(More from the mcarp archives… the prophetic genius and brilliance are his;
the ones/zeros, pixels, pictures and subheads and pull-quotes are mine.)

Greetings from Satellite City, TX

What do they call those noisemakers Tibetan monks swing around their heads… the ones that make that hroowwwwnnngggggg hrooowwwnnngggggg noise?

We all have our unanswered questions about Waco… and that’s mine.

I have nothing to say about black helicopters, or the second amendment, or whether David Koresh was a kook or a prophet. I have nothing to say about how it ended. I wasn’t there, as it turned out, on the final day.

But one evening in late March, 1993, stuck in Waco, and stuck for a way to advance the Branch Davidian standoff story for my own station, I picked up the Gideon Bible out of my room at the Days Inn, and took it with me down to Satellite City, the media encampment at the perimeter of the standoff.

I sat in a Chevy Astro van with that Bible in one hand, and a Pearl longneck in the other, and, with the van’s dome light for illumination, began reading the Book of the Revelation — specifically, the passages about the Seven Seals which were so crucial to the Davidians’ understanding of their leader, David Koresh.

“And when the Lamb broke one of the seven seals I saw it, and I heard one of the four living creatures say, as if in a voice of thunder, ‘Come.’”

Up on the hill, the Davidians’ Mt. Carmel compound stood illuminated against the night sky. An FBI helicopter swooped overhead, sailing down the hillside, sweeping the fields with a spotlight.

“And when the Lamb broke the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, ‘Come.’ And another horse came out — a fiery-red one; and power was given to its rider to take peace from the earth, and to cause men to kill one another; and a great sword was given to him.”

Across the road, a television news crew from Houston had turned their satellite truck into a landbound party barge, complete with barbecue, lanterns, and boom box. Gloria Estefan sang from the stereo.

Meanwhile, from the hilltop, the occasional rumbling of tanks, and the sound effects of the FBI’s ‘psychological warfare’ campaign drifted down to mingle with the dance music and constant chugging of satellite truck generators.

“When the Lamb broke the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, ‘Come.’ I looked, and a black horse appeared, its rider carrying a balance in his hand.”

In fact, crews who had been parked at Satellite City more than a month had turned it into a ‘home away from home’. The media pool had searched for tents that could serve as temporary shelter, and had come up with a row of candy-striped county fair pavilions, that were lined up along the side of the road. Talk about your media circus.

Lines in the sand

CNN crews had surrounded its installation with a foot-high picket fence, and had stuck a pink flamingo lawn ornament in the ground outside its trailer door.

There were other reporters who found so many amenities of resort living available in Satellite City, they never left the place. You’d see them following around other, working reporters who’d come in from town, trying to beg, borrow, or steal snippets of information. Or, they’d sit in their own trailers and watch Charles Jaco’s CNN reports, and plagiarize that material for the folks back home.

It occurred to me that night — with beer in one hand and Bible in the other — that, as surreal as this scene looked from my vantage point, it must look even stranger from the bullet-riddled house on the hill. Inside, the followers of David Koresh had convinced themselves the world was coming to an end. For them, in fact, it was.

“When the Lamb broke the fourth seal I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, ‘Come.’ I looked and a pale-colored horse appeared. Its rider’s name was Death, and Hades came close behind him; and authority was given to them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with the sword or with famine or pestilence or by means of the wild beasts of the earth.”

There they were, surrounded, on a hilltop in rural Texas, by helicopters and tanks and spotlights and loudspeakers blasting the hroowwwwnnngggggg hrooowwwnnngggggg of Tibetan soundmakers — whatever they’re called.

“When the Lamb broke the fifth seal, I saw at the foot of the altar the souls of those whose lives had been sacrificed because of the word of God and of the testimony which they had given.”

But what, amidst the tanks and helicopters and bizarre sound effects and bodies that surrounded them, did they make of that little camp down at the foot of the hill? The row of brightly-lit satellite trucks and festival tents, and the strains of Miami Sound Machine faintly drifting up the hill?

What the hell kind of apocalypse was this, anyway?

Nobody at the foot of the hill seemed to care.

“When the Lamb broke the sixth seal I looked, and there was a great earthquake, and the sun became as dark as sackcloth, and the whole disc of the moon became like blood.”

Crossing the line, never to return

Unable to focus on Revelation, I walked across the road to the Houston satellite truck. Someone noticed I seemed a little distracted. He asked why, and I told him. “Who cares?” he replied, pausing to swallow a mouthful of barbecue. “They’re all nuts up there, anyway.”

“When the Lamb broke the seventh seal, there was silence in Heaven for about half an hour. Then I saw the seven angels who are in the presence of God, and seven trumpets were given to them.”

On that spring evening in 1993, the axis of my reality shifted just a little bit. Nothing looked quite the same for years afterward. And TV news never looked the same again.

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

5,000 used to mean something, but now not so much.

The dynamic at play here has to do with attention. While I “follow” more than 1,400 people on the service, I really only follow a handful. I don’t go back and read every single message from each person. That kind of attention doesn’t scale. Many days, I am lucky to dip my hand into the stream and take a sip. Don’t be offended if I didn’t see the announcement of your tremendous accomplishment, there’s only so much attention to go around.

I know there are some who think I’m being pretentious for saying “5,000 doesn’t mean anything,” but it’s the truth. Because the people who follow me also follow many, many more than they used to.

Your Followers Aren’t Following, you follow?

Late Late Show host Craig Ferguson played with this idea recently, starting his account then dreaming about how far his “followers” would go to do his bidding. They became his Robot Skeleton Army, and for a celebrity with a huge following you can get some interesting crowdsourced humor. It’s also interesting to note that a lot of Ferguson’s audience isn’t following very many, so his Tweets aren’t diluted by noise and volume.

Back when I had only 500 followers or so, I might share a link to a post on this site. By watching my traffic counter, I could tell that I had generated enough interest to translate into a couple of dozen hits to my site. Those people were highly engaged and were likely to leave comments, too.

Not to say that the followers that came after are not as engaged, but they are looking at busy streams too. Having 10 times the audience, but an audience 10 times as dispersed in their attention is a net zero. You’re competing for tiny slices of time. 140 characters, and often it’s the first 40 that get scanned for content. That’s right – the first 30% of a Tweet determines whether the other 70% gets read (or if the link gets clicked.)

These days, with close to 5,000 followers, when I share a link to this site it might generate a couple of dozen clicks, and maybe another half-dozen for each time it is re-Tweeted.

Simply put – Twitter does not scale without changes to how you use it. The only way you can make the same formula work is by scaling up your number of overall followers.

A Race for Rats

I gave up on that race a long time ago, because it threatened to become an end unto itself. “It’s great you built an audience, now what is it you were planning to say to them again?”

There is a deficit of attention, but it’s not an issue of other people being too busy to “follow” me. It’s my failure to provide them with relevant or interesting information they can’t do without. If you want to be heard in the thunderstorm, you have to be either louder, more voluminous, or talk in a frequency that’s easy to tune.

And that goes for any channel, no matter how ephemeral.

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

The mistake is in assuming too much – that a spectrum of colors will cover every flavor of difference and distinction.

American politics has divided down Red and Blue lines, so chosen because the media of the time needed simple charts with easily-distinguishable colors to project the presidential races. Red equals Republican, Blue equals Democrat, and that’s probably the way it is going to be for the parties moving forward. It wasn’t really standardized in any way until 2000, and it just fell that way. If you tried to change it now, you’d likely get a lot of resistance from people who have freely chosen to identify as a Red-State voter, or that Proud Blue Dot in a Very Red State. The colors have come to represent more than just the parties, and cut to the very core of a conservative/liberal division.

While we’re on politics, it’s fairly-well understood that a Green is one who pushes an agenda with a strong environmental focus. In fact, the environment and sustainability drive just about every policy issue for one who is Green.

Beneath, Behind, Between

So where does that leave the rest of us?

I am a lowercase-L libertarian. I have at times been accused of being a brainless lefty, and at others of being a heartless conservative. You might paint me as a little bit red and a little bit blue. Which adds up to purple?

My problem is that my views don’t wash out that way. I have a strong axis toward fiscal conservatism, anchored by a belief that people in the aggregate spend their money more wisely and efficiently than when their money is pooled together and spent by someone who didn’t earn it. I also don’t trust “government” as an institution to stay out of the individual’s way, and leave people alone to their peculiarities.

There is nothing muddled about my thinking. Just ask me my position on just about anything, and I’m certain you won’t get a wishy-washy magenta out of it. Yet the current framework of color doesn’t have a place for people like me.

It’s entrenched in the notion that our two-party system is the best way to proceed – and both of our predominant American political parties have a vested interest in seeing that continue. (Don’t pretend the Democrats were happy with Ralph Nader’s Green Party siphoning off enough votes to turn the 2000 election on its ear.)

Essentially, this is rah-rah bumper-sticker boosterism. I steal from Rush’s “Territories”

They shoot without shame in the name of a piece of dirt
or a change of accent, or the color of your shirt

Better the pride that resides in a citizen of the world
than the pride that divides when a colorful rag is unfurled.

Reject the Premise

The Red Blue divide does more than polarize, it freezes the thinking. What color would you use to describe someone like me? Orange? Yellow? (Because cowardice is so politically appealing.) Pink? Brown?

How about just taking me off the map. I reject the notion there is a single prism through which to view issues, and I reject the premise that such a continuum can even exist. The Great Divide has become so much about different core values to the extent that “common ground” is difficult to navigate in the increasingly rare instances where the overlap remains.

We need a multi-dimensional approach to dissecting the issues that divide us. Viewed through one lens, the course of action is clear. Viewed through another, a diametrically-opposed strategy is apparent. But the language for seeing the differences from an angle that makes sense becomes impossible when the sides are conducting purity tests for their Red or Blue.

Color me invisible, color me blind. Better yet, challenge yourself to remove the goggles others are using to obscure your vision, so you only see the world in a way where the colors matter.

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression.”

Boy, we all sweat over that one, don’t we? To know that a potential lifetime relationship, be it personal or business, swings in the balance of a single encounter. It’s enough to make you sick. Some people do get sick, as a matter of fact. It’s not necessary, though… if you understand the science of first impressions, and the most important part: Some might call it “The Icebreaker,” but essentially we’re talking about a pick-up line.

Whatever your application — phone scripts — sales pitches — some are designed to win another over, some to get your foot in the door. Some are milked to death, and some are cheesy. You’ve probably seen a list or two of the worst ones in your e-mail. We all know what makes them bad, but don’t always recognize what makes them good.

With that in mind, let me tell you about the best pick-up line ever…

Rail Genius

It was the summer of 1984, and I had just turned 15 years old. We’d been in Alabama for a year, and I was still making adjustments. I guess that’s why my parents let me take the trip back to Idaho to see my old friends. I couldn’t drive, but I snagged enough money doing odd jobs that I could pay for the trip: Amtrak, all the way. (Remember, this was 1984, and I had shown signs of being responsible.)

The trip would take three-and-a-half days each way, and I was to spend two weeks visiting in between. As eager as I was to get there, I was just as eager to relax and enjoy the countryside.

Till it all got flat.

Then I went back to my books.

Along the way, though, I started admiring some of the sights inside the train. You meet all kinds of people in coach… All kinds: Overburdened moms, with screaming kids. Grandparents, with nothing but time. Wedding guests, funeral parties, and angels.

Angel’s Among Us

Oh yeah… Angel. That was her name (although I didn’t know it yet.) She was a glorious sight to behold inside that train. She looked to be about 19, with medium-length blonde hair, a healthy tan, and a smile that could melt titanium. It was all I could do to keep from drooling. And it was all she could do to keep this other guy from drooling… on her!!!

If Angel truly was an angel, then this guy was be-deviling her. Or at least trying to tempt her. He was in his early-to-mid thirties, rather unkempt, and had the kind of body that was just an NFL season or two away from landing him in the Bud Bowl Hall of Fame. Not quite a beer gut, but a promising start. She really wasn’t interested in “Bud.” But he sure was interested in getting her to follow him back to the bar car. She was in the window seat, and he was in the aisle seat, boxing her in.

I would have given anything just to talk to this girl, but I didn’t stand a chance with “Bud” in the way. I needed the perfect line.

I marched up to the seat in front of his, squared my shoulders, took a deep breath… and stomped like Rumplestiltskin while uttering the greatest icebreaker in the history of interpersonal relationships:

“Dad wants to see you in the sleeper car right now!!!”

(You would think there should have been trumpets or something, maybe a cascade of balloons and confetti, or a trip to Disney World… but I digress.)

Angel looked up at me, and her perfect eyes flashed a perfect mix of some perfectly raw emotions. Shock. Confusion. Abject Terror. She looked at me like I had been smoking crack (another stunning accomplishment, considering that crack was another five years away from being patented.)

She stared at me for an eternity, or one second, whichever one was shorter.

She turned and looked at Bud.

She shot a quick glance at me, turned back to Bud, and said “I gotta go.”

We walked the length of the train before sitting down next to each other in coach. I shook her hand and said “My name’s Isaac.”

Angel turned out to be a sweet person. We sat on that train and talked for hours. As far as I was concerned, I SCORED! (What did you expect? I was fifteen, she was nineteen, and we were sitting in coach!)

Lessons Learned

Little did I know it, but I had stumbled on a formula that replaces the guesswork of “breaking the ice” with pure science.

1) Recognize a need
This was clearly a damsel in distress. She wanted a way out of the situation.

2) Propose a solution
I gave her an alternative (me) that was better than the one she had (Bud)

3) Make it relevant to your shared reality
“Wow, look at those cows whiz by!” “Have you been to the caboose?” or even “Can I get you anything?” would have been completely useless. Only one thing mattered to her at that point. My hopes and needs weren’t going to get satisfied until hers were.

4) Make it timely
If a line works more than once, then it is just a line. If it only works on that one occasion, then the other person will know that you are truly communicating with them, and not seeing them as a means to an end.

Not every pick-up line or icebreaker will follow these rules, but it has been my experience that the most effective ones do. They don’t have to be offbeat, and they don’t even have to be memorable. They must, however, open a channel to the other person by sending an important signal: We can interact in a way that will benefit us both.

The best icebreakers are developed in an instant. The attitudes of recognizing another’s needs, being open-minded, and losing your fear of embarrassment are developed over a long period of time. Work on those things, and the memorable icebreakers will flow right from you.

(Angel – if you’re out there somewhere… you’re welcome. Just wanted to let you know I got something out of it too.)

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

The ordinary viewer is just so… ordinary.

“You know what your problem is?” My news director was putting the question to me — not in an accusatory or critical tone, but with the demeanor of a doctor telling his patient he has a terminal illness. “You have no style and no class.”

That was actually part of an employee evaluation I was given. (And here’s a bit of free career advice: if, during your first evaluation, you’re given an assessment like that, don’t think things will get better if you just hang around another 17 years.)

When I was recruited for my first TV news job, just five years earlier, I had gone to work in a newsroom full of people from working class families just like mine. Some were liberal and some were conservative, some Protestant, some Catholic, some Jewish.

But no one was there with the sense that the circumstances of their birth, or the fact that they were on TV, entitled them to some special place in the social order.

But five years later, Ronald Reagan was president, and the Ewings of Dallas were America’s TV family. And the term “working class,” at least in my profession, had become pejorative.

And although it is no longer my profession, the profession’s attitude seems the same.

Before Joe the Plumber

Have you ever heard of “Joe Sixpack?” He’s the ‘typical viewer’ for whom television news managers program their product. He is, by most accounts, an overweight, undershirt-wearing, lowlife who plops down in his ratty, squeaky, vinyl-upholstered easy chair at six pm, rips a Bud out of the plastic six-pack ring, and props his feet up for the news. Every morning, in newsrooms across the nation, executives and producers meet and talk about what Joe Sixpack will want to see on the news that evening.

Want to see a picture of him? Go look in the mirror. Because, unless you’re a doctor, lawyer, stock broker, or someone similarly situated, you are Joe Sixpack.

TV news personalities, in their need to separate those with “style and class” from those without it, have informally divided their public into two groups. The first group consists of the aforementioned doctors, lawyers, stock brokers, plus a few charismatic politicians — and, of course, TV news personalities.

The other group is ‘trailer park trash,’ consisting of everyone else.

But the grim reality for these provincial news celebrities is this: the affluent, fashionable folk with whom they want to associate, and be associated, don’t watch television news.They’re all tuned to the Discovery Channel, or Crossfire. The local TV news constituency is the very mechanics, convenience store clerks, letter carriers, plumbers, insurance salesmen, and the like whom one of my coworkers once dismissed with a single word, or rather, sound effect: “Ew.”

Dual Citizenship?

For the TV news reporter, the quandary is this: how to produce a news product for the mass of citizens who actually watch the newscast, and buy the products advertised — while simultaneously nudging the rich and trendy with a wink and a smile, as if to say, “Don’t pay any attention to that. Really, we’re just like you.”

One afternoon at an upscale shopping mall in the city where I lived, two gang members got into some kind of friendly scuffle outside the Swiss Army shop, and one of them accidentally shot the other in the butt with a small handgun.

We didn’t make any bones about it in our live coverage: the story was not that a black teenager had been shot. The story was that a lot of upscale white bystanders, whom our anchor described as being from the city’s ’select neighborhoods,’ could have been shot.

Years later, we interrupted programming to report on a shooting in a similarly exclusive mall — 250 miles away. One indignant caller demanded to know why we thought anyone in our audience cared what happened in the Dallas Galleria. One news executive shrugged and said, “Everyone I know shops there.”

You Might Be Surprised…

A pipe bomb exploded one evening in a suburban, semi-rural community east of the city. The teenager who had assembled it was seriously hurt. Our reporter on the scene — born and raised in one of those ’select neighborhoods’ — began her live report by saying, “You know, you might be surprised. There are actually some pretty nice homes out here.”

In fact, though, TV reporters generally aren’t like the affluent upper classes from whom they seek acceptance. They may have been raised in those kinds of homes, but in the competitive, cost-conscious world of modern TV news, they’re paid far less than they would be making if they’d actually become doctors, lawyers, or stock brokers.

So, they try to make up for it by just toadying and name-dropping (“Omigawd! Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a Rolex repaired in this city?”), and leveraging their tenuous status as celebrities for the chance to stand on the fringe of sophisticated society. They’d rather be the lapdog of the establishment than the watchdog.

But frankly, the glamour of exclaiming “Just take a look!” in front of a nightly procession of car wrecks, house fires, and drive-by shootings is often lost on people who have spent ten hours performing open heart surgery, or made new case law, or gotten in on the ground floor of an IPO that tripled in value in eight hours.

Life Without Apology

The guy who first tagged me with the ‘no style and no class’ criticism eventually got fired. His boss — chief enforcer of what the company described as the ‘aura of affluence’ — was escorted from the building under armed guard one day, along with most of his family, while auditors pored over the fat leaseback deals and inflated expense reports he’d written for himself at the owner’s expense. That’s how he’d gotten his ‘aura of affluence.’

I’m more than two years out of the business myself, now. I decided to go do something else for a living — something that didn’t require me to start every day by apologizing for having ‘no style and no class.’

I’m not dramatically wealthier than I was, but getting off the ‘best car/best restaurants/best neighborhoods’ merry-go-round left me financially more independent than I ever was as a reporter.

But there’s another kind of independence that’s even more valuable. That’s the freedom to be your own person, choose your own friends, form your own values, and not portray a semifictional character created by a boss, or a consultant, or your coworkers — or even by yourself — to please someone else.

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

“But I gave him a fighting chance.”

- Former television news director (1978)

I never understood why anyone wanted to be a news director, anyway. Talk about a thankless job. Now, it’s gotten to where some of the big companies won’t even let their ND’s go to the RTNDA convention once a year and least pretend for a week they’re doing something besides signing their own names to consultants’ faxes.

I worked for 17 news directors over 25 years, which gives you some clue about the average job tenure of news directors. Some of them were solid leaders or solid journalists, or sometimes both. And about a fourth were people I wouldn’t have hired to mow my lawn. Of course, then again, the guy who mows my lawn doesn’t need a focus group to tell him how to do it.

One ND was an alcoholic. One was a drug addict. One was both an alcoholic and a drug addict. Another made management decisions based on ‘psychic dreams.’ And the nuttier they were, the longer they seemed to hang on. It was the rational ones, with a grasp on reality, that usually cratered most quickly.

Remains of the Day

A bunch of us were sitting one evening at a local media hangout, rehashing the day. It was the usual shop talk: two-hour drives to stories that had fallen through, items that didn’t make slot, who was in and who was out in our competitors’ newsrooms.

During a brief lull in the conversation, our news director — working on his third or fourth margarita — offered how his day had gone.

“Well, I had to kill the kids’ hamster this morning.”

The rest of the table, not surprisingly, fell silent.

“He had gotten out of his cage and chewed a hole in my fishing waders. So, he had to die.

“I gave him a fighting chance, though. I put him in the middle of the garage floor, and turned the schnauzers loose. I figured if he made it under the lawn mower, well… survival of the fittest, you know.

“But he didn’t. Too bad.”

So, our news director had amused himself before coming to work by watching his dogs tear his children’s pet to pieces.

Setting His Sights

The ratings were not being good to this guy. The network had jumped from third to first place, but our local news was still mired in third. A complete reworking of the product — new set, new name, new promos and graphics — had made no impact at all. He had brought in a new, glamorous ‘pretty boy’ anchor from another city, whom the viewers had greeted with howls of laughter.

(“We didn’t hire him just for his pretty face!” the promos announced, as an attractive young woman followed him with her eyes, licking her lips as he walked by.)

And as the ratings chugged along in the basement, his demeanor worsened.

One day, he brought a rifle to work, and propped it against his desk.

“What’s that for?” a slightly nervous employee asked.

“I cracked the stock over the weekend,” he replied. “I’m taking it by the shop after work to get it fixed.”

But the next day, the rifle was back. And the day after that. And the day after that.

Finally, as the days stretched into weeks, we just got used to seeing the gun propped up against the desk, or laid across the top, and we quit asking about it.

He ended up getting fired at the station Christmas party — which is a story in and of itself. Thank God he didn’t have the gun with him then.

While the rest of the staff was in Studio One, getting wasted on punch and margaritas after the late news had wrapped, he was going on a rampage through the station. He tore excutives’ nameplates off their office doors, and tossed them in the toilet. He ripped pictures off the walls, and smashed them over his knees. On his way out the front door, he pulled the pole lamp down in front of the terrified night receptionist, and used it to to chop down the station Christmas tree.

But you know what? As news directors go, he was one of the better ones.

I had to work for a few who were really nuts.

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Read here about how ABC News is “transforming” itself through cuts and reorganization. At least they didn’t call it “right-sizing.”

(And bear in mind that ABC News had a larger staff than NBC News and MSNBC combined…)

But how do you do the job with fewer people? You outsource.

Check out Good Morning America’s coverage of tornadoes and storms in Arkansas.

I apologize if the image isn’t clear, it’s not always easy to shoot an old-style curved television surface.

But just about everything you need to know about the future of network news is in this piece.

Particularly in the little white letters across the top.

The ones indicating the source of this interview.

Five years ago, this would have been inconceivable, that a television network would run video shot by a local newspaper.

But the key elements for this piece came from many sources outside of the ABC editorial umbrella.

So, what are your predictions for what is to come for network news?

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

(made with the Despair.com Do-It-Yourself De-Motivator)

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

“You mean it’s not in Wisconsin?”

The phone rang, and an intern picked it up. She listened for a moment, then put her hand over the receiver and looked at me.

“Where is Mount Everest?” she asked.

What am I, the World Book? “Tell ‘em it’s in Wisconsin,” I replied.

“Nuh-uhhh,” a coworker interrupted. “Mount Everest is in Colorado.”

“Mount Everest isn’t in Colorado,” a third responded. “Pike’s Peak is in Colorado. Mount Everest is in Alaska.”

The intern turned back to me. “Where is it, really?”

Then I realized I didn’t know for sure which country it was in. So, I weaseled. “It’s in the Himalayas.”

“No, it’s not,” replied the coworker who had placed it in Alaska. “The Himalayas are in New York, and I know Mount Everest isn’t in New York.”

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Look – I’ve written a lot of things online over the years. Enough to fill a book, if anyone were so interested. And I share it freely.

But maybe I shouldn’t anymore.

I have no problem with this, because Mark Burhop didn’t Imitate. He Attributed.

Let’s instead look at what I found today, on LifeHacker:

I only return messages left for me at 10 am, 2pm, and 4 pm. My phone’s ringer is turned off, and my cell phone sits in my purse. I call it my “Dr Pepper Rule,” because of the old 10-2-4 logo on the Dr. Pepper bottles.

That was an excerpt from another blog post – and you’ll note LifeHacker does an excellent job of attributing the origin of information and directing readers to the original.

My quibble is with how we define “original.”

Look at this post, from February 2010:

If you will, stop and compare it to this:

I wrote the above and published it on my site in August 2007. Many people read it and linked to it, and that is flattering. It drove a little traffic to my site, and that was nice.

Please note, that in more than three years of writing Occam’s RazR, I have not run a single ad. My ideas, as they are, are completely non-monetized.

So, bear with me if I have a little problem with people taking my ideas and repackaging them as their own. For all I know, the author I linked to above was inspired by a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of what I wrote. That could be the case with this one, as well.

That’s why Attribution is the new currency of Flattery. They are called Links for a reason. They bind ideas, and help trace the epidemiology of inspiration. The other plus to Attribution is when you are open in cataloging how and where you got an idea, then you have immediate immunity to claims of original authorship.

Yes, it feels good to see your ideas flourish.

No, it does not feel good to see your ideas generating money and reputation for other people.

Your suggestions are welcome.

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

“This is a cleansing moment of clarity.”

— Howard Beale, “Network!” (1976)

Network!, in case you’ve never seen it, is the movie that gave us the expression, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

The gist of the plot is that low-rated network anchorman Howard Beale suddenly comes unhinged before his TV audience, and as his apparent mental deterioration advances, his bosses and coworkers try to exploit it for ratings gain.

And for me, seeing Network! it was kind of like getting saved.

I had been a television reporter for less than a year, but I was already sensing something was not quite right about the way things were. I just couldn’t quite put my finger on it — and no one seemed to notice it but me.

So, naturally, I thought it was me. And so, for that matter, did everyone else. My ‘attitude problem’ was starting to get me into trouble.

And then, out of the clear blue, along comes Howard Beale with the explanation:

“You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal.

“You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness. You maniacs.

“In God’s name, you people are the real thing! We are the illusion! So, turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off. Turn them off right in the middle of this sentence I am speaking to you now. Turn them off!”

When the lights came up at the end of the movie, there seemed to be about three of us in the theater who ‘got it.’

The others were looking at each other with quizzical stares: ‘What the hell was that about?’

But no matter. At least I knew at last I wasn’t alone.

Up the Rabbit Hole

Beale’s rants made perfect sense to me. He was the first person in the business, real or unreal (as if in television news, there were a difference), who did make sense to me — the first person who saw it the way I saw it.

There was a hitch, though: Howard Beale was going crazy.

“I am imbued, Max. I am imbued with some special spirit. It’s not a religious feeling at all. It is a shocking eruption of great electrical energy. I feel vivid and flashing as if suddenly I had been plugged into some great electro-magnetic field.

“I feel connected to all living things, to flowers, birds, to all the animals of the world and even to some great unseen living force, what I think the Hindus call prana.

“It is not a breakdown. I have never felt more orderly in my life! It is a shattering and beautiful sensation! It is the exalted flow of the space-time continuum, save that it is spaceless and timeless and of such loveliness! I feel on the verge of some great ultimate truth. And you will not take me off the air for now or for any other spaceless time!”

Yeah, that’s crazy, all right. Or is it?

I don’t know what author Paddy Chayefsky wanted us to think when he put those words in Beale’s mouth.

But personally, I don’t think Howard Beale was going crazy; I think he was going sane.

He said it himself: “I just ran out of bullshit.”

Psychiatrist David Viscott, in his self-help bestseller Emotional Resilience, wrote about real-life cases not unlike Beale’s:

“Eventually, there comes a day of awakening and reckoning. Your epiphany is both inevitable and totally unexpected.

“In the moment of your illumination, you finally see yourself as you are and are forced to surrender to the truth lest your false illusions forever obscure your best self.

“Until you reach such a day, you often live a self-deceptive way of life. You try to convince yourself that what you have chosen is what you really want.”

I do know exactly how that feels. I’ve been there myself.

Inside the Looking Glass

Ever see one of those promos where the news anchor dashes to the News ActionCopter — off, presumably, to cover The Big Story?

But as soon as he gets in the copter, they turn off the camera. He climbs back out and returns to his office. The pilot shuts down the engine, and the rotors coast to a stop. There is no ‘Big Story.’ It’s just a promo — an ad that pretends the anchor is taking off to chase down the news. (One of my favorites is one in which the anchor jumps into the copter, looks at the pilot and dramatically points at the sky. Like, where the hell else are they going to go?)

The purpose of these ads is to persuade viewers that anchors are out there every day, in dramatic hot pursuit of the news. Even if they aren’t.

Or the promo where the anchor and some anonymous behind-the-scenes staffer look at a script together? The anchor points to some word on the script, gesturing as broadly as a vaudeville performer so you’ll be sure to notice. Then they look at each other, nod, and dart off in opposite directions.

At one station in New York, they hired actors to play the newsroom staff, because the real producers and editors weren’t as glamorous as the station wanted viewers to think they were.

That scene in Broadcast News — in which news producer Holly Hunter feeds interview questions through a headset to affable but dimwitted anchorman William Hurt — is a lot closer to reality.

But I’m not telling you anything you haven’t figured out for yourself: TV news is, for the most part, just an ongoing advertisement for itself. An entertainment program, loosely based on the day’s events.

That ‘News ActionCenter’ is no more real than the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. That’s why they call it a newsset.

Row upon row of monitors cover the walls, but many are just transparencies in cardboard cutouts. Fake.

A sweeping vista of the city skyline ties it all together, supported by pillars of impossibly blue plastic marble or stapled-on brushed aluminum. Fake.

If you could go in the studio, and walk behind the backdrops, you’d see that it’s all just laminated plywood and painted two-by-fours, with extension cords and power strips scattered everywhere. Fake.

The spontaneous question and answer session between anchor and reporter at the end of a live shot? Scripted. Fake.

A reporter walks down the road, talking to the camera and sometimes pausing reflectively, as if looking for a word. Where is he walking to? Nowhere. It’s fake. What’s the word he’s looking for? The one he memorized, along with the pause. That’s fake, too.

You would assume, I suppose, that there is some ‘jumping off point’ at which TV news leaves behind the fakery and melodrama for reality. I think there was, at one time. But eventually, I got to where I couldn’t find it.

“You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal.”

The Awakening

And I told myself for years that the phoniness and fakery and false sincerity and exaggerated drama were just part of the cost of doing business. The other guys were doing it, too, and doing it more flagrantly than we were. We had to stay competitive. But somewhere in the back of my mind, it kept nagging at me.

I knew it was crap to say ‘reports are coming in at this hour,’ when the ‘reports’ had come in the form of a single anonymous, unverified telephone tip, or a snatch of a conversation picked up off a police scanner.

I knew it was misleading to hyperbolize every trivial complaint or allegation with adjectives like ’shocking,’ ‘outraged,’ and ‘dramatic.’ (It also meant that when really serious stories came along, we had no words left to adequately describe them. We’d used them all up overstating fender bender car wrecks, broken tree branches, kids getting into fistfights at school, shoplifted cigarettes, and the like.)

I knew it was ridiculous to dress up in heavy parka, scarf, earmuffs and wool hat in 55-degree weather and stand on the side of a central Oklahoma highway and talk about the ’scary road conditions’ that were ‘paralyzing traffic’ — in Amarillo, Texas.

There was a newscaster in my home town who, according to local reports, briefly became a house painter after his career publicly and spectacularly flamed out.

And when I first heard that, I thought, ‘Wow. What a way end up.’

In retrospect, it seems like not such a bad thing at all.

The paint, after all, is real. The brush is real. The house is real. If you paint houses, you actually paint houses. You don’t apply a few strokes for a camera, then leave while an assistant finishes up, and a promotion team crafts an advertisement describing what a caring and conscientious painter you are.

In fact, I considered becoming a maintenance man at an apartment complex for much the same reason. I had opportunities to do other things (and as it turned out, I took one), but the idea of doing simple, honest work that really was what it appeared to be was appealing after 25 years of often pretending to be doing something I wasn’t, and creating carefully-worded portrayals of a world that really didn’t exist.

And I would like to think that, even though he was a fictional character, Howard Beale eventually had to confront the same reality — that he had been living in a dramatic, exciting, but basically unreal world, and had been trying to fool people into believing that his false world, and not their own, was real.

“In God’s name, you people are the real thing.

“We are the illusion.

“So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now.

“Turn them off and leave them off. Turn them off right in the middle of this sentence I am speaking to you now.

“Turn them off!”

I turned off my television in February of 1999, and it hasn’t been on since.

(originally published by Michael Carpenter, republished with permission.)

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Mind you, I am talking single-day loser here. It took Ken Jennings 76 appearances to top the $3-million mark, so his Jeopardy victims don’t count.

Pete was on the Wheel of Fortune episode where a woman won the first million-dollar jackpot. Pete finished third, which by all accounts makes him the Biggest Loser in game show history.

Odds are, you won’t be able to find anything about Pete online, because losers are seldom remembered. And the ones that do get remembered had to do a whole lot of winning to get there. The Buffalo Bills lost four straight Super Bowls. Dewey didn’t defeat Truman, but he had to beat out other losers (that you can’t name without Google) just to be nominated. Unless you’re really engaged, you don’t remember the losers.

But they were in the game. Pete – despite hitting Bankrupt on two of the four chances he had to spin the wheel – walked away with more money that day than I did for not playing. He’s also got a great consolation prize, the awesome-sounding title of “Biggest Loser in Game Show History.”

All I am is a phone-a-friend, and that didn’t get me squat.

Even the losers have better stories than those who never played.

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Why don’t you make something arrogant and superficial of yourself?

I came back from a story one day to find the fortune from a Chinese cookie stuck to my computer terminal screen.

“It is not talent you lack,” the slip of paper said, “but ambition.”

Some free character analysis, courtesy of one of my coworkers. Who knows what the purpose was?

I left it taped to my screen for months, though. Because frankly, I thought it was true.

Obviously, something was wrong with me. Why had I willingly stayed in the same medium-market job for 15 years, instead of carpet-bombing top-10 stations with resume tapes? Why was I driving an old Cutlass, instead of a BMW or leather-upholstered Suburban? Why was I still wearing glasses, instead of having laser eye surgery?

Why did I not care whether I had the lead story, or whether I was officially designated a ‘high-profile’ reporter? Why was I not lobbying for longer standups, and more live shot ‘face time’?

Why was I not living in a so-called ’select neighborhood’? Or playing golf with chamber of commerce officials or Republican party leaders?

It seemed reasonable to me at the time that if I’d had any ambition, I would have been doing at least some of those things, like everyone else I knew.

That Carp. Smart guy, but what a slacker.

It took me a long time to understand that I did not lack my own ambition — I lacked other people’s ambition. And it frustrated them that I was chasing my own goals, instead of theirs. And I became frustrated whenever I fell into the trap of letting others decide for me what I should want.

Maybe I set my own bar fairly low. It was never important to me to be seen as a celebrity. I didn’t enjoy signing autographs, or making personal appearances. Why should someone want my autograph? The service I provided — reading aloud news stories they could have gotten just as easily from the paper — was no more valuable than, say, changing the oil in their cars. But they didn’t ask the FastLube guy for his autograph.

I liked my home town. It felt familiar and comfortable. We had moved frequently during my childhood, and it was important to me to have a sense of belonging somewhere. I saw no reason to live anywhere else. I travelled a lot as a reporter, and saw only one or two places I liked better than where I was.

I could not bring myself to genuinely care about most of the trappings of my (other) brilliant career. I tried. For a few years, I had myself sold on it — and I was as close to the perfect, Volvo-driving, Italian suit-wearing, Cole Haan-shod Stepford anchor as I could make myself.

But I couldn’t make it last, and more importantly, I couldn’t make it convincing. I was like one of those people in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” trying to pass for a ‘pod person’ without actually being one.

Whoever put that cookie fortune on my computer probably thinks I’m a complete failure now. I live alone, in a quiet place, and spend a lot of my time thinking and writing. I’m still driving the beat-up Cutlass. The Cole-Haans and Italian suits are still in the closet, but I wear running shoes and jeans every day. I haven’t worn a tie since December of 1998.

I don’t get everything I want from life. No one does, I suppose. But I decide for myself what I want, and I don’t let others make the decision for me.

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Am I venting too hard on journalism lately? Maybe it needs a kick in the pants. I teased the other day to some people that I would share the story of my last day as a television reporter. It certainly doesn’t have the gravity of the “Day They Forced Me To Reschedule My Colonoscopy” story, but it was just as inwardly revealing.

My final day in television news was Friday, January 16, 2004. Earlier in my career, those leaving usually had other matters to attend to which precluded actually appearing on camera, but I was accustomed to the reality that I was not going to get away without turning something. I was proud of earning my keep.

However, Human Resources had other plans for me. I was compelled to go down for an exit interview, which is now fairly standard. In an ideal world, it’s the corporation’s way of getting naked and unfiltered feedback. It’s the way employees who are leaving can help those who are still beholden to the paycheck. In reality, it’s an exercise in ensuring there are no outstanding gripes or complaints on my part that might mysteriously surface later in a lawsuit. I made no mention of the manager who ordered me to change my appointment, he had suffered enough.

Naked Pockets

My exit interview was accompanied by the other formalities of separation, including turning in my phone, my card key, and any other identification and passwords. I think the producers took this into account when they made my assignment for that day.

I was to go to Birmingham’s Five Points South, and cover a PeTA protest at 11 o’clock. A woman – wearing nothing but a paint job meant to make her look like a leopard – was to demonstrate by sitting inside of a steel cage on the sidewalk. The circus was coming to town, and PeTA’s grand scheme appeared to be providing the people of Birmingham with additional reminders that the circus was coming to town. But it was an assignment, and I rolled with it.

There she was, right there on the concrete. And you didn’t have to look at her to tell it was cold. But more than a few people tried.

Naked Expectations

I did what I had done all during my reporting career. I stood back and watched.

I didn’t run right up to the PeTA handlers and grab soundbites. For me, the curiosity came in seeing how people would react to this display. I eventually did perform the obligatory interview, but given no direct marching orders about this story, I sat back and waited for the narrative to come to me. It didn’t take long.

People walking by thought this was one of the dumbest, most idiotic things they had ever seen. I’m not sure anyone’s opinions budged, except for the people who told me they were more inclined to go to the circus now.

Jud Hulon was partner that day, a very talented videographer that I didn’t get the chance to work with as often as I would have liked. His style was compatible with the technique we used that day. We set up the mic in various places around the cage, then moved far away to eavesdrop on the people as they walked past. People tend to be much more honest and open when the camera is sixty feet away than they are when the distance is just six feet.

The Truth, Unpeeled

In one of those moments that is too real for fiction, we were somewhat accosted by the mascot from Planet Smoothie, across the street. He obviously saw this as his chance to break into standup comedy, because he was begging to be interviewed.

He was also very, very stoned. You could see the dilation in his eyes, even behind the sunglasses he wore. And unless I am mistaken, Planet Smoothie did not offer a THC/Patchouli shake, and the aroma was quite strong.

After a brief negotiation, I decided to interview the Stoned Banana. And there it came, the moment of naked truth.

Stoner: “This woman looks completely ridiculous”

Me: “This, from the guy dressed as a seven-foot banana?

Stoner: (pregnant pause) “You have a point.”

Such exchanges are worth their weight in journalism gold. Because deep down, even Stoner Bananaman knew that he had very little leeway to make fun of another’s appearance, yet he did anyway.

The Aftermath

This story is worth telling because it is a microcosm about what’s wrong with broadcast journalism today.

Sometime just after four o’clock, the producer chewed us out for ruining his newscast.

You see, he had pulled a piece of wire copy about a survey, where average Americans were asked questions about whether activists and extremists had gone too far with their displays and protests. (You would think the word “extremist” might taint that…) It was supposed to be his lead story, and now he had to reshuffle his entire lineup because I didn’t meet his (unshared) expectations.

No one had given us that wire story. No one supplied us with that as a template. No one mentioned it to us, we were just handed a slip of paper by a grinning assignment editor who said “you guys ought to have fun with this today!” No one that we spoke with that day, including that producer, bothered to tell us how constrained we were supposed to be.

Bare Lessons

We were given a planned event, which in and of itself is rarely news.

However, we were being placed in what I like to call a “target-rich environment,” where the unusual collides with human nature on a mass scale.

We went to the unusual confluence, we took the temperature of the city (still cold,) and we neatly summarized the event in a way that communicated the futility of it all.

And what we did was wrong, because we didn’t attempt to connect a poorly attended circus, the ill-considered media stunt, and an irrelevant survey. Grasping for straws doesn’t begin to describe the contortions made in newsrooms, and I can’t imagine it’s gotten any better.

I did learn three things that day, however.

I learned that I needed no further confirmation that my decision to exit that career was a good one for me.

I learned that Planet Smoothie, as of 2004, did not conduct drug screenings.

And I learned that if you’re ever trapped outdoors in the cold, you can measure the temperature on a leopard’s chest.

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

This survey published in September of 2009 shows that 70% of journalists use social networking to assist in reporting.

A Cision study of practicing journalists released in January 2010 indicates:

• 89% use blogs
• 65% use social networking sites
• 52% use microblogging sites

If you’re reading this from a newsroom, please do not lay the charts together and project the trend. I can hear it now:

“With a 19% rise between September and January, experts forecast that by May of this year 108% of journalists will use Social Media!”

Don’t laugh. It will probably happen.

Take the Viewers’ Temperature

There’s nothing new about this. For years, television stations have sent reporters and photographers out on Zeitgeist Patrol – or they would have, if any of the producers knew what zeitgeist was. Maybe if it had a cooler name like Zeitgeist Patrol, we might have been happier about doing it.

Instead, it’s called “Man on the Street,” or MOS for short. That’s where reporters who know very little about an issue get to make themselves feel more educated by asking the opinions of people who likely know even less. Sometimes, you get the added bonus of asking people about things that have yet to be on the news, so you can satisfy your inner gossip and tell them about it in person.

It’s a time-killer, a time-filler, and lacks any enlightenment or originality. It is also demeaning, because it forces you to put people in categories.

Knowing that you must show a cross-section of your viewing audience to appear as multi-cultural as possible, you find yourself not asking people who might have a good opinion, because you need the diversity. This leads to the tragic-comedy of watching reporters chase down people of “local minority” so they can fill out their MOS-Bingo Card. (“Local Minority” means finding the people who are rare in the place where you are standing right then.) People are reduced to characteristics, as you can’t have Columns A and B represented, and not C, D and E.

So while you think it’s an imposition to “take the viewers’ temperature” in person with a microphone, the people who really get it inserted are those who have to endure fact-free television filler.

Different ‘verse, Same as the First

I don’t know why we thought it would be any different with Social Media. A little over a year ago, people swooned over the savvy way Rick Sanchez at CNN “reached out” to his audience with his active Twitter presence. This was great for television, because now they wouldn’t be wasting the time of a reporter and/or photographer to go out and get public opinions! But instead of assigning those resources to investigate stories about crime, education, fraud and societal impact, it put them to work studying unemployment, depression and alcoholism. As “permanent embeds.”

The truth is, there is very little original in modern “news,” especially television. That’s why it’s fun sharing the mcarp essays, because 10 years later they are still true.

Want proof?

Someone in Chicago landed on my site from a Google search.The search was for “live shot ideas.”

My condolences to television news viewers in the Windy City, as the quality of your local television product is bad enough that reporters are turning to the internet for ideas. Maybe you can express your disgust via Twitter. Someone in the newsroom is probably reading it.

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.