Here and There

Ken Auletta’s “Fault Line” story in the Oct. 10 issue of The New Yorker explores one of today’s most pressing issues, not only for journalists, but for society as a whole.

Auletta’s look at the Los Angeles Times explores an issue of importance since the first instance in which a media conglomerate bought a family newspaper. That story is perhaps best situated in the context of Tribune Company’s buyout of Times Mirror, owners of the L.A. Times.

John Carroll, the Times’ editor since 2000, announced his intention to leave the paper this year, after racking up 13 Pulitzers during his tenure. The problem for Carroll was an age-old one: friction between “church and state,” or the battle between editorial and corporate.

The Tribune Company, naturally, wants the paper to perform. But a corporation’s definition of performance, of success, is in many ways in direct opposition to a journalists’ conception of the same. A journalist reports on and tells stories that are important, not that feed the public’s gluttony. With corporate, bottom-line minded bosses pushing news organizations to “give the customers what they want,” core journalistic principles are removed from the picture.

A quote from Tribune’s CEO Dennis FitzSimons is telling: “[W]hen competition is intense, providers of a service are forced to give the consumer what he or she wants, not what they, as proud professionals, think the consumer should want, or, more bluntly, what they want.”

The million-dollar question I’d love to pose to Mr. FitzSimons is: Exactly what service is he talking about here? The service of delivering advertisements? Of providing birdcage liner or fire-starting material? Of reporting on Tom Cruise’s latest maniac shenanigans?

I read FitzSimons’s quote and, almost like when you die and see your life flash before you, the entire problem with journalism became more obvious to me. Sure, it’s been on my mind for the last five or six years, but I suddenly saw it with added clarity. Once a megalomaniacal drive for profit is introduced, anything meaningful in the news business will be sacrificed. It became a cycle: newsrooms were forced to make cuts, to let good reporters go, to diffuse their focus to the trivial. That’s what corporate told them readers wanted.

Readers respond by being less-informed, so that when the paper does its work, recognized by awards like those Pulitzer hands out, readers are blasé. The snake eats its tail.

Dean Baquet, Carroll’s managing editor and successor at the top, gave FitzSimons the retort he (and the nation as a whole) deserved. “Southern newspapers are still hanging their heads because generations ago they gave readers what they wanted—no coverage of segregation and the civil-rights movement.” Auletta paraphrases Baquet: “The job of newspapers was to help readers understand the world.” Baquet ends with “If we don’t do that, who will?”

It’s probably obvious which side of the aisle I like to sit on. But even then, I appreciate compromise. In the same way that it’s probably a good idea for journalists to take a business class or two, I’d recommend that every manager at every media company take courses in the fundamentals of journalism. The same principle that allows TimeWarner’s HBO to use the word “fuck” and show women’s breasts (the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution) dictates “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom…of the press.” With the government forced, rightly so, to keep its hands off the press, it is then the press’s duty to inform the public, especially on matters of government.

I couldn’t wait. I had to go.

Today, October 15, 2005, was the grand re-opening of San Francisco’s de Young museum.

I’ve heard people say they love it. I’ve heard people say they hate it. I’ve read about the controversies. I’ve even overheard people bitching about the media saturation surrounding today’s event.

But wow.

I don’t care if you think it’s the ugliest thing sticking out of planet earth. If you’re in the Bay Area, go. If you live anywhere else, come here and witness this spectacle.

We didn’t get in because we didn’t feel like standing in one line for an hour just to get a green bracelet to be able to stand in another line for fifteen minutes. But that’s only because we were lazy. It’s also because the building itself, and the grounds out front, took our collective breaths away.

There’s Andy Goldworthy’s crack (in the sidewalk). There’s the revitalized Pond of Enchantment, with Pan playing his flute to two sculpted dogs (seriously, this was cool). There’s a sculpture garden featuring works by Coosje van Bruggen and Claes Oldenberg.

Then there’s the museum’s exterior walls. Okay, I’m a dork, but this place is fun. It’s exhilarating to get right up beside the metal, to see the contour of the enormous sheets of copper. Apparently, the walls are changing color with exposure to the elements, and are very beautiful.

Today’s weather (sunny, high in the upper-60s) didn’t hurt the occasion, either.

This building, at least on the outside, is fun and interactive. It already blows away SF MOMA in terms of appearance and accessibility.

My advice to skeptics: don’t knock it ’til you try it. I’ll be waiting until the crowds thin out a little, but I’m sure it’ll be worth it.

Icons are people too, or so the film Capote sets out to relate.

Truman Capote, perhaps best known for writing the book Breakfast at Tiffany’s (so different from the movie, they say), was between stories in late 1959 when he happened upon a headline in The New York Times. A rural Kansas family had been brutally murdered in the middle of a quiet night on the Great Plains. Capote immediately phoned his boss, New Yorker editor William Shawn, and said he had to go. The result, nearly six years later, was In Cold Blood, a true crime book that critics note as changing the tone and style of American writing.

The first twenty minutes of this movie are a roller coaster of inanimate beauty, subtle movement, shock, horror, comedy, and sadness. The film opens with a shot of a flat field, then cuts to the dead family’s house. Shortly afterward, their bodies are discovered. Cut to Capote, comfortable in his Manhattan penthouse, enjoying his morning paper. He stumbles upon the story and it grips him. The deep, immediate interest is visible on Hoffman’s face.

The following hour and some-odd minutes, though, are a poorly-paced rendition of the writer’s budding relationship with one of the killers, Perry Edward Smith. Hoffman’s outstanding performance betrays Capote’s interest in his subject, but the audience is cheated out of experiencing the true nature of the relationship. We don’t really know what draws the writer to the killer: does he truly relate to something in Smith’s history, as he tells the prisoner? Does he honestly feel Smith and his accomplice, Richard Hickock, were not provided adequate counsel at their preliminary hearing? Or, is it all just a ploy, the conniving writer going to any length to get the story?

(In an interview on The Daily Show, Hoffman suggests it started with going after the story, which demanded intimacy with the killers. From there, the fondness developed, and Hoffman doesn’t mince words. He calls it Capote’s love for Smith.)

Capote hides from his subject the fact that he’s begun writing. He also lies and tells Smith there’s no title. He knows he can’t blow his ride, but in tender scenes shot inside Smith’s cell, the filmmaker (Bennett Miller, director of 1998’s The Cruise) teases his audience by blurring the dynamic between the two men.

Ambiguity can be a good thing, in all walks of life. It’s perfectly natural, after all. We’re ambiguous creatures, forever slaves to making sense of it all. That’s built into the job description of writers, filmmakers, artists, maybe even iconic characters. In Capote, clarity is portrayed only by Hoffman, in the role of icon. Perhaps if Miller and his screenwriters had demanded more from their supporting characters, especially Clifton Collins Jr. in the role of Smith, we’d have a better handle on the answers we as an audience are looking for.

Hoffman is already collecting accolades and Oscar nods, deservedly, for his breathtaking role. I remember Capote from my early years, mostly as the guy with the glasses and a cool name who died just before I started fifth grade. I’m adding what I saw on-screen with the praise for Hoffman to come up with my own interpretation of the writer. As a journalist, I respect his drive, though not necessarily his methods. I also find myself a little cold to his dealings with people. The non-journalistic public will, on balance, see the fourth estate as a band of Gypsy users, out for their own good, for glory and fame. Capote seems to have embodied and perpetuated this stereotype.

But icons exist to push our conceptions of what it is to be human. There’s something in these people we can all use, and we throw the rest away. For me, sitting back and watching Capote go after the story, no matter that I didn’t exactly grasp his attraction, was all the inspiration I could ask for in a movie.

In the coming months, I’ll be reading In Cold Blood, a natural reaction to seeing this film, despite its faults. Look for a review in late November/early December.