'All it takes is one person to stand up and say F--- this'
Wed Feb 20, 2008 at 11:17:41 AM PDT
This is the story of a CNN employee who worked on the American Morning show who was just fired for blogging. And he isn't going quietly.
Chez Pazienza has been writing a blog called Deus Ex Malcontent for about 20 months, frequently giving his views on politics from a liberal perspective. At no time, he says, did he ever represent himself as a CNN employee or claim to speak for CNN.
Nonetheless, he was fired, according to him, because he violated a section of the CNN employee handbook that requires employees to get permission before writing for an non-CNN source.
But whether CNN was correct in firing him is not what is most fascinating about this story.
What is most fascinating is what Pazienza reveals about CNN's attitude toward blogging and bloggers in general -- dismissive and contemptuous.
And what he describes as a deliberate attempt at CNN to downplay Iraq coverage.
As far as CNN (and to be fair, the mainstream TV press in general) believes, it still sits comfortably at the top of the food chain, unthreatened by any possibility of a major paradigm shift being brought to bear by a horde of little people with laptops and opinions. Although the big networks recognize the need to appeal to bloggers, they don't fear them -- and that means they don't respect them. Corporate-think dictates that the mainstream television press as a monstrous multi-headed hydra is the ultimate news authority and therefore is in possession of the one and only hotline to the ghosts of Murrow and Sevareid. Sure those bloggers are entertaining, but in the end they're really just insects who either feed off the carcasses of news items vetted through various networks or, when they do break stories, want nothing more than to see themselves granted an audience by the kingmakers on television.
This, of course, is horseshit.
During my last couple of years as a television news producer, I watched the networks try to recover from a six year failure to bring truth to power (the political party in power being irrelevant incidentally; the job of the press is to maintain an adversarial relationship with the government at all times) and what's worse, to pretend that they had a backbone all along. I watched my bosses literally stand in the middle of the newsroom and ask, "What can we do to not lead with Iraq?" -- the reason being that Iraq, although an important story, wasn't always a surefire ratings draw. I was asked to complete self-evaluations which pressed me to describe the ways in which I'd "increased shareholder value." (For the record, if you're a rank-and-file member of a newsroom, you should never under any circumstances even hear the word "shareholders," let alone be reminded that you're beholden to them.) I watched the media in general do anything within reason to scare the hell out of the American public -- to convince people that they were about to be infected by the bird flu, poisoned by the food supply, or eaten by sharks. I marveled at our elevation of the death of Anna Nicole Smith to near-mythic status and our willingness to let the airwaves be taken hostage by every permutation of opportunistic degenerate from a crying judge to a Hollywood hanger-on with an emo haircut. I watched qualified, passionate people worked nearly to death while mindless talking heads were coddled. I listened to Lou Dobbs play the loud-mouthed fascist demagogue, Nancy Grace fake ratings-baiting indignation, and Glenn Beck essentially do nightly stand-up -- and that's not even taking into account the 24/7 Vaudeville act over at Fox News. I watched The Daily Show laugh not at our mistakes but at our intentional absurdity.
This is, of course, not limited to CNN. The traditional media in general thinks that bloggers are just people spouting off without much professionalism.
And then he reminds CNN that it probably wasn't the smartest thing in the world to piss off a blogger with a growing online following.
Awhile back I was watching a great documentary on the birth of the punk scene, it closed with former Black Flag frontman and current TV host Henry Rollins saying these words: "All it takes is one person to stand up and say 'fuck this.'"
I truly hope so, because I'm finally doing just that.
And I should've done it a long time ago.
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