’s the Joint” by the Funky 4 + 1 and “Zulu Nation Throwdown” by Afrika Bambaataa.) I cherish, to one degree or another, all of that music (especially the hip-hop), but Electric Version is the first record to make me understand why. Maybe someday I’ll figure out exactly what they’re singing about, but I doubt it’ll matter. — Chris Herrington

Grade: A

Antenna

Cave In

(RCA)

Five years ago we would not be speaking of Cave In within the context of MTV2 daytime programming, Clear Channel rock radio, or malls. The once thudding, screaming, metalcore band has now entered the vocabulary of the undiscerning alt-metal fan. The transition was an almost brazen commercial makeover, but the members of Cave In were not handpicked from a Slipknot concert and assembled into a band by an impresario. Cave In spent a few years eating crow as a ludicrously heavy, inaccessible, and somewhat intellectual alternative to Eyehategod. Then, on 2000’s Jupiter, they befuddled longtime fans by adding a shiny coat of Radiohead to the package. There will be no longtime fans sticking around for Antenna.

Antenna was assembled for mass consumption, right down to the free-CD contest spots running on MTV2 as you read this. It’s heavy for listeners who don’t want, or don’t know, real heaviness, and there is nothing on this CD that even remotely recalls metal. The vocals are a precise synthesis of Queens of the Stone Age croon, emo-boy yelp, and early-’90s grungeternative snarl. It’s almost as if somebody loaded all of that crap into a computer program. There is even an acoustic/electric ballad (the strategically placed centerpiece “Beautiful Son”) that rips off Soundgarden’s initial major-label sound. Oh, how times do not change.

Because Cave In are not a band that fell out of a tree yesterday, the songwriting is above average and on par with the Foo Fighters or the Deftones. Well-crafted for what it is, and if the street team pulls its weight, Cave In will be unavoidable in a matter of months. — Andrew Earles

Grade: C+

She Has No Strings Apollo

The Dirty Three

(Touch and Go)

On their last two albums, Australia’s Dirty Three seemed determined to get as close to silence as they could while still making a sound. Ocean Songs and Whatever You Love, You Are were quiet, soft, and textureless, abandoning the noisy intensity of the band’s self-titled album and their semi-breakthrough, Horse Stories. They were focused more on sound than on song and sorely in need of vocals to liven things up — the kiss of death for an instrumental band.

If the Dirty Three’s sixth album, She Has No Strings Apollo, isn’t a return to form, it’s a tremendous step in the right direction: Measured and restrained, it nevertheless captures the bracing tension of their best material but with a firmer sense of purpose in each song. Tracks like “She Has No Strings” and “Sister Let Them Try and Follow” churn and eddy around Warren Ellis’ rasping violin. The closer, “Rude (And Then Some Slight Return),” builds on Mick Turner’s expressive guitarwork, which goes from graceful understatement to blistering dissonance and back again as it rises to the album’s dramatic climax.

As with their best work, She Has No Strings Apollo lives up to the band’s name: messy, jarring music that sounds like the work of three distinctive musicians. — Stephen Deusner

Grade: B+

News News Feature

The Death of Local News

Post author By Paul Schmelzer
Post date May 29, 2003

Tune into the evening news on Madison, Wisconsin’s, Fox TV affiliate and behold the future of local news. In the program’s concluding segment, “The Point,” Mark Hyman rants against peace activists (“wack-jobs”), the French (“cheese-eating surrender monkeys”), progressives (“loony left”), and the so-called liberal media, usually referred to as the “hate-America crowd” or the “Axis of Drivel.” Colorful, if creatively anemic, this is TV’s version of talk radio, with the precisely tanned Hyman playing a second-string Limbaugh.

Fox 47’s right-wing rants may be the future of hometown news, but — believe it or not — it’s not the program’s blatant ideological bias that is most worrisome. Here’s the real problem: Hyman isn’t the station manager, a local crank, or even a journalist. He is the vice president of corporate communications for the station’s owner, the Sinclair Broadcast Group. And this segment of the local news isn’t exactly local. Hyman’s commentary is piped in from the home office in Baltimore, Maryland, and mixed in with locally produced news. Sinclair aptly calls its innovative strategy “NewsCentral.” It is very likely to spell the demise of local news as we know it.

Like many a media empire, Sinclair grew through a combination of acquisitions, clever manipulations of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules, and considerable lobbying campaigns. Starting out as a single UHF station in Baltimore in 1971, the company started its frenzied expansion in 1991 when it began using “local marketing agreements” as a way to circumvent FCC rules that bar a company from controlling two stations in a single market. These “LMAs” allow Sinclair to buy one station outright and control another by acquiring not its license but its assets. Today, Sinclair touts itself as “the nation’s largest commercial television broadcasting company not owned by a network.” You’ve probably never heard of them because the 62 stations they run — garnering 24 percent of the national TV audience — fly the flags of the networks they broadcast: ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, and the WB.

Sinclair has been called the “Clear Channel of local news,” a reference to the San Antonio, Texas, media giant that has grown from 40 to more than 1,200 stations thanks to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which relaxed radio ownership rules. But the parallels extend beyond their growth strategies. Sinclair has a right-wing approach that makes Fox News Channel look like a model of objectivity. And like Clear Channel’s CEO L. Lowry Mays — a major Republican donor and onetime business associate of George W. Bush — the Sinclair family, board, and executives ply the GOP with big money. Since 1997, they have donated well over $200,000 to Republican candidates.

According to Sinclair’s Web site, NewsCentral is a “revolutionary news model” that introduces “local news in programming in markets that otherwise could not support news.” Begun in 2002, it’s being tested in Minneapolis, Flint (Michigan), Oklahoma City, Raleigh (North Carolina), and Rochester (New York). Hyman’s segment, “The Point,” however, is aired on all 62 of Sinclair’s stations. In these five cities, the hour-long newscast combines local broadcasting with prepackaged news. To maintain the appearance of local news, the Baltimore on-air staff is coached on the intricacies of correct local pronunciations. Or the weatherman, safely removed from the thunderstorms in, say, Minneapolis, will often engage in scripted banter with the local anchor to maintain the pretense: “Should I bring an umbrella tomorrow, Don?” “You bet, Hal, it looks pretty ugly out there.”

Journalists have been pondering the specter of centralized news operations for some time, both because it affects the quality of news and because it could put them out of a job. “We should all be conscious of the dangers that are present when you have one newsroom producing the news,” says John Nichols, associate editor at The Capital Times in Madison and co-author with Robert McChesney of the books Our Media, Not Theirs and It’s the Media, Stupid. “That’s a real possibility. It’s a very dangerous future, but Sinclair is already living in the dangerous future.”

And that future’s getting pretty crowded with media mega-empires jostling to “synergize” their operations. The Tribune Company is already cross-training reporters. Under the label of journalistic synergy, the company owns most of Chicago’s media outlets: The Chicago Tribune, WGN’s TV and AM radio stations, Chicago magazine, the AOL project Digital City Chicago, plus the Chicago Cubs (not to mention its 22 TV stations nationwide, 25 percent stake in the WB network, 14 newspapers, the syndication service Tribune Media Services, and 14 online publications, including cars.com and apartments.com). A Tribune reporter — variously called a “multimedia reporter,” a “backpack journalist,” or merely a “content provider” — might attend a mayoral press conference, for example, armed with a digital audio recorder, a camera, and a notebook to provide stories for radio, print, online, and television news. While the debate rages over whether such journalists can consistently produce high-quality news, the real fear is that only one voice will frame and tell a news story. It’s a chilling thought when that lone perspective is shaped by a Sinclair or Fox worldview.

“Thomas Jefferson and James Madison believed that, in order to sustain democracy, media needed to be cacophonous and diverse,” Nichols says. “Today we don’t have that. Our range of debate is getting incredibly narrow. We still have a highly regulated media. The only thing that is changing is that it’s now being regulated in the interests not of democracy or the people but larger corporations.”

Paul Schmelzer is a Minneapolis-based writer and edits the Web site Eyeteeth: A Journal of Incisive Ideas.

News The Fly-By

PARTY ON!

Post author By Chris Davis
Post date May 28, 2003

Long before Fly on the Wall ever started swapping written licks with the glossy society rag, Elite Memphis, the Fly team sat down to plan a parody of it. We planned to call our little parody (what else?) Defeat Memphis and instead of going to high-priced charity balls and snapping shots of pretty blondes with dapper older gentlemen sipping top-drawer cocktails in elegant formalwear, we were going to hit backyard keggers in Nutbush and snap shots of party-dudes flipping us the bird. Instead of commenting on What They Wore, we were going to seek out mud-wrestling competitions and focus on What They Didn t Wear. We were going to run profiles of failed businessmen who spend their days and nights in seedy bars drinking away all the pain and humiliation. In short, it was going to be a lot of fun. But we snoozed on the idea, and we lost. Such a magazine already exists, only it s not a parody. Memphis Party Source is, it would appear, Elite Memphis re-tooled for the common man. Do they have pics of party dudes flipping off the camera? Check. Do they run profiles of total losers? Well, no, they don t. But they did run this picture of a fat guy in a beer hat and a diaper.

News

TOM JONES PLEADS GUILTY TO EMBEZZLEMENT–TWICE

Post author By Ed Weathers
Post date May 28, 2003

Former Shelby County mayoral aide Tom Jones pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to embezzlement. He subsequently made another guilty plea to similar charges in state court.

Jones, head of public affairs for Shelby County under three mayors in four decades, waived his right to indictment and pleaded guilty to information submitted by federal prosecutor Tim Discenza. U.S. Magistrate Judge Daniel Breen accepted the plea in a hearing that lasted about 25 minutes.

The single count to which Jones admitted guilt states that from 1999 to 2002 Jones embezzled at least $5000 each year in federal funds. Shelby County gets federal funds, and that is why the case was in federal court.

The amount of money that Jones used for personal instead of county expenses is in dispute. The federal government contends it is over $100,000, while Jones and his attorneys, Kemper Durand and Al Harvey, say it is less than that.

Sentencing was set for August 28th. Jones was released on his recognizance with no conditions or travel restrictions. Discenza said the government would recommend a sentence at the lower end of the federal sentencing guidelines. He said that could include imprisonment and supervised release, but he did not indicate how long the sentence might be.

Discenza said the government was prepared to show that Jones used funds channeled through the Memphis Regional Chamber of Commerce for personal use while submitting payment requests that indicated they were for business travel or other county expenses. Credit card receipts show that Jones bought CDs, diet products, gifts, and a honeymoon trip for his daughter with a county credit card.

The story broke nearly a year ago in the final weeks of the administration of Mayor Jim Rout. In addition to being head of public affairs, Jones was a top special assistant to the mayor and served on several boards. Rout suspended Jones in the final week of his term.

Jones pleaded guilty to one count of theft of property between $10,000 and $60,000 and official misconduct following an investigation by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation in coordination with the FBI.

Jones made his guilty plea in state court after he pleaded guilty to the related charge in federal court.

Jones will be sentenced in state court after he is sentenced in federal

court.