imus

I want to riff for a minute on the sort of unspoken subtext of Josh's blog about Imus, and the spoken text of his comment here:

I also think we all should be on TV. All the time. Seriously, have you seen what’s on TV? It’s terrible. Steward and Colbert are good, but I’m waiting waiting waiting for someone or something to break out and do high-end politics with an angle towards quality, lively presentation and real relevance. The re-invention of the TV drama should have some echo in the news/politics end of the spectrum, right? Right???

This seems like an opening. I mean, I’ve seen a lot of my friends linking to somewhat silly youtube videos that make what I could call a C+ effort at engaging the bigger picture.

He is totally right. There is no reason these jokers should so completely dominate our airwaves, and the cost of producing our own content is so minimal that there aren't really any barriers to entry anymore.

The biggest problem seems to me that Josh is implying that we need to take over the broadcast airwaves, not just narrow cast our stuff over the internet or join that Gen-X dominated media "middle class" that is developing over at Current TV. There's no quick way to do that. The number of available jobs where a young person might actually hold a position of influence to a broadcast audience just aren't there.

More after the jump.

We haven’t said anything here on FM about the disintegration of Don Imus, but I’m going to pipe up, because I think this is an issue that speaks to the culture of the media/political establishment, and gives us a real point of differentiation between Millenials and Boomers. That’s part of our beat, right?

I’ve been catching coverage of this on my normal blog rotation lately, but it wasn’t until I was on a Jetblue flight and picked up my monthly dose of cable news that I realized how big a deal it was. I have to admit my general reaction is one of confusion. To me, Imus seems like a borderline pathetic fake-ass old man (why the fuck does he wear that cowboy hat?) and yet the response from his “gang” of journalist buddies — Howard Feinman, Paul Begalia, et al — seems to suggest above that all else they really think he is cool, and they want to make sure he (and we) know it. Which blows my mind. It’s like the he’s captain of the GD football team.

I mean, who are these people? Does anyone else remember Tom Oliphant (another genuflector) as the terminally nerdy journalist from Going Upriver, that biopic that made John Kerry seem inspiring for a second? This tweedy geek (and I don’t often use that term disparagingly) comes on the Imus show with “Solidarity forever" as his opening line. What. The. Fuck? How did these foobs become the arbiters of our national discourse, and why do they kowtow to Don Imus?