I Am Ozymandias, King of Kings

Recently, I've been fascinated by the Shelley poem "Ozymandias."

I mean, most well-educated people can pull out the operative line to make the point of megalomania: "I am Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" But only a few who have survived something resembling a classical education can pull the whole poem from memory, including me.

So while doing a sound check, requiring one to run on and on in order to provide continuous speech to check levels, I regretted that I had never memorized some epic poem for the occasion, and "Ozymandias" came to mind.

I looked it up that evening, and printed the text. It's far from epic in length, just 14 lines, so I set out to make up for lost time and memorize it.

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

 The task proved easier than expected. The first dozen or so lines came quite easily and quickly, though for some reason I am now struggling with the last two. However, that's not what struck me most.

David Roberts, Fragments of the Great Colossi (of Rameses II), 

at the Memnonium (Ramesseum), 1838

First, though I am late to the party, I am so amazed at the quality of the writing. Each word has its place, and each is perfectly chosen. I think that's what made memorization so easy: only that word, that phrase could follow the last. No other one would do.

But then the structure became apparent. From my angle as a TV reporter, I realized it's a perfect television news story, spinning out its information in a catchy way before the big reveal.

Writing news for TV is unlike a lot of other journalism. Usually one is taught the newspaper, inverted pyramid method: Important information up front, secondary data next, fill details following. So a story goes: So-and-so was murdered today in Chicago. (The lede, with the most important facts) He was at a party with friends at a car repair shop when gunmen entered and killed the group. (More data that was not so critical) And so on. Not getting that critical fact up front is know as "Burying the lede."

TV, especially a feature story, is more of a storytelling medium. The information is doled out in easily comprehended pieces, one after the other, so that the viewer doesn't lose his place. In the words of my journalism professor -- not forgotten after 35 years -- the viewer can't go back a page to figure out a reference. You have to write so it makes sense that one time it flies by.

So let's look at Ozymandias as a feature piece for TV.

For one thing, because it's poetry, the line breaks are in different places than they would be for a script. So let's rearrange Shelley (accompanied by the horrified screams of English teachers everywhere).

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—

“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. . . . 

Near them, on the sand, half sunk 

a shattered visage lies, 

whose frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

tell that its sculptor well those passions read, which yet survive,

stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. 

Round the decay of that colossal Wreck, 

boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Ok. Now try reading it as a narrative voice over with the returns being where one is tempted to pause.

The opening line sets the scene. I love the choice of "antique land," especially as my mind kept jumping to a more cliched "ancient land." Antique is such a better word, carrying so much more baggage. 

But why this open at all? Can't we just jump into the facts? Two reasons:

1. It sets it as a story, not a scene.

2. More to my point (that this is a great TV story): Reporting is almost never contemporaneous (much as we would like it to be). Usually, we're showing up after the fact and trying to put together what happened. Most all of journalism is "who said." 

And then we get the descriptor of facts and scene. TV stories, I think, are told like a good bar story, laying out the facts bit by bit to build a structure, or laying them out like a triumphant display or the cards of a winning poker hand: one at a time building to the finish. So we get it here: two legs, but no body, made of stone, standing in the desert. Next to them a face, broken from the statue. But not just broken, a "shattered visage." How much better? A total image in just two words.

Then both character and a summary of how well sculpted was the image, capturing the subject so well that his passions yet survive in the stone ("stamped on these lifeless things," again, how much packed into five words). 

Finally, the big reveal: "Nothing beside remains."

Boom.

The rest is an easy set down for the listener (viewer), re-enforcing the image gently: boundless and bare, lone and level sands to the horizon.

All that remains is the sig out.

It only runs around 40 to 50 seconds as a straight read, and there is no sound or nat pops, so there's that. But what a simple, tight, perfectly told tale.

Is There Really No Master Plan?

I always jokingly answer conspiracy theories of the Trilateral Commission or DaVinci Code or alien autopsy ilk by saying: "I wish it worked that well." While, from the distant outside one can spin up deep state organization ideas based on an elaborate arrangement of certain facts aided by fantasies, once you go inside and see how it works, you realize that they -- be it government or business or media -- are like the rest of us, just making it up as they go along.

Well, I guess I too have succumbed in a small way to belief in some hidden, greater knowledge and power. In my case, it was Warren Buffet's continuing purchase of small market newspapers. Why, I wondered, would he do it? This, after all, is the Wizard of Omaha, the man who made billions on his savvy business sense. While everyone else was beginning to arrange the funeral for newspapers, why would he invest so heavily in them? Surely he knows something we don't.

Now, Bloomburg has a piece suggesting ... well, that they wish it worked so well. They seem to think he's just emotionally attached to the idea of a local paper. No ambitious scheme, like Jeff Bezos seems to have for The Washington Post, no deep understanding of something the rest of us don't see, just fond memories of being a paperboy.

Now I'll just have to go back to awaiting a miraculous salvation ...

Addendum

Apparently I'm not the only one who has thought of this:

"In the words of the Joker in 'The Dark Knight,' 'Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plan is horrifying.' But what if there is no plan? What if everybody is just bad at everything? What if the adults who run the most important institutions in the country were the children who picked their noses and put the boogers under the desks in school?"

As I Was Saying ...

Some time ago, I posted a comment on CNN having a hissy over the Trump administration making the daily briefing not for camera. They cried that it was a closing off of access for the public, and in a bit of theatrics hired a courtroom artist to come in and draw the briefing. Been there, done that.

Well, the dramatics on both sides have only escalated (though the briefing seems to be open for broadcast again), with now the spat playing out for our collective ... entertainment?

But my point here is Todd Purdum, who was apparently covering the White House right around the time I was, has finally articulated well the concerns I have been forming over the more recent efforts by the press, and CNN's Jim Acosta particularly, in confronting the administration.

Photo by Wilfredo Lee

But as a secondary note, let me add: Where were you guys?

Press aides in the Clinton administration regularly flat out lied to us, and often over ridiculously minor things. It was part of the back and forth, and we took it in stride without making it a challenge to democracy. I'm sure those who covered George W Bush have similar stories, and it takes little effort (even while avoiding alt-right conspiracy sites) to find questionable Obama actions and statements. Yet it lacked the melodrama we see today.

Is the Trump administration a leap beyond? Perhaps. Should journalists rigorously challenge authority and demand their questions be heard? Absolutely. But where were you guys all those years before someone so obvious showed up?

I Think We've Been Ruined by Television

Odd thing for a guy who works in TV to say, especially as I also think we've had some of the best entertainment TV produced lately since the medium began. (And I'm not alone in that.) But that may very well be the problem.

I think the problem is twofold: The "Star Trek" problem and the "House of Cards" problem.

The "Star Trek" Problem

 

In the 1950s and 1960s, everything seemed to be looking up.The reach out of the atmosphere was on everyone's mind, from the 1957 shock of Sputnik to the 1969 landing on the moon. One can place this all in the context of superpower competition, but let's stick with popular interest. Even "Toy Story 2" centered its main plotline on the public's fascination with things space.

The 1960s also brought space drama to TV with shows like "Lost in Space" and "Star Trek." Even comedies like "I Dream of Genie" had a space subtext. Then it faded with the counterculture, Vietnam War protest, and the feeling that reaching to the stars was somehow indulgent with so many problems on Earth. Science Fiction would not regain its popularity for a decade, with the arrival of the space fantasy of "Star Wars" (which had a counterculture element to carry its plot, but let's not get distracted).

"Star Wars" brought, along with a renewed interest in science fiction programming and the accompanying profits, the start of a great leap forward in special effects, leading to a computer graphics revolution making not just space drama but earthly adventures have SFX scenes that were indistinguishable from reality, as well as making a revived "Star Trek" financially practical.

And all this brings me at last to my main point: now that we have all seen on television -- through "Star Trek," "Battlestar Galactica," "Babylon Five," and any number of other shows, reboots, and revivals -- the sights of the universe and a few fantastic versions of it, we are left with the emotional impression that we have all been there and done that.

As Mercury and Gemini entered orbit, we had some early movie visions of what Earth orbit looked like, but we had never really seen it before. And as for landing on the moon, Hollywood gave us "Destination Moon," written by the respectable Robert Heinlein and backed by real science. But it looked like this in 1950:

 By 1969, we knew it looked like this:

And indeed, now the special effects wizards have real images of Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, and so on, not to mention spectacular Hubble telescope imagery of distant stars and nebulae.

So now, our science fiction, even the minimally science-based stuff like "Star Trek" and "Star Wars," looks more real than ever. Thus, I think, somewhere back in our subconscious, back in that part that makes us want to go places and see things, we feel no need to go to space. We feel like we have already been there.

The "House of Cards" Problem

I wish I had a better example for this, but I believe the Netflix version of "House of Cards" is the most applicable. (I much prefer the deliciously malicious British original version, but moving on ...)

Politics now is in chaos, with previously understood standards kicked aside at regular intervals. During the 2016 campaign, Trump campaign aides met with a Russian lawyer offering "dirt" on the Hillary Clinton campaign. What exactly this means legally remains to be established, but let me go on.

As part of the investigation into Russian election meddling, congressional committee chairman Devin Nunes said he had come to the White House to see secret evidence, only to be so embarrassed by the clumsy circumstances and statements around the event that he eventually had to step back from his committee's work.

Having grown up in Washington, watching the Watergate scandal progress as I was in middle and high school as the wily Sam Ervin ("I'm just a simple country lawyer") slowly worked his select committee, watching able parliamentarians like West Virginia's Robert Byrd and petty tyrants like House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Wilbur Mills (finally brought down by a drunken escapade with a stripper) and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Tower (served cold karma by his former colleagues when rejected the post of Secretary of Defense), this all seems like the blundering, ham-handed work of amateurs.

And I think it is. The Trump campaign is a prime example.

Organized and mostly run by Trump and his business associates, bringing in politically experienced professionals now and again, but always under their control and often fired arbitrarily, depending on the atmosphere of the moment, the campaign lacked any real foundational feel for politics, either how it is done on the campaign trail or in practice in government. Public revulsion over politics-as-it-is in America made this very appealing, but it also made the campaign then and governance now the amateur hour, reeling from crisis to crisis.

I think the core to understanding this is "House of Cards." The cynical fantasy of "how Washington really works," based on the even more cynical British approach, is like most political drama exaggerated to the point of fantasy. But these people think that's how it really works, and thus thought it unremarkable, if not expected, to take a meeting with representatives of a foreign government offering "dirt" on a political opponent, and then to be disappointed when there was nothing to offer. Not that long ago, a much less egregious dirty trick resulted in the FBI being called in ... by those who would have benefited!

The same could be said of Congressman Nunes, seeing himself as a real-life Frank Underwood, quietly maneuvering his allies and opponents like a spider pulling the threads of his web, headed off to secret meetings revealing dark truths. Real life is both not that interesting and much more complicated.

It's enough to make one wish for the days of Richard Nixon, a man who had spent decades in politics learning the dirty tricks then far more prevalent than now, until he too fell for playing his hand too broadly in changing times. But at least he knew what he was doing.

This Is A Problem

Ever since Dwight Eisenhower warned about the "military-industrial complex," we've worried about how they would take over the government ... and the world. It was the theme of "Rollerball" and any other science fiction stories. In one of its most lethal forms, it becomes Skynet, the AI, self-aware automaton that takes over the world in the Terminator movies.

Well, guess what: you can stop worrying about Skynet being a military operation. We'll just walk into it thanks to corporate fear, according to Axios. The problem is "already, researchers believe that the increasing dominance of big tech companies is partly to blame for wage stagnation in the U.S. and elsewhere, because companies left behind can't afford to pay the higher rates earned at dominant rivals." Those leading with AI, in other words, will come to succeed more and more thanks to a beneficial survival, and so others will rush to catch up.

I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.

Dear Warren Buffett ...

You own a bunch of newspapers -- little, local newspapers, that you bought from Media General just before it disintegrated completely, finally selling its TV holdings to Nexstar. When you made that buy, I wondered: WHY?!

It was ironically the president of Nexstar, Perry Sook, when they bought the TV station I worked for around the same time, who dismissed newspapers as a dying medium as he spoke to us, his new employees. Nexstar, I was to learn, also wasn't so much interested in traditional broadcast TV either. The folks from corporate arrived with their eyes primarily on what our web presence was ... and of course sales and reducing expenses, especially human ones. But that rant is for another day.

It is a truism (and thus nothing particularly novel or wise when Sook said it) that print is dying, eclipsed by free internet content. So why would one of the richest men in America, the Oracle of Omaha, want a dying industry?

Fortune had a theory they posited last February: "In effect, Buffett appears to own newspapers not because he believes they have a future, but because he believes that they can produce cash flow—albeit declining amounts—while they are dying, and that this can be used for other investments. Berkshire Hathaway owns a number of investments of this kind, like Dairy Queen and See’s Candies."

And, when I have asked people, a range of theories have been offered, from classified advertising to selling assets and real estate.

But this is all in contrast to the other big-name newspaper buy: Jeff Bezos' purchase of The Washington Post. That buy seemed obvious to me, and The New York Times quoted him explaining it at a conference in June: "Mr. Bezos said he bought the newspaper because he wanted to make it into a more powerful national — and even global — publication, and that The Post was well situated to be a watchdog over the leaders of the world’s most powerful country. 'If it had been a financially upside-down salty snack food company, I would not have bought it,' he said."

Two thoughts are there, I think, when that quote is translated (from last to first):
1. He bought a media company because he wanted a media company, not because he wanted assets or real estate or whatever.
2. He bought a media company because he wanted media, or rather the product that makes it a media company rather than a salty snack food company. He wants -- he needs content.

(And, by the way, what's with all this hating on snack treats? Dairy Queen is dying? Another of life's little treats evaporating? But that's neither here nor there.)

Bezos has a massive technology operation geared at delivering mostly stuff: books, then CDs, and now just about anything, including digital print, audio, and video. Amazon is producing its own TV shows and  movies, and unashamedly trolling for more. Unlike many other internet-centric information companies, Bezos has started making his own stuff. (And this trend of being a content deliverer without producing content is indeed something that's bothered me for a while.)

 

So Where's It All Going?

As CNN's Brian Stelter reported (in what rates right up there as a lazy, year-end review),  there's been a lot of change just in 2017. And that's just the tail end of this years-long series of changes. Is there a traceable line that we can use to see where it's going?

Apparently, no.  Take, for example, this graphically lively but oh so wrong series of predictions from Nieman Lab. "My prediction is not solely that media leadership will be feminized, but that news itself will take on a new, more feminine, tone," says one. Nice, but irrelevant. How about: "In way too many stories, the idea that tens of millions of people could lose health insurance amounted to a throwaway line. Those are real people, people like my sister, who will literally die if she can’t afford her medicine."  Undoubtedly important, but what exactly does that have to do with the future of journalism? Or the idea that media will go into merchandising, if the haven't already.

Even when they get on subject, they've arrived at the station too late for the train. "Not only is there a lot more investment into video journalism, television’s business models, broadcast or cable, are also dominating: from video ads before or in the middle of a clip, product placement, and monthly subscriptions. This is while digital or analogue ads for text-based media are plummeting," says a predictor. No one's happier than I, a laborer in the field of video, to hear video's the future. But then why are broadcasters seeing audiences shrink while they pay consultants tons of money to find those wandering eyeballs?

So, it's the internet, right? Well, one review after another, time and again, very rationally argues that the current news aggregator models, despite a shift to videos, just aren't working. In the end, as with any business, you have to ask where the money is coming from.
 

So Why Newspapers?

But here's the thing, Mr. Buffett.  Did you really buy newspapers just because they would produce some paltry profits as their orbits slowly decayed and they burned up in the new media star? Is the fact that they are, in their way, creative endeavors produced by people (people, as in real people) making stories and pictures out of ephemeral life and experience not in any way part of the equation? Well, hell, you might as well have bought them for the real estate.

In the internet age, the information economy, I can't believe that this information product has no value. As I said in my old posting: Sooner or later, you have to have a source. You can't just spend your time repackaging other work ... if you don't have that other work.

“Newspapers continue to reign supreme in the delivery of local news,” you said when you bought them, according to Fortune. “If you want to know what’s going on in your town—whether the news is about the mayor or taxes or high school football—there is no substitute for a local newspaper that is doing its job.”

That's the key. Bezos bought the Post and is now actually expanding staff because he was buying the content, not the package. Buying newspapers for the newspaper is like buying Coca-Cola for the two-liter bottle.

Now, the Post is this message writ large. It does have a market, one others -- probably less successfully because they live only in New York and LA -- are trying to tap into. But you, Mr. Buffett, have always had the advantage of the perspective from flyover country. The Post isn't going to tell you about what's going on in Omaha, and you had a sense of that in that quote just above, that thing you said when you first bought the papers. Now you need to take the next step and understand you didn't buy local papers, you bought local news and the reporters and photographers who gather it and turn it into a salable commodity. The newspaper is just what it's wrapped in.