BLOG-RIPPERS PLEASE WRITE YOUR OWN MATERIAL

I suppose I ought to be flattered that someone with a blog that boasts a few more readers than my mine has stolen my material, but I am not flattered;I am outraged. The blog-rippers who take the words of another, and advertise them as their own, are thieves. They violate the spirit of the web and of common decency, effectively denying the writer his or her voice, which is all a writer has to offer.

Perhaps this increasingly common copyright infringement is a reflection of the dire social and economic situation thrust upon our society: it’s everyman for himself.

The person who calls himself “Maxime Bell” and has the blog, http://weekend-manic-panic.blogspot.com, has put my essay, “Newspapers Rendered,” on his website without attribution. Anyone who doubts this may consult Google and see that I posted my piece on December 13^th.

Mr. Bell, please quit taking the material of others and write your own.

© Bruce J. Miller and brucejmiller.wordpress.com, 2008,2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Bruce J. Miller and brucejmiller.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Those of us who love newspapers have not only read the bad news, we’re living it. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post (any of them, all of them, as Sarah Palin says) have reduced the physical size of their papers as well as the length of the articles. Investigative journalism has taken a fall, made up in part by energetic bloggers and independent web-only citizen-journalists. So,  I am not denying the value of the (as Bush says) internets.

Every quarter paid newspaper circulation declines, and with it, advertising revenue. Reporters and editors have been fired or encouraged to retire as the once full-throated hawkers of news have become mute vendors of websites, working their way towards the utopia of publishing without the messy labor and material costs of print production.

I must at this point digress to refute the notion, most recently advanced by a man named Jonathan M. Lloyd in his letter to the NYT (12.4.08), that reading on a screen saves trees, the implication being that those who read newspapers and books are deforesting the world while screen watchers are green (perhaps the way nuclear power is green?).

And what happens to that biodegradable notebook computer or Bezos Kindle or Sony Reader when they are discarded? These flowers issue nectar of toxic chemicals that will leave an imprint on the soil and drinking water long after the self-satisfied consumer who bought them has been interred. Let’s not forget that trees, properly harvested, are a renewable resource.
A letter by Peter C. Herman also appeared in the Times on 12/04:

“Unlike computers, books require no energy at all. One does not need to plug in the original edition of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” (1667) or Thomas More’s “Utopia” (1516) to read them. The book is not only efficient, but the ultimate in green technology as well. It is even biodegradable. Second, the technology required to retrieve the data stored in books (that is, our brains and reading) does not change, whereas one must constantly update digital storage devices. For example, data stored on zip drives or data stored using a defunct program can be accessed with great difficulty, if at all…”

The same might be said of newspapers. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m no Luddite, but at this very moment faces in the news peer at me from my coffee and dining room tables and other spaces. I get the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Sun-Times every day. The articles invite me to read them at my leisure and without the noxious brightness of the screen I stare at as I write.

Herman, by the way, has hit on one of the great taboos of our time: the outsized energy consumption that our wired world requires. This was an issue discussed in the 1970’s, but it has all but disappeared in the world-wide rush to embrace computers and everything they represent.

The fate of the Tribune is a subject I could write about ad nauseam. The greedy leprechaun who “bought” the newspaper with billions of dollars in borrowed money is on his way to burying it. Maybe calling him a leprechaun is too flip: let’s describe him as the future Ozymandias of the newspaper biz.
So, isn’t it just possible that the newspaper owners/investors have it backwards? Rather than giving the online paper away for free while raising the price of the print editions, why not the other way round?

Furthermore, instead of leading readers exclusively to the web for updates and additional stories, why not offer some print exclusives along the way? The WSJ made money for years by charging for access to their website. Why not reduce the newsstand price or make it free and charge web-surfers some number of pennies per page view? Yes, yes, I know everyone has gone for miles in the other direction; the Times did away with Times Select, the New Yorker offers itself free of charge on the web.

The problem is that the more you devalue printed newspapers, the less value they have. The newspaper industry has made no attempt over the years to argue its case to the public. Book publishers have, to a limited extent, promoted reading; the film industry disseminates pro-movie propaganda whenever and however it can, but the newspapers never even tried.

I am not suggesting that we can ever return to the Old Ways. The internet is here to stay, but so is paper and ink.

When Barack Obama won the election there was a sudden market for printed papers that stunned the publishers. It’s time to build on that, just as the publishing industry ought to have built a pro-book campaign around the success of Harry Potter.

Lovers of the printed page, please, do not go gentle into that good night. There’s bounty for you.

© Bruce J. Miller and brucejmiller.wordpress.com, 2008,2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Bruce J. Miller and brucejmiller.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has always struck me as a buffoon. I know it’s unkind to comment on his double chin, but, with the Thanksgiving holiday on the horizon, his resemblance to the holiday bird, particularly when he shakes his head for emphasis and the ample neck follows, eager to be in agreement with its headmaster, is hard to ignore.

I saw him on Meet the Press November 16th, appearing as part of a round table with Katty (can you believe that name?) Kay, Tavis Smiley, and some others. I didn’t see the entire segment, but it seemed as though Tom the Friedman took more than his allotted time. Tom the Brokaw was happy to let this media-anointed wise man gobble gobble on as long as possible, so the languid former TV anchorman could pass meet-the-press-muster without undue stress. Thus the Toms did their two-step.

Thomas Friedman had come to mind that same morning, just before I spotted him on TV, as I was reading an article in the New York Times about Danny Boyle, the British director whose new film, “Slumdog Millionaire” was just released. The writer of the piece, Somini Sengupta, tells us that Mumbai, where the film was shot, “is not only crowded, it is also a city where tens of thousands of people live on the streets.” Thus, filming outside of a studio is rare, unsafe, and unpredictable. I thought of Friedman because he has spent so much air time mouthing the grandiloquent cant of free trade. “Tens of thousands on the streets, but the streets are paved and there are port-o-potties where before the resplendent call centers there were 100 times as many and nary a latrine” he might have said.

Within the last couple of years, I’ve heard him talk about how a green China will transform the planet—this while crude coal-fired power plants were sprouting all over the place like green beans in a hot house.

Well, I see he has a new book out about all the problems created by his pet fat flat world.

In the past I viewed a television appearance by him the way Mr. Bennet of Pride and Prejudice looked at fools: a source of amusement while dining. And speaking of dining, he is a perpetual dinner guest. He would have dinner with, say, the Saudi Crown Prince in Riyadh, or journalists in Jakarta and come back with a Friedman exclusive meant to surprise and enlighten us all, in the meantime providing Tom Tom with some hifalutin feed.

No doubt, when I get around to reading his brilliant new book, I will be forced to eat my words. Until then, allow me to share some of his priceless broadcast utterances from that recent Meet the Press:

“It started as a credit crisis, then it morphed into an equity crisis, your stock portfolio went down.  Then it morphed into a consumption crisis; nobody went out and bought.  Then it morphed–now it’s morphing into an unemployment crisis.  Then it’s coming back and intensifying the credit crisis.  That’s the loop we’re in now.  And if we don’t find a way to get America to go back shopping, to, to get the economy re-stimulated again, to get a catalyst there, Barack Obama could have some of his inaugural balls in, in soup kitchens.  I mean, I don’t know where this is going to be a couple of months from now.”

Indeed it is true that a President’s balls might end up in the soup over a collapsing economy, but what a thing to say on national television!

We have to find a way “to get America to go back shopping.” Hmmm. I think maybe people aren’t shopping because they have no money. Mr. Friedman, your stock portfolio may have gone down, but many of the people that comprise the “America’ you are speaking of, have no stock portfolio, or not much of one. And what money they do have may go for hospital visits because they have no health insurance, and maybe not enough pasta or peanut butter for a meal.

And here’s another rhetorical gem on the ubiquitous post-election topic that drove me to turn off my television, the tedious speculation surrounding Hilary Clinton’s nomination to the office of Secretary of State:

“You know, Tom, I think that’s important.  Obviously, having a woman secretary of state would be important.  But I’d step back and say what are the unique conditions right now that actually should affect the actual job qualifications of the next secretary of state?  And for me, I’d want a bankruptcy specialist because I think the next secretary of state’s biggest job is going to be managing weakness, not, not strength.  Managing the weakness of Russia, managing the weakness of China.  I might go back to George Bush Sr., Brent Scowcroft.  ‘Hey, guys, what was it like to manage the collapse of the Soviet Union?’ Because I think the biggest problem in the next couple years, given this financial crisis, is going to be managing the weakness of some of the big players in the world, not their strength.”

Wow! I guess every secretary of state has “managed” the “strength” of the other countries of the world, and now will have to “manage weakness” instead. The weakness of China? The last time I looked the United States economy depended on countries like China, Japan and others for investment to prop up the dollar and our over-leveraged country. I think he has a great idea though, get an accountant, or a lawyer, a bankruptcy specialist to be Secretary of State. Maybe the character from Monty Python, the CPA who was bored and wanted to become a lion tamer?

Of course, since we’re involved in two wars and have lost thousands of soldiers and contractors, and have caused the death and displacement directly and indirectly of millions of Iraqis, maybe we should hire a mortician as Secretary of Defense? What do you think Mr. Friedman?

© Bruce J. Miller and brucejmiller.wordpress.com, 2008,2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Bruce J. Miller and brucejmiller.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

]]> http://brucejmiller.wordpress.com/2008/11/25/thomas-friedmans-wise-words/feed/ 2 brucejmiller