{"id":200,"date":"2005-08-25T21:41:45","date_gmt":"2005-08-26T02:41:45","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=200"},"modified":"2005-08-27T12:17:45","modified_gmt":"2005-08-27T17:17:45","slug":"blame-the-audience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=200","title":{"rendered":"Blame The Audience"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In <a href='http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/08\/24\/movies\/24slum.html?ex=1282536000&#038;en=d4926eee92216196&#038;ei=5088&#038;partner=rssnyt&#038;emc=rss'>Summer<br \/>\nFading, Hollywood Sees Fizzle<\/a>, a writer for the <cite>New York<br \/>\nTimes<\/cite> explores the theory that movie attendance is tanking<br \/>\nbecause the quality of all too many mega-hyped &#8220;major movies&#8221; has<br \/>\nplunged into the crapper.  Well, no shit, Sherlock &mdash; what was<br \/>\nyour first clue?  <em>Pearl Harbor<\/em>?  <em>Alexander<\/em>?<br \/>\n<em>Mission Impossible II?<\/em> What&#8217;s really news about this story is<br \/>\nthat it&#8217;s news &mdash; a startling break from the blame-the-audience<br \/>\nthinking so prevalent in Big Media over the last decade.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s been most egregious in the music industry, which has spent<br \/>\nmost of that decade desperately trying to pin the blame for anemic<br \/>\nsales on anything other than the fact that it spends its marketing<br \/>\nbudget pushing no-talent assclowns like Limp Bizkit and &#8216;N Sync (and<br \/>\nyes, for you <cite>Office Space<\/cite> fans, Michael Bolton too).<br \/>\n&#8220;Nah,&#8221; say the record-company executives to themselves, &#8220;It couldn&#8217;t<br \/>\nbe <em>that<\/em>.  I know, let&#8217;s blame file-sharing!  Bad audience.<br \/>\n<em>Baaad!<\/em>&#8220;<\/p>\n<p>Newspaper circulation is in a death-spiral so steep that at least<br \/>\nfour major-city dailies and a national syndicate have been caught<br \/>\nmaking up millions of readers out of thin air just to stay<br \/>\nviable-looking to advertisers.  Could it due to be shallow<br \/>\nprint-the-press-release reporting, political bias, and a surfeit of<br \/>\nsensationalism and fluff?  &#8220;Nah,&#8221; say the newspaper executives to<br \/>\nthemselves, &#8220;It couldn&#8217;t be <em>that<\/em>.  I know, let&#8217;s blame the<br \/>\nInternet! Bad audience.  <em>Baaad!<\/em>&#8220;<\/p>\n<p>Of course, one could argue that Big Media is simply taking its cue<br \/>\nfrom the Democratic Party. (Yes, I know one of those is a wholly-owned<br \/>\nsubsidiary of the other, I just can&#8217;t keep straight which one is on<br \/>\ntop.)  If Republicans are beating the stuffings out of you in every<br \/>\nelection, it couldn&#8217;t be because you have no program beyond screaming<br \/>\n&#8220;George Bush is eeeeevil!&#8221; and licking the anus of the Designated<br \/>\nVictim Group Of The Week.  &#8220;Nah,&#8221; say the DNCers to themselves, &#8220;It<br \/>\ncouldn&#8217;t be <em>that<\/em>.  I know, let&#8217;s blame talk radio and Karl<br \/>\nRove! Bad audience.  <em>Baaad!<\/em>&#8220;<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s really going on here is a confluence of trends.  One, which<br \/>\nthe <cite>Times<\/cite> article points out, is that audiences are<br \/>\ngetting better at seeing through hype and rejecting the crap. A second<br \/>\nthat the article doesn&#8217;t highlight is the proliferation of media<br \/>\nchannels and the rise of the Internet.  Blogs, cable, satellite radio,<br \/>\npodcasts, remix culture, &mdash; these are all part of a trend that<br \/>\ngives media consumers far more choices than they&#8217;ve ever had before.<br \/>\nWhich means more alternatives and less temptation to settle<br \/>\nfor the crap.<\/p>\n<p>Which means that, exactly as audiences have been breaking free of<br \/>\nmedia oligopolies, media bosses have been telling them they should<br \/>\nkiss their chains.  Bad audience.  <em>Baaad!<\/em> But wait &mdash;<br \/>\nperhaps this <cite>Times<\/cite> article, brought to you by the Grey<br \/>\nLady aka Dowager Empress of Big Media, is a leading indicator that<br \/>\nsome tenuous contact with reality is beginning to develop in the<br \/>\nmedia-bosses&#8217; brains.<\/p>\n<p>That would be nice, wouldn&#8217;t it?  But I&#8217;m not holding my breath.<br \/>\nHere are some indicators to watch for.  More movies like the<br \/>\n<em>Rings<\/em> trilogy or the <cite>Harry Potter<\/cite> sequence that<br \/>\nactually seem to have some kind of heart and respect for their<br \/>\nsources. More pop bands like Lynkyn Park and System of a Down that can<br \/>\nactually play their instruments and seem to have some ideas that weren&#8217;t<br \/>\ntest-marketed to death by some soulless A&#038;R hack.  Newspapers where you<br \/>\ncan actually tell the war news from the partisan editorial ax-grinding<br \/>\n(sorry, can&#8217;t think of any of those).  And &mdash; OK, I know this<br \/>\nis a stretch, but stay with me here &mdash; a Democratic Party with<br \/>\nan actual <em>platform<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Hear that, media bosses?  Best you get it together, because here&#8217;s<br \/>\nthe sentence that will spell your doom otherwise: I have choices,<br \/>\nand I know how to use them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Summer Fading, Hollywood Sees Fizzle, a writer for the New York Times explores the theory that movie attendance is tanking because the quality of all too many mega-hyped &#8220;major movies&#8221; has plunged into the crapper. Well, no shit, Sherlock &mdash; what was your first clue? Pearl Harbor? Alexander? Mission Impossible II? What&#8217;s really news&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=200\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Blame The Audience<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}