Tynan's Anger

Arts & Culture Commentary from a Loving Digital Skeptic

You Got Yr Link Bomb Merry F*cking Hanukkah Edition: Huffington Plagiarists, Ron Rosenbaum gets fascist on fascism movies, and hip-hop cannibalism

Posted on | December 22, 2008 | No Comments

Image via WikipediaYou Got Yr Link Bomb is meant as a cross between the Will Cordero Memorial Linkpunch and the Week in Review post of the Gawker Media blog of your choice. Hence: links featuring commentary with heavily regulated snark. These links did not get the full Tynan’s Anger treatment, through no fault of their own.

Warning: the Jets’ utter craptitude has soured my Hannukah, in a way that not even a Flip Mino camcorder the complete series of the Wire can fix. I will save my sports ranting for another day. Today I am taking it out on the media industry.
  • This was not a merry season for new media in my mind. I’m not even talking about the god awful media economy that’s hitting the online sector as well as print. I’m talking about those highly sought after journalistic “standards” that are supposedly to be found at sites like Slate, Salon, and Huffington Post. First we get the reports that a publication no less dominant of the new media industry than the HuffPo is fast becoming a breeding ground for plagiarism. I’ve seen too many front page Digg stories that link to HuffPo as opposed to the source article to fully buy the general “it helps your traffic too” argument. But now we get reports that HuffPo is outright stealing concert previews from multiple Chicago publications without permission for syndication. We’re talking entire articles, people.

    This is the stuff that got Jayson Blair and Janet Cooke fired, but it’s being done without repercussions on the internet by someone as respected as Ariana Huffington. Gawker, who has had this happen to them by HuffPo multiple times before, is predictably going apeshit. And they’re right. This is not aggregation. This is theft of content, search traffic, and advertsing revenue, and it’s doing it to an excellent publication like the Chicago Reader whose owner just filed for Chapter 11. And you still claim to be saving journalism? If I sound pissed, the Reader is even more so. The fact that HuffPo hasn’t really responded only makes the case more damning. I’ve already found the Full Feed unmanageable with all the articles that are less-than-subtly pilfered from actual reporting publications. That overload is hurting HuffPo’s own readers in addition to the media industry. And all this occurs even as the HuffPo’s own builing staff continues to produce outstandingly, top of the line quality writing that doesn’t need supplemental content theft. That’s what makes the case so frustrating.

  • If media theft isn’t enough to get your blood boiling, how about media crypto-fascism? Ron Rosenbaum, the guy who wrote a book heralding the German dissenters of Nazism, is becoming exceedingly intolerant after supposedly “exposing” Jeff Jarvis as a fraud. I was already burnt out from Rosenbaum after reading his exceedingly navel-gazing, obnoxious article on Bernie Madoff that carelessly called the Godfather Part II anti-Semitic. Then I stumble upon his “review” of The Reader, which he calls the worst movie of the year, backed by this wonderful nugget of open-mindedness:
    And yet the reverent reviews this film has got from people who should know better. Are they out of their mind? Or does the reverence for a “serious” film with “serious” actors and “serious” pretentions outweigh, overwhelm their “serious” powers of judgement? I’m totally baffled. I’d like to call this movie the Emporer’s New Clothes of “serious” Oscar contenders, but maybe with its sleazy exploitiv use of nudity to keep our attention from wandering in the first thifd, it should be called The Emporer’s New Nudity.

    First off, I have not seen The Reader, and knowing my tastes, I would probably agree with Rosenbaum’s assessment. But how dare he speak for other critics and call them crazy simply for disagreeing with him. I thought you learned in like freshman year of college that civil discourse in the intellectual world allows for a diversity of opinions. A Kate Winslet movie is certainly less touchy of an issue than the banality of evil, yet Rosenbaum won’t allow anyone who disagrees with him to chime in on that either? As someone who studied fascism, I would hope Rosenbaum would appreciate dissent. Turns out he only appreciates it when he’s the dissenter.

  • Ok, now to the Hanukkah portion of the evening: Loews 42nd street E-Walk has introduced a Kosher vending machine, the first of it’s kind to run 24/6 (god I love saying that), because it turns off on Shabbos. Go on, quote The Big Lebowski now; there’s no point in trying to resist.
  • On to journalism I actually like. Two of my favorite yearly features came out this week. The first is Regret The Error‘s list of the most egregious mistakes and most surreal corrections in the media world. Amid disastrous 2Pac reporting and misspelling of your own paper’s name came this glorious correction from Slate:
    In the June 20 “Culturebox,” Jonah Weiner stated that Lil Wayne was the first hip-hop artist to fantasize about eating his competition. Other rappers have contemplated consuming their rivals.

    This is one case where what was left out of the correction actually makes it a better read. I don’t want to know what other rappers have contemplated cannibalism before. I want the answer to remain ambiguous.

  • The other, which I have blogged about before, is the AV Club’s list of worst band names of 2008. Overally, this wasn’t the best (worst?) year for ridiculously awful band names, but this is only feature every year where you get an entire slew of band names like Fecalized Rectal Sperm Spewage (“one man porn groove nightmare”) and Diarrhea Till You Die
     all in one place. Still, there’s nothing quite as transcendent as last year’s show listing: Pink Reason + Psychedelic Horseshit, Expensive Shit: Beerland, 10pm.
  • Finally, if you’re too depressed by the media industry’s decline, here’s the death of print set to the tune of “I Am a Very Model of A Modern Major General” from Gilbert & Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore (via FishbowlNY).
    This is a cheery comparison. I mean, things worked out for the British Empire, right?
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