Live wires promote the living truth

I know, let’s open all the microphones all the time.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson is merely the latest public figure to speak ugly into a hot mic he apparently thought was dead.
He apologized to Barack Obama for calling the Democratic presidential hopeful out of his name. (That’s a wonderful country idiom for, “Momma, Jesse said something vulgar”).
Here're a couple of points.
First, it’s nuts to say anything in a broadcast studio you don’t want picked up.
Really, don’t say anything anywhere you don’t want the world to hear these days.
Which leads to the possibility Jackson actually wanted to be heard. But that’s too cynical and spy-vs.-spy to contemplate. Let’s don’t go there.
Instead think about a world where everybody gets everything out in the open naturally.
This flap won’t go anywhere. Because Obama quickly accepted a quick apology. And it wasn’t big enough to label “Jessegate.”
But the remark inside a Fox Broadcasting studio focused on the candidate’s stand that African American fathers should be fathers. That means at home and attentive to children as Obama’s dad was not.
Jackson called that “talking down to black people.”
Really interesting is his published statement of apology.
The old line Civil Rights leader said he wanted black males’ personal moral responsibility to be matched by the country’s collective responsibility for public policy.
Oh, really? H-m-m-m-m, say those folks who have moved beyond that view.
Government ought to correct itself for “the lack of good choices” that often led to their black dads’ irresponsibility, according to the Jackson statement.
Suddenly we understand Obama better for Jackson’s gaffe and follow-up.
The younger leader believes in personal responsibility. The older leader still labors under the entitlement mindset that government is to blame and needs to make up for it.
Barack Obama couldn’t pay for that kind of left-handed endorsement.
And public understanding is the better for climbing the continental divide between two views.
The unintended free flow of ideas all resulted from a single hot mic.
Open all the microphones!

The radio icon's channel comes clear

Good for Rush Limbaugh. His $400 million deal for an eight year contract extension fazes me not.
Yet I don't care for the gentleman and don’t listen to him.
That seems to me sensible instead of getting into a swivet over outlandish pay for outlandish people.
Rush comes across as the cigar-reeking, bad habit, loud-of-mouth passenger lumbering down the airplane aisle toward the empty seat next to mine.
His opinions soar with a lot of his fellow travelers. I’d have to consider a later flight if I were forced into his company.
I don’t even think it’s a liberal vs. conservative thing. My taste simply is substance over image, reason over rhetoric, meaning over controversy. Give me an open mind over an open mouth anytime.
In fact I flow from the left full circle again into conservatism and completely defend any commentator’s First Amendment right to become the unwanted flight partner.
Ah, I hear you say. How can you judge Limbaugh if you don’t listen to him?
Well, you don’t have to eat the whole egg to know it’s rotten. I’ve heard enough.
I've also read enough in Time and Newsweek and elsewhere to know their coverboy is a national phenom who isn't going away. Americans made him what he is, phenomenally.
NYT Magazine writer Zev Chavets called the guy an American icon. Yes, well, icons are one dimensional religious images.
This one's veneration comes from being "confrontational, deliberately insensitive and funny," Chavets wrote.
And his single dimension?
Well, Rush himself told The New York Times Magazine it isn't his conservatism but his business ability: "My first goal is to attract the largest possible audience so I can charge confiscatory ad rates." http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/magazine/06Limbaugh-t.html?ex=1373083200&en=96d69779ce7c0fb1&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
Sounds like sham, a case of entertainment profit and not movement standard bearer.
Is he worth what Clear Channel is paying him? Sure, if the market will bear it. Commercial radio is like every information platform, grabbing at gold-plated straw men to cope with the digital and demographic revolt by audiences.
Media salaries at upper echelons took off into the wild blue yonder long ago.
The merger of the information industry with entertainment is like gay marriage will seem 20 years from now. What once appeared strange and perverse to some people turns ho-hum in time.
That means, of course, the Rush Limbaugh star will flame out too.
Newspapers started the star system long ago when they began running photos of their top columnists and having them speak at the Rotary and booming them in house ads.
Those promos seem primitive now. But TV news built on the concept to the point Katy Couric became CBS-TV's astronomically paid evening news anchor with $15 million a year. Now there's talk she'll be pushed out.
Katy doesn’t even mouth cigars or pop an excess of prescription drugs like ol’ Rush.
Then again, for all her personality attributes, The CBS celebrity can’t match the radio man for his familiarity with audiences.
Talent? How much does it take?
It’s that connection that matters.
Instead of getting jealous at Rush Limbaugh, we should all study how he does it.
Trouble is, then we’d have to listen to him.
Clear Channel would have to pay me the $400 million.

Revive us again! Clay Felker and a hallelujah for the magazine business!

Magazines are slick, sometimes sophisticated plays for reader attention, subscriber loyalty. And I love them.
Their circ departments must know I’m a mark. They’re always sending me their “professional rate” discount offers. So I take more than I need as a sampler.
Those markdowns suggest churn to me. Subscribers get super savings so publishers can try to stay even with their declining customer lists.
Maybe its time for another magazine revival. There is a certain sameness about all that pass in front of me.
Clay Felker built the model 40 years ago as New York. The glossy challenged even The New Yorker, the one legendary journalist Harrison Salisbury famously called “perhaps the best magazine ever.”
Everywhere you looked editors imitated New York’s graphic design by Milton Glaser, the narrative writing style by the likes of Tom Wolfe or Jimmy Breslin and the sassy service information.
When I became a newspaper features editor, our tribe was still trying to borrow as much of the tone as we could get away with.
Felker came out of The New York Herald Tribune tradition. It was said The Trib’s editors went out for sex at lunchtime, while The New York Times editors merely went for a drink.
Sexiness was and is a main ingredient to compete with other media, especially when TV does more show and tell than even movies once thought they could get away with.
New York’s groundbreaking editor invented a formula without being formulaic.
“American Journalism would not be what it is today without Clay Felker,” said the magazine’s current editor, Adam Moss. The Times quotes his statement in an appropriately generous obit. Felker died at age 82 in his Manhattan home. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/business/media/02felker.html?ex=1372737600&en=20a30abd0cea6d55&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
He was middle-aged and I was starting out when he taught me editors could be full of themselves. And how!
Felker and his friends Ben Bradlee, executive editor of The Washington Post, and Tom Winship, editor of The Boston Globe, spoke like a trio of mythological Graces, or maybe it was Titans, to our graduate journalism class at Columbia University.
Honestly, those egos sucked the oxygen right out of the classroom.
Humility has its place in editing. But so does chutzpah, the creative life of Clay Felker shows.
In the reinvention of modern media on all print and broadcast and digital platforms, journalism will need a revivalist of his style.