A follow-up on a post I made a while back about which presidential candidates (and other candidates past and present) had been endorsed and supported financially by which cast members of the TV show “The West Wing:” Martin Sheen has endorsed New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson for president in 2008.

Uncle!

It’s time to admit defeat. I’ve been writing about the things I find interesting about the relationship between news and entertainment for a bit now and only my most masochistic and loyal of friends — but it has to be both, I have some masochistic friends and some loyal friends to whom this doesn’t apply — read it.

I understand. We’ll see what comes next…

Blame the media. They’re all conspiring against you. Or them. Or us. I don’t know. Friends of mine will tell you that my first major cardiac event will likely stem from listening to a conversation themed thusly.

Sometimes, bloggers are pretty worked up over media consolidation and how the MSM — mainstream media — is too centralized, too powerful. Lots of antitrust overtones. Somewhat startlingly, Jeff Jarvis, who is a vocal opponent of the MSM status quo, wrote this a couple of weeks ago and I just got around to reading it:

Media consolidation is a boogeyman we don’t need to be afraid of anymore. Clear Channel, the great consolidator, had to go private because the market wouldn’t support it anymore. Tribune Company, the wunderkind of cross-ownership with a paper, TV, radio, online, and a sports franchise in the Chicago market, has been taken over by a builder. Giant Knight Ridder fell into the hands of giant McClatchy, which just took a huge write-off against its plummeting value. Consolidation today is no longer about conquering the world. It is, as I’ve said here often, about huddling together against the cold wind of the internet. Let them huddle, I say, or they’ll die sooner.

I disagree.

More voices, more voices, more voices. The Internet is swell for getting a multitude of perspectives, but there are a lot of people who simply don’t want to (or don’t have the time or means to) go searching out a diversity of sources. They have to rely on television on print. Or they choose to. Or in some cases, such as my own, they supplement their Internet findings with print publications.

Why surrender media of any kind to consolidation like this? I don’t think it does much to preserve the voices, especially since all of it just encourages that instinct to cut back to a bare-bones reporting team — how long, for example, before someone is the only capitol reporter for a city’s major newspaper, television station and radio station combined? — and prop the majority of the publication up on wire services?

Gross.

And that’s coming from somebody who doesn’t think The Media Is Against Us.

I didn’t actually think that politicians would ever tap into the Mountain Dew/Red Bull-fueled underbelly of message-forum Internet humor, but here we go:

Who will get the Rhett and Link endorsement? (Hint: Giuliani.) Or the Chocolate Rain guy? Or that kid who flipped out about chocolate milk while playing Halo? “I want some MFING MIKE GRAVEL!”

Don’t I look dumb.

OK, so I just posted about how much I hate the idea of making YouTube into TV during the WGA strike. Well, this doesn’t fall directly into that category — it’s not something that will air while writers are striking because they’re striking — but a Web TV show just got bought by NBC.

No, it wasn’t “The Guys in 3A,” the smash-hit vlog starring me and my roommate Reid Levin, which is also an NBC Universal joint; it was “Quarterlife.” (But our final episode is this week, so tune in for that on Tuesday.) Point is, the transition from Web to TV is obviously already a trend. And that’s fine — as long as the people whose Web content is being turned into TV content are getting compensated fairly. But right now I don’t know that I trust they will be.

There are a lot more ins and outs on the writers’ strike than I think Jeff Jarvis realizes. He’s posted saying that networks should be using YouTube talent to fill the voids made by the writers’ strike because it’d be cheap labor and potentially a good fix, and so on and so forth.

Firstly, cheap labor is so insulting. To revisit a theme from about a week ago, I’m really tired of anybody considering “YouTube talent” as cheap labor. And it’s happening a lot. Sure, people will say that shows like Online Nation, which bought, for between zero and several hundred dollars, videos from folks who were posting on YouTube, thereby give them their only shot at exposure when they were played on national TV.

But honestly, a lot of the stuff that happens like that is a little exploitative. And Jarvis’ proposed solution here is doubly so: it would exploit the video talent — such as it is — from YouTube and it would further exploit the striking writers.

So it goes. Plenty more opinions on this, but a head cold calls. Email or comment if you’d like to have a chat about it. Beginning to use Skype more frequently, by-the-by.

From the picket lines, more on the WGA-E strike, via The Apiary. Presenting “Not the Daily Show.”

Jon Swift, a hilarious satirist, posted on David Broder this week. Lots of it is good, but I’d like to pull one little section that is vaguely relevant to what I’ve been writing (and talking) about lately:

Even when President Kennedy was assassinated he didn’t let emotion sway him, as he once explained once to a group of Chinese students: “On November 22, 1963, I was one of the journalists following President Kennedy’s motorcade. You know what happened later — the President was assassinated and I was right on the spot. As an ordinary man, I wanted leave the scene, hide somewhere, and weep. But I managed to calm myself and to report the event in the most objective way.” While other reporters lost their heads, Broder refused to take sides after the President was killed. Was he for the assassination or against it? It was impossible to tell from his reporting. No matter what his personal feelings might have been, as a reporter he had to be objective when it came to the issue of whether killing Kennedy was a good thing or a bad thing.

Impartiality humor!

I’m a big “West Wing” fan. In fact, I’m feeling a little under the weather and I’m planning a sitting-in-front-of-the-TV marathon tonight. Right after watching “Michael Moore Hates America,” which I’ve been curious about for a while, I think I’ll cue up some Sorkin time.

Ever wonder about the actual politics of people who portrayed political movers and shakers on the show? Read the rest of this entry »