08w01:1 What he learned working for Dateline NBC

Posted January 3rd, 2008 by timothy. 0 Comments

Goodreads | 2008 week 01 number 1 (What he learned working for Dateline NBC)

This article by John Hockenberry is one of the best things I’ve come across in a long time. It seems to reflect how Chomsky’s critique of mainstream media 20 years ago is now becoming mainstream itself. – Timothy

“You Don’t Understand Our Audience” | John Hockenberry
http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=19845
“One might have thought that the television industry, with its history of rapid adaptation to technological change, would have become a center of innovation for the next radical transformation in communication. It did not. Nor did the ability to transmit pictures, voices, and stories from around the world to living rooms in the U.S. heartland produce a nation that is more sophisticated about global affairs. Instead, the United States is arguably more isolated and less educated about the world than it was a half-century ago. In a time of such broad technological change, how can this possibly be the case? […] Humor in commercials was hip–subtle, even, in its use of obscure pop-cultural references–but if there were any jokes at all in news stories, they were telegraphed, blunt visual gags, usually involving weathermen. That disjunction remains: at the precise moment that Apple cast John Hodgman and Justin Long as dead-on avatars of the PC and the Mac, news anchors on networks that ran those ads were introducing people to multibillion-dollar phenomena like MySpace and Facebook with the cringingly naïve attitude of “What will those nerds think of next?”