PopCult: September 2007 Archive Page

I missed this when it came out during a recent rush of newshole fodder about Anna Nicole Smith. It is predictable yet slightly amusing for the first minute and a half, but be sure to watch past that point -- I'm still recovering from my coughing fit.
 

Images of Journalists in Popular Culture (PDF)

A newsroom is always filled with fast-talking, bright people whose main work is to speak to strangers, investigate a situation, get answers, develop a story. Since reporters are always finding out something about someone, they create countless stories with good beginnings, middles, and endings. The newspaper gave the moviemaker an endless flow of story possibilities in an atmosphere that soon became so familiar to movie audiences that journalists could be thrown into a film without the scriptwriter having to worry about motivation or plot.

By the early 1920s, audiences already knew that reporters were always involved in some kind of story, no matter how bizarre or melodramatic. They accepted it as a matter of course. In the process, they got not only large doses of entertainment but also a series of lasting impressions about the media that has stayed in the public mind for more than ten decades.

A journalist without a voice is only a shadow of the real McCoy. The images at first didn't speak, but all of the Jekyll-and-Hyde stereotypes of the newspaperman and woman were there in the pages of melodramatic fiction and in the silent films often based on that fiction. People who read newspapers didn't have the slightest idea how the news came to them until they read about it in lurid books or saw it on the silent screen. Right from the beginning of film, the world of the newspaper was an easily accessible and recognizable background.

[...]

By the last decades of the twentieth century, the journalists most people remember are the anonymous journalists, played by nondescript actors, who chase after a story by rudely invading the privacy of the person involved. These reporters become bit players, an anonymous piece of an intrusive pack of harassing journalists, many armed with lights, cameras, and microphones. The public watches uncomfortably as these obnoxious reporters fill the movie and, especially, the television screens. They poke their cameras into people's faces, yell out questions, recklessly pursue popular actors - the kind who used to play journalists once cheered by audiences. The result of this particularly offensive image of the reporter from the 1970s to the new century is the public's rejection of the reporter as a hero, as someone helpful and necessary to society. In the beginning, these anonymous reporters were more likable because they were given witty lines, and they asked questions the audiences wanted answered. They were often used to advance the plot and summarize the action. They were created by former journalists who, no matter how critical of the profession, couldn't disguise their true love of the people in it.

Great Zork map.

The Walls are Closing In

 
It's all my fault
that now I hear their death -
their screams of pain
within their final breath.    


No, we are alive.

And thanks to you,
we'll get out.

A whole song about such a literal event?  Songs in musicals, even if they are showpiece numbers attached closely to what is happening on stage, have to be about the hopes and fears of the characters. There are a few other songs that seem to be closer to the right idea, but I wasn't really impressed by what I saw.

Wired's Threat Level:

Just two days after it was yelled out in a University of Florida lecture hall, "Don't Tase Me, Bro!" has become the newest cultural touchstone of our pop-cultural lexicon.

Nick Montfort, Grand Text Auto:

Leonard Cohen

Manhattan: Taken.
Berlin: Taken.