Bill Kurtis is a serious guy, and by any account would be on the higher end of the (admittedly limited) spectrum of TV investigative reporting. In recent years he’s become more of a crime-show host than investigator, but it’s still a shock to see him shilling for a crummy cellphone company:

… in Kansas City, the NYT reports:

In the wave of buyouts and layoffs hitting newspapers this season, The Kansas City Star has decided it can no longer afford a classical music critic. Paul Horsley, who took the critic’s job eight years ago, was quoted on the Web site MusicalAmerica.com as saying, “I think it was a very ‘corporate’ decision.” He added, “I think they eliminated the beat they thought they could most easily farm out.” Kansas City’s orchestra, opera and ballet companies are said to be organizing a formal protest.

Good luck! Last summer, the Times detailed the shrinkage in this field:

 Classical music criticism, a high-minded endeavor that has been around at least as long as newspapers and reached an English-language peak with George Bernard Shaw, has taken a series of hits in recent months.

Critics’ jobs have been eliminated, downgraded or redefined at newspapers in Atlanta, Minneapolis and elsewhere around the country and at New York magazine, where Peter G. Davis, one of the most respected voices of the craft, said he had been forced out after 26 years.

Newspapers have a lot of challenges these days, but cutting coverage in classical music is counterproductive, for two reasons. One, interest in classical music skews older and richer; those are two demographics that subscribe to daily newspapers disproportionately. It’s crazy to give whole classes of readers a reason to cancel their subscriptions.

The second reason is a little more weepy, but hear me out. I don’t think papers have to be high-minded, or suicidal. But it’s true that, with their special legal status, that they owe their communities something. If every daily in the country stopped writing about the local classical music scene, it wouldn’t be a death blow per se. It would merely be a horrendous one, which would hurt all the local music organizations for some period of time before another network of coverage sprang up.

Which brings me to the point I wanted to make. There’s obviously a market for coverage of the fine arts. The papers just have to figure out how to do it more creatively in a changing marketplace. Local papers have a unique knowledge base about the arts in their local communities, and it should be easy—and not very expensive—to leverage that online.

The paper should be enlisting online freelancers who, in return for reviewers credentials and a small fee, go to local classical music concerts and write short reviews for the paper online, immediately after the show. Two of these a day at, say, $50 per, is only $35,000 a year, That would at once a) save the paper money, b) provide increased coverage of a scene desperate for it and c) help establish the paper’s web site as the local source for commentary on the fine music scene. And it’s a model that could easily be adapted to gallery coverage and that of the local jazz and club scene.

Hitsville was so grossed out by the R. Kelly case (not the verdict, but just writing about the particulars of Kelly’s predilictions) that he didn’t have the stomach to immediately start writing about how repulsive the Roman Polanski documentary on HBO was. (It was first shown a couple of weeks ago, and remains in heavy rotation.)

My interest in the Kelly case came about not because he’s a serial sexual predator who should be put behind bars, but because the press had become so complicit in the celebrity hype machine that the crimes he was accused of had become not even worth mentioning to virtually everyone who wrote about his albums or tours.

It had something to do with a lot of journalists being lazy, but it also had something to do with the Ick Factor.

You’re a pop critic at a podunk paper, and R. Kelly’s coming to town. No one at your paper wants to hear about a child-porn sex tape, much less one that involves the words “urinating” and “on a girl police say is 13 or 14.” It is a firmly held belief of newspaper editors that people don’t want to read about gross stuff over their Rice Krispies. So why not just do the usual fun puff piece promoting the Kelly show, and refer obliquely to some unspecified “legal problems”? It’s a win-win situation.

… Unless you’re the parents of  a teenage girl who goes to the Kelly show, catches the eye of one of Kelly’s henchmen, and gets invited backstage.

But whatever. I feel like I should mention the Polanski case, even though it gets into depressingly similar vomitous territory, because no one else did.

We all know that story: The girl with the stardom-obsessed mother who left her daughter alone with the hedonistic European director so he could do a late-night Vogue photo shoot with her in Jack Nicholson’s mansion. What could possibly have gone wrong?

Nature took its course. Polanski was duly arrested and charged, apparently to his great surprise. (Americains puritains!) Negotitations began for a plea bargain but, as the new HBO documentary demonstrates, Polanski ultimately decided he was about to be the victim of railroaded American justice. You can argue that his fears were well-grounded, as the documentary does, but it’s also true that taking a plane out of LAX and living in luxury in France for the next three decades is an option not generally open to criminals who harbor similar suspicions.

The documentary spends a great deal of time obsessing about Polanski’s endangered legal rights and some amusing footnotes to the case, right down to noting that the judge in the case had a girlfriend or two.

The judge was apparently unmarried, so it’s not clear how this was relevant. (It would actually be irrelevant if he had been married, come to think of it.) Anyway, engrossed in such trivia, the filmmakers nelect to explain properly what Polanski was accused of. He did, as the documentary details, photograph the aspiring young Vogue model naked in a hot tub and then, over her repeated objections, whisk her off to a bedroom for sex.

The fact that he had dosed her with a Quaalude made this all easier. “I was having trouble with coordination like walking and stuff,” the girl later said.

But while the movie mentions the (ambiguous) word sodomy in passing (as only some of the recent coverage of the documentary does) it never explains what that charge stemmed from.

I only know about it because the Smoking Gun web site has posted the original grand jury testimony of the girl. It went something like this:

“Then he lifted up my legs and went in through my anus.”

“What do you mean by that?:

“He put his penis in my butt.”

Polanski was 44 at the time. His difficult life as a Jewish survivor of World War II is mentioned many times in the film, but the fact that the drugged little girl was anally raped isn’t mentioned at all.

Polanski is being protected by the filmmakers, who are unaccountably more entranced with his celebrity than they are with sharing with their audience the salient facts of the case, which makes them both incompetent and unethical.

But Polanski, like Kelly, is also protected by something else: The Ick Factor.

Family activists complain, with some justification, that we live in a coarse world. It’s hard to do anything about it, because the coarseness seems to be what an ever-more-empowered audience demands.

In this context, it’s surprising that men like Polanski and Kelly are able to find themselves charged with deeds that test even today’s broad palette of commonly discussed sexuality. (Entertainers aren’t the only ones, incidentally. There is a certain footnote to the Starr Report, containing words uniquely used there in relation to the Presidency of the United States, that as far as I can ascertain were never repeated in the news pages amid the reams of commentary that that scandal generated.)

But it seems plain that if those charges were repeated as often as we are told of, say, their Grammy and Oscar wins, their diverting music videos or their continental flair, our perception of the men, and their cases, would be somewhat different. In this sense, the true beneficiaries of the Ick Factor are plain.

The Chicago Tribune takes a look back and decides the verdict came from what everyone’s been saying all week: The prosecution didn’t have a victim:

One paramount lesson to take away from the failed child pornography prosecution of R&B star R. Kelly is this: It’s hard to win a conviction when the alleged victim not only denies it but also doesn’t show up in court.

“Child exploitation cases are usually difficult to defend,” said Paul DerOhannesian, a New York lawyer who is an expert on criminal cases involving the sexual assault of children. “But the lack of a [complaining] victim here was a major weakness that drained the case of emotion.”

There’s another thread here as well:

[…] Kelly’s gold-plated defense team had the resources and skill to put off the trial for years, and legal analysts say that delay may have sapped the potential to provoke juror outrage.

“Time was his friend,” said Andrea Zopp, the former Cook County prosecutor….

It was thought, in the Tribune as elsewhere, that the extraordinary six-year delay in the case was due to the trouble the state had in coming up with something to base the case on, absent the girl they thought was on the tape, who as the story said not only wouldn’t testify, but told police and a grand jury that it wasn’t she.*

It seems that in the end the state’s strategy was to base the case on the production of child porn, rather than statutory rape, which in a way took the victim out of it. You have to give Cook County credit: The case ultimately included a friend of both Kelly’s and the girl’s who could testify to having had three-way sex with the pair—and having been filmed doing it. But that gambit, obviously, didn’t work.

Meanwhile, the Sun-Times goes back to canvas the reactions of some of the witnesses at the trial—particularly those who were friends of the girl in question and ID’ed her in court:

Tjada Burnett, a family friend of the alleged victim who also testified against Kelly, said she “can’t understand” the verdict.

Burnett said she had spoken Friday night with Sparkle, the alleged victim’s aunt who introduced her to Kelly when she was just 12.

Sparkle “was very, very upset,” Burnett said.

Bennie Edwards Sr., the alleged victim’s uncle, who also testified for the state, described Kelly’s acquittal as “B.S.”

“How can the jury let a pedophile go like that?” he asked.

Though he too is estranged from his niece, he said: “She’s gotta be hurting right now.”

Kelly, he predicted, will “get what he’s got coming.”

————-

* Based on the testimony of other people at the trial, the chances are good that the woman was lying to the police and perjuring herself before the grand jury, and that the three relatives of hers who testified at the trial committed perjury as well.

Something I just noticed while looking something up in the original Sun-Times stories about Kelly’s predilections, emphasis added:

The girl in the video, now 17, was identified by her aunt, who said that her niece would have been 14 at the time the tape was made, based on her appearance. Kelly can also be heard on the tape referring to the girl by her first name.

————

Previously in Hitsville:

The verdict: Jim DeRogatis’s take
Post-morteming the R. Kelly case
Who you gonna believe: Your own eyes or R. Kelly’s defense team?

The world’s weirdest defense summation

Everything you need to know about the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly Sexfacts™ IV: The Quantum of Solace! The complete prosecution case!

The Godfather Who Shagged Me: The complete R. Kelly SexFacts™, Parts I, II & III—Every barfy thing you ever wanted to know about the origins of the R. Kelly case

Targeting Jim DeRogatis—literally

More on L’affaire DeRogatis

The DeRogatis ruling

Bad craziness at the R. Kelly trial?

At the R. Kelly trial, they do things they don’t do on Broadway!

Ever hear the one about the guy convicted of murdering his parents who asked for mercy because he was a orphan?

The NYT and R. Kelly: Curiouser and curiouser

The NYT finally notices R. Kelly isn’t a nice guy

R. Kelly and the NYT: The Freaky Defense

Tribune, Sun-Times protest closed hearings in R. Kelly case

Secret hearings in the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly’s Publicist: He slept with my daughter!

The Chicago Sun-Times reporter, whose reporting kicked off the R. Kelly scandals nearly eight years ago, gives his impression in the paper:

The 41-year-old artist proudly described himself as “the World’s Greatest,” a “Sexual Super Freak” and “the Pied Piper of R&B”—perhaps oblivious to the fact that the Pied Piper of medieval legend led 130 boys and girls from a German village to their doom. Yet despite his acquittal Friday on 14 counts of making child pornography, it remains difficult to dismiss his lyrics and his boasting in the media as mere hyperbole.The prosecution chose to pursue a very narrow case against the superstar, solely concentrating on a 26-minute, 39-second tape anonymously sent to the Chicago Sun-Times in February 2002. But as the paper first reported in December 2000, for more than a decade, public records and lawsuits allege that Kelly abused his staggering wealth and fame to pursue sexual relationships with underage girls, many of whom were left deeply wounded by those encounters.

The voices of those girls were never heard in Judge Vincent Gaughan’s courtroom. But they include:

• The late Aaliyah D. Haughton, Kelly’s celebrated 15-year-old protege, whom he illegally married in 1994 shortly after producing the debut album he titled “Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number.” (The marriage was annulled, and Kelly paid Aaliyah a token sum in a settlement.)

• Tiffany H[.]*, who sued Kelly claiming that he began having sex with her when she was 15 after he picked her while visiting her choir class at his alma mater, Kenwood Academy. (Kelly settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed sum.)

• Tracy S[.], a former intern at Epic Records who sued Kelly claiming that she lost her virginity to him at age 17. (Kelly settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed sum.)

• Patrice J[.], a Chicago woman who sued Kelly alleging that they began having sex after he met her at the Rock ‘n’ Roll McDonald’s following her high school’s senior prom. (Kelly settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed sum.)

• And Montina W[.], a legal-age dancer who sued Kelly claiming that he videotaped her without her knowledge while they were having sex. (Kelly settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed sum.)

And these are just the main on-the-record, names-attached cases we know about. (There is photographic evidence of two more, but the girls in them have never been identified.)

DeRogatis’s piece is a reminder of the second-saddest thing about the verdict. (The first is that Kelly’s back on the streets a smarter and wiser sexual predator, presumably with the minor object lesson learned that he merely probably shouldn’t film himself urinating on under-aged girls.)

The second saddest is that he’s now an acquitted sexual predator and will be referred to that way by a press that has already spent nearly eight years downplaying the acts he’s been accused of. A year before the tape came to light DeRogatis and his reporting partner, Abdon Pallasch, had crafted a convincing portrait of Kelly’s activities in that realm.

The acts in that story will now fade as Kelly takes a what will certainly be a victory lap of media interviews, no doubt with pliable folks who won’t press Kelly for explanations.

————-

* Hitsville sees no reason to print the women’s full names.

I’ve noted before how the Tribune’s handling of its R. Kelly coverage is pretty lame:

Incidentally, the Tribune’s odd handling of its R. Kelly stories continues. Where the Sun-Times has always had an R. Kelly main page on the web on which you could access all of the paper’s voluminous R. Kelly coverage, the Tribune’s promotion of this valuable archive online has been spotty. (Valuable to the paper I mean; it’s the logical place for folks around the world to find comprehensive coverage of the trial.) You need to find an actual R. Kelly story, and then try to navigate the (non-chronological) list of stories to the left to get up to speed. If there’s a home page for the paper’s Kelly coverage I’ve never been able to find it.

Now, it seems, some of the early stories in the case have disappeared, apparently because the Trib removes two-week-old stories and sticks them in a (for pay) archive. The Trib had an early deal with AOL and I’ve always thought it was an operation with sophisticated web folks around.

Is it possible, in 2008, that the paper’s web people don’t notice stories drawing increased attention and get to work maximizing the interest? What kind of numbskulls start taking down their on-the-scene coverage of a local story of international interest? Sam Zell know about this?

Now, check out this screen shot of the paper’s acquittal story. (It encompasses the entire screen on my laptop; I had to lower the type size just to get a shot that included story text.) In its desperation to monetize, the paper’s web site fills the window with Google ads. The subject of most of them are funny, but besides that it’s not really a very reader-friendly way of doing things:

… At 10 this morning. The defense goes first, and then the prosecution gets the last word, the papers say.

The Chicago Tribune reports:

Despite the high-profile nature of the trial, the case itself is not very complex, experts say. It boils down to two questions: Is the girl on the sex tape at the heart of the case underage? And is that Kelly in the video with her? Both sides will have one last chance to sway the jury of nine men and three women.

The paper goes into more detail here …

The lack of a cooperating victim is a central weakness in the state’s case, according to some legal experts, but others say she did nothing to help the defense.

“It used to be a fatal part of the case, until [defense attorney Edward] Genson couldn’t produce her either,” said Leonard Cavise, a law professor at DePaul College of Law. “As a result, they are in the same boat.”

… but, as has been the case all along, they don’t relate this directly to the charges in the case, which are related to child pornography, not statutory rape. Does the concept of “victim” even apply in a child porn case?

The Sun-Times doesn’t go any deeper:

Two issues make the case volatile, [DePaul law prof Leonard] Cavise said: Sex and celebrity. The tape shows intercourse and oral sex, and it shows the man urinating on the female. The shock factor alone could push the jury to a guilty verdict, experts said.

“You see a real possibility that the jury can go guilty because the tape is so disgusting” and jurors want to punish someone, one legal observer said.

At the same time, Kelly’s fame could prejudice the jury in the defense’s favor. “Everybody on the jury who likes R. Kelly is going to hold out for him,” Cavise said.

Studies show that 80 percent of jurors make up their minds before they have heard any evidence, Cavise said.

“As we go into closing arguments, at least 80 percent of those people have an opinion already,” Cavise said.

I’m worried that after the verdict comes down, the jurors are going to tell us it all came down to some obscure part of the directions the court gave them, which was never mentioned in the press coverage.

Incidentally, the Tribune’s odd handling of its R. Kelly stories continues. Where the Sun-Times has always had an R. Kelly main page on the web on which you could access all of the paper’s voluminous R. Kelly coverage, the Tribune’s promotion of this valuable archive online has been spotty. (Valuable to the paper I mean; it’s the logical place for folks around the world to find comprehensive coverage of the trial.) You need to find an actual R. Kelly story, and then try to navigate the (non-chronological) list of stories to the left to get up to speed. If there’s a home page for the paper’s Kelly coverage I’ve never been able to find it.

Now, it seems, some of the early stories in the case have disappeared, apparently because the Trib removes two-week-old stories and sticks them in a (for pay) archive. The Trib had an early deal with AOL and I’ve always thought it was an operation with sophisticated web folks around.

Is it possible, in 2008, that the paper’s web people don’t notice stories drawing increased attention and get to work maximizing the interest? What kind of numbskulls start taking down their on-the-scene coverage of a local story of international interest? Sam Zell know about this?

In the last ten years, two humor outlets have established themselves as the dominant forces in their respective media. On TV, it’s The Daily Show; in print and online, it’s The Onion. It is hugely significant (and rarely noted) that both are based on the banality, triviality, and utter absurdity of the media.

Of the two, The Onion is the most insidious, because its attack on the form is so comprehensive. You can read Poynter study after Poynter study and never get the insight into the decline of daily print journalism you do in one classic issue of The Onion. The critique works two ways. First, there’s the tone; the vapid, get-both-sides-of-the-story balance and the hokey clichés. But then there’s the subjects: The Onion on the one hand takes the banality of most metro dailies to its logical conclusion, focusing on the truly trivial (”Area Man Confused by Buffet Procedure”) but on the other demonstrates vividly what the papers don’t provide, generally a sharp depiction of unspoken truths (”Barry Bonds Took Steroids, Reports Everyone Who Has Ever Watched Baseball”)—and in both cases manages to shed a more profound light on society than its subject.

Anyway, all that said, The Onion is not what it used to be, and it’s possible that a “Has The Onion jumped the shark?” story is overdue; to me, the operation has lost a lot of its originality and essentialness in recent years.

The Onion Movie, which was supposed to carry the franchise into new areas, is not going to help its image. The movie was finished four or five years ago, but never got released. Rumors came and went, and then, with an utter minimum of advance publicity, it finally came out, surreptitiously, on DVD only, this week.

I don’t know anything about its troubled history, but I do know why it didn’t get released, and that’s because it may be the most unfunny 90 or so minutes of filmed human activity since, Oh, I don’t know, Sophie’s Choice. The tragic thing is that they couldn’t even take the Onion brand off of it; what (lame-ass) story there is is set up around the set of an Onion nightly newscast.

In that framing story, the anchor of the show, played by Broadway star Len Cariou with no apparent humor sprachgefuhl, gets increasingly upset about corporate product-placement in his newscast. This is all done with such heavyhandeness and poor execution that any potential for satire is lost. The product in question is a movie called Cockpuncher, starring Steven Seagall, who appears here laboriously trying to send himself up. It doesn’t work because … well, basically because Steven Seagall, he’s kinda … fat now. And his face is such a fleshy mass of uncomprehending self-regard that it doesn’t work as a self-send-up. (And Cockpuncher in any event actually doesn’t look as bad as his recent movies.)

This wholly unengrossing story is told amid an inconsistent melange of news reports, spoof commercials, some free-floating sketches, and a few bits of bootless extra-cinematic foofara. (In one sketch, there’s a pointless appearance by a well-dressed polite black guy who asks where the local library is. The scene cuts to the inside of a movie theater where a row of what are supposed to be Nation of Islam types watch approvingly. It’s not that amusing, and the cheap set makes it worse. This movie makes Mad TV look like Woody Allen.)

Outside of not being funny, having crappy production values, lacking focus or consistency, being boring, and the fact that none of the people who star in it are watchable comic actors, The Onion Movie bears the marks of two disastrous decisions on the part of its makers. First, and most pathetically, the movie could not figure out how to transfer the Zen of the paper to the screen. The logical thing would have been to devise a way to transfer the daily journalism satire to TV news, and just do 90 minutes of fake newscast, but The Daily Show and The Colbert Report do that a lot better. The movie compromises by having the newscaster read 15- or 30-second snippets of some of The Onion’s greatest hits. Because these are newspaper spoofs, they invariably fall flat, and earns the movie exactly none of the carryover goodwill of the digital version’s audience.

And that leads to the second big problem, which is that all of that leaves no real substance to the framing story. Since “The Onion Nightly News” is made up of dumb news stories, there’s no tension in its being debauched by corporate overseers. All the paper and digital operations can do to protect their brand is hope that the DVD release flies under the radar of public perception.

The Daily Swarm analyzes an interview transcript between Jim DeRogatis and the singer Sparkle here. In the talk, DeRogatis says he thinks that someone with the initials “B.H.” left him the sex tape that has resulted in child-porn charges against Kelly:

Q. But is it partly that [B.H.] wants revenge for the whole Aaliyah thing? ??

A. I don’t know. I’m sure he would tell ya. He’d have no problem telling you.

Q. He never has. I’m sure that tape came by [B.H.]. Not directly. He’s wondering about the police investigation.

A. My career isn’t a fruitful as his, but…

That’s all exactly as the Sun-Times published the transcript. Kelly’s former manager, whose name is Barry Hankerson, is also the uncle of Aaliyah Houghton, whom Kelly married when she was 15. (Houghton, under the name Aaliyah, would go on to become a big star before dying in a plane accident in 2002.) Hankerson eventually left Kelly’s employ, some years later, writing a letter to his label that said in part that Kelly “needed psychiatric help for his compulsion to pursue underage girls.”

The Daily Swarm had speculated on Hankerson’s likelihood of being the leaker yesterday.

Update: To me, it’s obvious that DeRogatis doesn’t actually know who sent him the tape; in this context “I’m sure” seems to me a synonym for “I think.” I’m still not clear on what the actual relevance to the trial the tape’s provenance is. (It and others had been floating around for years; why focus on the few hours in 2002 that the Sun-Times had possession of a copy of it?) That said, it seems plain that Hankerson would now be someone that the defense would be interested in talking to, based on its contention that the tape has been digitally modified in some way.

Since, as I note above, Hankerson left the singer’s employ because of … what were the exact words … ah, yes, “his compulsion to pursue young girls,” I doubt the defense will bring his ass into court. This also spares Hankerson the ordeal of explaining in public why he continued to work for the singer for years after he married his 15-year-old niece.

More details on the R. Kelly/Jim DeRogatis ruling. The two local papers, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune, offer somewhat inconsistent accounts of the proceedings. The Sun-Times, in its report coverage, said this:

Sun-Times attorney Damon Dunn argued Friday morning that DeRogatis should be protected from testifying by the Illinois reporter’s privilege and the First Amendment. Kelly’s attorneys were attempting to create a “chilling effect” against reporters covering Kelly by bringing DeRogatis in to testify, he said.

Anything DeRogatis could say in court would be “irrelevant” to Kelly’s defense, he added.

But Gaughan sided with Kelly’s attorney Marc Martin, saying that the reporter’s privilege only protects journalists from identifying their sources. Gaughan said he would not allow Kelly’s team to question DeRogatis about his sources, or to ask him how he got the tape, or to ask DeRogatis if he made a copy of the tape.

Emphasis added. The judge apparently will, however, make DeRogatis testify about a meeting he had with Stephanie Edwards, a former protégé of R. Kelly’s who sings under the professional name of Sparkle. Edwards was one of the people who identified the participants in the sex tape at the center of the case to DeRogatis and was quoted in his original story on the case:

The girl in the video, now 17, was identified by her aunt, who said that her niece would have been 14 at the time the tape was made, based on her appearance. Kelly can also be heard on the tape referring to the girl by her first name.

The names of the girl and her aunt are being withheld by the Sun-Times to protect the family’s privacy, although they are known to police.

The judge even went further, according to the Sun-Times story today:

Gaughan also said DeRogatis would have to turn over any notes relating to that meeting with Sparkle, saying that he did not believe that would reveal anything about DeRogatis’s sources.

The distinction between not questioning the reporter about his sources but forcing him to talk about a meeting with a source is one that isn’t explained. And trying to force DeRogatis to turn over notes opens up a whole new can of legal worms. The justification seems to be an attempt to impeach the testimony of Edwards, who has already told jurors she recognized Kelly and her niece on the tape. But the papers aren’t making it clear why the judge thinks any of this is relevant to the crime being tried, which is Kelly’s allegedly having brought a 13- or 14-year-old girl back to his suburban Chicago house, had sex with her and then urinated on her, all on videotape and all years before any of the participants actually saw the tape.

Here’s the Chicago Tribune’s version of events, with a first sentence, emphasis added, that contradicts what the ST said:

The defense intends to question DeRogatis about whether he manipulated, morphed or copied the video after receiving it. The singer’s attorneys contend the music critic–who spent years chronicling the R&B superstar’s relationships with young women–has a personal vendetta against Kelly.

“The bias was so strong it compelled the reporter to break the law,” said Kelly’s attorney, Marc Martin.

Last week, Kelly’s team suggested that DeRogatis copied the sex tape and showed it to Stephanie “Sparkle” Edwards, a relative of the video’s alleged female participant. If that happened, it’s possible he might have broken the state’s laws against reproduction, possession and dissemination of child pornography, the defense says.

Again, this contention seems to be detrimental to the defense’s case, since his client, many witnesses have said, was the guy who made and starred in it. It’s hard to see the logical point to this, other than as a way to delay the trial by forcing the Sun-Times to fight the issue. But some of what the Trib said doesn’t gibe with what the ST wrote, particularly the issue of asking DeRogatis if he copied the videotape he received.

The story does, however, clarify the “possession of child porn” angle:

Both the judge and the defense, however, acknowledge the statute of limitations ran out on any copying or screening of the tape in 2002. If [DeRogatis] still has a copy–or had it within the past three years–it’s possible he may have broken the law, Gaughan said.

The judge’s ruling in the R. Kelly case that reporter Jim DeRogatis must testify creates problems for him, his paper, and the prosecution in several ways. For those just coming to the story, DeRogatis was delivered, anonymously, the 27-minute sex tape that is at the center of pop superstar R. Kelly’s current trial. The paper turned the tape over to police.

DeRogatis, who works for the Chicago Sun-Times, first wrote about R. Kelly’s legal problems a year before the tape came to light. Without his adventuresome reporting, the tape might not have come to notice and an alleged child molester like Kelly wouldn’t be on trial right now.

Kelly’s defense wants to get the writer on the stand for a couple of reasons. The one with a remote legal justification involves what exactly happened to a key piece of evidence. The others are dicier:

The defense also says it wants to establish whether DeRogatis bore a grudge against Kelly; whom he showed the tape to; and if he made a copy.

(Hitsville is an old friend of DeRogatis and used to host a talk-show with him; while we’ve talked in recent weeks I’ve avoided asking him these questions and I don’t know the answers myself, save for the grudge issue, which strikes me as specious.)

The R. Kelly tape, showing, as it is alleged to, child pornography, is legally radioactive. Being questioned puts the reporter in a difficult position. Was watching the tape a crime? Was showing it to someone else a crime? If he did copy it, was copying it a crime? At what time did he know/suspect/decide that an under-age girl was involved? Since he’d written about Kelly’s issues in this area before, didn’t he suspect from the outset an under-aged girl was involved?

I wouldn’t want to answer any of those questions.

There’s of course the central irony, as well, that he would be being questioned by a lawyer for the guy who, nearly a dozen witnesses have testified, made the thing. Hitsville still doesn’t understand the logic of the defense’s position.

It leaves DeRogatis and the paper with uncomfortable choices. He could be made legally liable for doing his job. (Irony would not be the word for a situation in which the reporter suffers some legal penalty and Kelly gets off.) Once on the stand, the judge could allow the defense to ask all sorts of questions about his reporting and reporting methods. Taking the Fifth Amendment would be inappropriate for a reporter.

The least unappealing option would be, uh, appealing, which the paper is doing. I have no inside knowledge on this at all, but let’s not forget that the Sun-Times is not the New York Times. It’s a struggling newspaper—it’s the number two paper, remember, in Chicago, after the Tribune. It’s been abused by Murdoch and looted by Conrad Black and doesn’t have unlimited financial resources. One assumes that, given the paper’s strong journalistic history, there is the internal corporate fortitude to defend DeRogatis, but that of course has yet to be seen.

Finally, this is exhibit number one for the R. Kelly CircusWatch™; the defense is doing anything it can to distract attention from the trial’s testimony thus far, which has essentially been a parade of people saying “Yes, that’s him,” “Yes, that’s her,” and “Yes, that’s his house.”

From the Daily Swarm:

Well, it’s official: Judge Gaughan ruled this morning that Sun Times reporter Jim DeRogatis must testify in R. Kelly’s child pornography trial. While he will not be compelled to reveal his sources, DeRogatis will have to submit to questioning about his reporting and the videotape that is at the center of the trial.

An immediate appeal will be filed by the Sun Times’ attorneys.

It’s hard to say the coverage of the R. Kelly trial provided by the Chicago Sun-Times or the Chicago Tribune has been stellar. While some of the material has been fun to read, the quality varies wildly; the web presentations are confusing; and overall it’s not particularly comprehensive or particularly thoughtful or helpful if you’re trying to follow the case not from the courtroom … which, of course, all of the coverage’s readers are.

So Hitsville’s been trying to go through it and make sense of what’s happened so far. There seems to be three threads to keep an eye on:

1. For one, there’s the R. Kelly CircusWatch™—how tough Judge Vincent Gaughan is going to be on both parties. Thus far, signs are good; he’s been running a tight ship from the beginning; he threw a bystander in jail for yelling at the jurors; and Tuesday he chastised prosecutors for coming in late from lunch. At the same time, trouble is a-brewing: the defense has been making noises about trying to charge some state’s witnesses with a crime—apparently for being in contact with child porn. The defense is also trying to subpoena Jim DeRogatis, the Sun Times reporter who was anonymously delivered, back in 2002, the sex tape at the center of the case.

Kelly deserves a fair trial and his defense should of course try to take the case where it best benefits its client. And I’m not a lawyer. All that said, it seems pretty plain that what happened to the tape after it came to light is irrelevant in the context of charging Kelly with having made the tape in the first place. (“Yes, Your Honor, but after my client killed the son of a bitch this man stole his wallet!”)

The defense is hanging this line of inquiry on the contention that the tape was mysteriously doctored. Even this doesn’t make much sense. The tape might have conceivably been fabricated. (Dark deeds indeed! Given the defense’s lines of contention in the case thus far, the doctoring would have had to include taking some pretty stomach-churning stock sex footage and then stitching it together with similarly lit tape of the girl [who the defense says is not on the tape], Kelly [ditto] … and blending it into some surreptitiously taken footage of Kelly’s basement playroom! Kinda makes you wonder what Industrial Light and Magic was doing on the night of the 23rd.) But the chances of that happening after it was given to the Sun-Times are a little remote. (That would be a journalism story to rival anything in the Ben Hecht storybook.)

Gaughan gave the Sun-Times a week to respond to the motion, which means he might rule tomorrow. Where he goes on this matter may be an indicator of how successful the defense will be in its attempts to distract the forward movement of the trial.

2. Speaking of dark deeds, the more I think about it, the more I wonder what happened to the other R. Kelly sex tapes. The tape that mysteriously appeared in 2002 was actually just one of a triptych of tell-tale tawdriness: There was the film that is being tried right now; there was additional footage of Kelly with an adult woman, which has already been the subject of a civil suit against Kelly from the woman, who claims she did not know she was being videotaped; and another tape of what people who have seen it have said is footage of Kelly having sex with a different under-aged-looking girl. That third portion has not yet come back to light and no mention has been made of it in the case thus far. Wouldn’t the other two tapes have some sort of value in the case? (Kelly’s propensity to film himself, Kelly’s propensity to film himself with very young women….)

3. The running total of how many people have identified Kelly and the girl on the tape. Earlier news stories have said the police have “dozens” of identifying witnesses; there’s been no word on how many will end up testifying. It’s hard, from the coverage I’ve read, to keep exact track of who has testified, but here is at least a partial list of the key testimony this far:

• A Chicago Police investigator testified that he recognized the girl on the tape from talking to her in his ongoing investigation into Kelly’s involvement with young girls.
• Delores Gibson, a Chicago cop who was said to be married to a relative of the girl allegedly on the tape, ID’ed both Kelly and the girl as being on the tape.
• Simha Jamison, was a friend of the girl police say is on the tape; she said she and the girl met Kelly when they were about 12, and that her friend called Kelly “Godfather.” (She was identified that way on one of Kelly’s albums, as well.) She ID’ed Kelly and the girl on the tape.
• Jamison’s guardian, Peter Thomas, identified the girl as well.
• Stephanie “Sparkle” Edwards, the aunt of the girl allegedly on the tape, ID’ed the girl and Kelly.
• Bennie Edwards, Stephanie Edwards’ husband, ID’ed both.
• Tjada Burnett, a neighbor, identified the girl as being on the tape.
• Raven Gengler, a junior high classmate of the alleged girl on the tape, ID’ed the girl and Kelly.
• Lindsey Perryman, at the time Kelly’s personal assistant, ID’ed Kelly and the girl as being on the tape.
• Jacques Conway, a pastor, a retired police sergeant, and a neighbor of the girl alleged to be on the tape, ID’ed the girl.

———-

Previously in Hitsville:

Bad craziness at the R. Kelly trial?

At the R. Kelly trial, they do things they don’t do on Broadway!

Ever hear the one about the guy convicted of murdering his parents who asked for mercy because he was a orphan?

The NYT and R. Kelly: Curiouser and curiouser

The NYT finally notices R. Kelly isn’t a nice guy

R. Kelly and the NYT: The Freaky Defense

Tribune, Sun-Times protest closed hearings in R. Kelly case

Secret hearings in the R. Kelly case

The Godfather Who Shagged Me: The complete R. Kelly SexFacts™—Everything you ever wanted to know about the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly’s Publicist: He slept with my daughter!

For Immediate Release

FRANK RICH, WHO WRITES A WEEKLY COLUMN FOR
THE NEW YORK TIMES, SIGNS ON AS CREATIVE CONSULTANT TO HBO

NEW YORK, May 21, 2008 - Frank Rich has signed on as a creative consultant to HBO, it was announced today by Richard Plepler, co-president, and Michael Lombardo, president, programming group and west coast operations, HBO.

In this capacity, Rich will both initiate and help develop projects at the pay-TV network.

“Frank is one of the smartest and most astute observers of popular culture, and we are thrilled that we can call upon his judgment and superb instincts,” said Plepler and Lombardo.

Added Rich, “To my mind, HBO has always been the gold standard for some of the best work in television. I’m excited to be a part of this collaboration.”

Rich will recuse himself from writing about HBO and Time Warner in his weekly OpEd column, which is largely about politics and public affairs.

Just when you think the media and entertainment world can’t get any weirder, you get a press release like that in your inbox.

Traditionally, journalism stands opposed to the powers that be. Journalists get special privileges, and get them for a reason. In return, we don’t ask much of them. We ask them to be honest; to try to get the news out; to be, when faced with a choice, on the side of the reader.

Implicit in that agreement, heretofore, were some unspoken requests as well.

Like not having their hands out to one of the most powerful corporations on the globe.

Now, we are so far beyond that. Rich isn’t leaving the Times for HBO; he didn’t use his position on the Op-Ed page to wheedle a jump into the big bucks of the entertainment world. He’s going to continue to have one of the most powerful voices in media … and work for Time Warner at the same time.

The claim that he won’t write about Time Warner while writing about “politics and public affairs” is slightly preposterous. What about Time Warner’s competitors—the News Corp, Disney, Universal and GE, maybe Microsoft, or Apple? What about FCC decisions affecting the media industry? What about the subject of media consolidation generally?

TW isn’t a direct competitor of Fox, but the companies are definitely elbowing for advantage. The Times itself says that Fox News, at least, will be allowed to be a target for Rich:

In his column, Mr. Rich has rarely focused on any Time Warner property, and when he has, the results have not been flattering — for example, in 2006, he wrote scathingly of Time’s declaration of “You” as the person of the year, calling it an “editorial pratfall.”

But he frequently makes passing mention of various arms of Time Warner, including CNN and Time, and he has been a vocal critic of CNN’s primary competitor, Fox News Channel. Mr. Rich and [Times ed-page editor Thomas] Rosenthal said that for a political column, such material remains fair game.

I can’t envision where this will end—is every Times op-ed contributor going to have a sideline corporate gig? Maureen Dowd part of Oprah’s brain trust, David Brooks consulting with Blackwater, Thomas Friedman moonlighting with GM? Paul Krugman would be a good fit at the Gates Foundation. (”Krugman will recuse himself from writing about Bill Gates and Warren Buffet in his biweekly OpEd column, which is largely about economic issues.”)

Is this going to end well? You’d hope the Times’ public editor is going to go nuts, and I think people will justifiably wonder about an institution whose strongest independent voices are cutting deals with Big Content on the side.

Nikki Finke, oddly complaisant, has more here. The official Times story on the matter is here.

I realize the New York Times is an overused target; as I noted the other day, the paper does a lot of things well, and it’s just easy couch-potato action to sit on the sidelines and attack it for minor oversights.

But each day brings a new weirdness when it comes to the Times and R. Kelly.  As I have detailed here and here, the paper has invested an enormous amount of news space telling us how talented and funky and freaky R. Kelly is over the past six years, but has been comparatively parsimonious in space devoted to letting readers in on the full slate of the trouble he’s gotten himself into over that same time period.

Since this trouble involves being accused in about a dozen credible cases of sexually molesting young girls, at least three of these on film, that parsimony itself comes across as a little …. freaky.

The latest: In the national edition today, it ran a short blurb detailing the defense’s opening statement, and the news that the judge warned jurors they would soon be watching the videotape at the center of the case. The item attributed this news to the AP, since the Times apparently isn’t paying for anyone to cover the trial.

But the AP yesterday reported that jurors were actually shown the tape, which has been previously said to show Kelly having sex with the girl, asking her to urinate, and then urinating in her mouth, though the AP didn’t explain all of that to its readers, either.

I realize this is less tasteful than just saying Kelly is really “freaky,” but that happens sometimes. Isn’t the public showing of a such a film starring a name as big as Kelly news for the paper of record?
—————-

Previously in Hitsville:

The NYT finally notices R. Kelly isn’t a nice guy

R. Kelly and the NYT: The Freaky Defense

Tribune, Sun-Times protest closed hearings in R. Kelly case

Secret hearings in the R. Kelly case

The Godfather Who Shagged Me: The complete R. Kelly SexFacts™—Everything you ever wanted to know about the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly’s Publicist: He slept with my daughter!

The NYT takes a look at what R. Kelly has been accused of today.

It’s the first time that I’m aware the paper has told readers that he’s accused of filming himself urinating on a girl police say was 13 or 14 at the time, though the paper has told us numerous times what a wacky, funky guy he is. (This was Kelefa Sanneh’s celebrated “Freaky Defense,” detailed by Hitsville here. )

The Times is an extraordinary place, of course, and it’s easy to pick on it for the few things it doesn’t do well. But as I wrote there, it has not distinguished itself with its coverage of this matter, and I thought the article today, besides being a full six years late, was more than a little flip.

It began by saying that charging Kelly with making child porn rather than child molestation was comparable to the prosecution of another fabled Chicago name, Al Capone, on income tax evasion rather than being a “murderous gangster.”

Isn’t that a cheap comparison? Child porn is a serious charge. Kelly could be sentenced up to 15 years and a conviction would mark him as a sex offender, which presumably would scotch a good part of his concert career. It’s not like they went after him for jaywalking.

(Also, the comparison would be more apt if the Times had never told readers that Capone was a murderous gangster, or had largely focused, in its coverage of him, on his fine public speaking skills.)

Then the story says:

That the girl in question, who might have been as young as 13 when the tape was made, is now a woman is one hurdle for the state’s case. A bigger problem is that she has consistently denied being on the tape. Saying this is a criminal case without a victim, some legal experts already smell a fiasco.

“The girl will take the stand and say, ‘It’s not me,’ ” said Leonard L. Cavise, a professor at DePaul University’s College of Law. “If she is in any way a credible witness, and the prosecution does not have evidence she’s been bought off, how can that fail to cause a reasonable doubt?”

To get around this complication, prosecutors are expected to introduce witnesses who will attest that it is indeed she on the tape, as well as a woman who reportedly will say that, when she too was under age, she had sex with Mr. Kelly and the girl.

But, as other news reports have taken the time to note, Cook County apparently has dozens of witnesses to testify that it is she; and I don’t think it would be hard for a jury to discount the girl’s testimony under the circumstances. (The prosecution would presumably also have contemporary photos of her to introduce as evidence.)

The story continues:

“This is a very weird case,” Mr. Cavise said. “It makes Chicago look like a laughingstock. It’s as if they said, ‘Let’s spend millions of dollars and six years, shut down an important courtroom, cause a media circus and end up either convicting him of nothing at all or on some charge that has nothing to do with what you really should get him on if he’s guilty: sex with children.’ ”

I am unclear as to why using a courtroom to try a criminal case is something that makes a city a laughingstock.

(I think this is one of those newfangled, postmodern “legal studies” critiques of the criminal justice system.)

In reality, Cavise is just engaging in cable news-style sophistry, and his comments don’t deserve to be in a serious news story.  The reason the state is going after Kelly on child porn charges is that it seems to be the smart gambit when the victim won’t testify. It could be it allows the state to say a girl was involved rather than this girl. And it’s not true that child porn has nothing to do with the case.I haven’t read anything that details what the standard of proof is on child pornography, but I would bet that there are some guys doing hard time on less evidence than a high-quality video starring themselves.* The jury could certainly convict Kelly on the evidence of the tape if they are convinced the girl, whoever she is, was underage.

(Question for further research: Aren’t there laws about getting actors’ legal age on record in the porn industry? Can’t the state just challenge Kelly to prove that the girl is of legal age? Am I the first person who’s thought of that? )

This issue of why it has taken so long to bring Kelly to trial is a separate one, which the NYT doesn’t do a good job of explaining either. The Chicago Tribune did a piece several years back looking at the delay from the point of view o the prosecutor’s ofice, but didn’t find any answers. In the years since, a series of snafus and accidents befalling participants have drawn it out further.

* Though they of course would have lacked Kelly’s legal resources, which as history has shown will probably be the deciding factor in the case. That’s another thing the NYT story didn’t mention.

—————-

Previously in Hitsville:

R. Kelly and the NYT: The Freaky Defense

Tribune, Sun-Times protest closed hearings in R. Kelly case

Secret hearings in the R. Kelly case

The Godfather Who Shagged Me: The complete R. Kelly SexFacts™—Everything you ever wanted to know about the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly’s Publicist: He slept with my daughter!

Every once in a while, NPR or PBS finds itself the target of critics who accuse it of violating some broadcast or journalistic standard. A lot of the time, neither company has anything to do with the transgression in question.

Two recent web exposés about public broadcasting illustrate some weaknesses in the way the public radio and public TV industries operate—and define themselves. This is a issue that creates very real PR problems for well-respected institutions like PBS and NPR.

It has a very simple solution, too, but weird imbalances in the systems mean that it’s unlikely it ever will be fixed.

Salon has an exposé of a show run widely on public television stations across the country. It’s about a guy who has a self-produced TV show partly about how to “prevent” Alzheimer’s disease. The Salon writer, a neurologist, says that medicine doesn’t know how to avoid or prevent Alzheimer’s and that the measures the show promotes aren’t proven.

Meanwhile, Slate last week attacked a public radio series called “The Infinite Mind.” The writers charged that the show’s producers used experts who had various financial connections to drug companies.

You can read the stories yourself and judge them on their merits.

I’m more interested in how both displayed an ignorance of the structure of the public television and public radio industries. The Salon story mentioned PBS in the lede; the Slate story mentioned NPR in the lede. But neither organization had anything to do with the creation of the story under attack. (I have a trifecta of a disclosure here—I used to work for, and am close to people who work at, NPR, Salon, and Slate.)

PBS, for example, doesn’t produce programs and doesn’t quote unquote own or control any stations: It just funds certain programs, mostly through prominent stations in large cities. It didn’t fund the show in question. Public TV stations are independent entities and decide on their own what to run. Generally any given station’s most popular shows are PBS-funded stuff like “The NewsHour” and “Antiques Roadshow,” but what the station runs the rest of the day comes from a variety of different sources.

In the public radio world, NPR status is different from PBS’s in the public TV world in all sorts of ways: It was formed by public radio stations to supply news programming. The division of the company called “NPR News” (which is where I used to work) creates and produces actual news shows, like “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition.” Over the years the parent company has taken on many technical and engineering responsibilities for the public radio world, and among other things it also syndicates, but doesn’t control or produce, certain other boutique operations, like popular interview shows featuring Terry Gross or Diane Rehm, and “Car Talk.”

(But not “This America Life” or “Prairie Home Companion,” produced by which originated out of an effective competitor to NPR’s syndication arm, Public Radio International.)

(Don’t even ask me about APM; that’s where things get really complicated.)

The public radio world is based on independent, local control of stations. NPR has zero effective control over what any station does. I don’t mean that in a coy way: NPR can’t and doesn’t exercise control over any public radio station, period.

The brand “NPR” looms large—many people refer to their “local NPR station.” But that’s nonetheless a meaningless thing to say, because there is no such thing. In fact, NPR’s relationship to the station is essentially that of the Associated Press’s to most newspapers. The Memphis Commercial Appeal might run a lot of NYT wire copy, but that doesn’t make it an “New York Times paper.”

But NPR’s branding of those famous NPR News shows are effective, and listeners probably don’t notice when the stations themselves describe the connection slightly differently—they will generally use the term “NPR member station.”

In other words, PBS is a sugar daddy. NPR is a wire service. Neither are networks, in the CBS or NBC sense of the term.

But this is lost on listeners, and many journalists.

PBS ombudsman Michael Getler writes here about the Salon article. He makes the same point about PBS branding that I just did about NPR’s; that when the letters “PBS” loom so large on the screen on some shows, listeners can be forgiven for not making a distinction when the letters are absent.

NPR’s ombudsman, Alicia Shepard, who began after I left and whom I’ve never met, has her take on the brouhaha prompted by the Slate article here. I think her article is muddled and seems not to have had an editor, so it’s hard to figure out its position.

NPR’s connection to the independent show slammed in the Slate story is slightly complicated. The show ran on many public radio stations, but was not produced or distributed by NPR. But the show was picked up and run on one of the two NPR stations on the Sirius satellite service.

These carry the NPR brand, but are to some extent stepchildren. (The NPR member stations don’t want the big-draw shows they fund, like “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” on satellite, because it could draw listeners away from terrestrial outlets.)

Among other things, Shepard’s column doesn’t make this distinction clear; nor does it tell readers who in NPR is actually responsible for programming the Sirius channels. Shepard does quote my former colleague Margaret Low Smith, who says the sensible and correct thing:

“If we are going to put a show up on our Sirius service, our expectation is it will live up to NPR standards and if it doesn’t, it can become an issue.”

That said, it should also be said this is a hugely minor issue. The NYT owns a lot of smaller papers; if the Santa Rosa Press Democrat runs a Sunday wire feature that comes under attack for its use of sources, it’s important, and should be dealt with, but it’s not suddenly a “New York Times story.”

I think it’s a mark of how ineffective both the PBS and NPR ombudsmen are that neither make the obvious recommendation: Both public radio and public TV stations should just make it a habit to run periodic public service-style announcements that explain, in trenchant, conversational language, how the system works. (There’s a response from PBS’s Michael Getler here.)

The odd balance of power in both worlds, however, make this unlikely. The people responsible in each of those stories are the individual station programmers who ran them. But it’s the national brands that suffer when problems like this come to light. NPR can’t run a legend during “All Things Considered” that says, in effect, “Hey, this is an NPR News show; don’t hold us responsible for the other crazy stuff this station runs during the rest of the broadcast day.”

Jack Shafer at Slate wanders through the Rauchenberg obits and finds that few had anything but good to say about the influential painter’s careeer.

The solemn tributes to Robert Rauschenberg in today’s newspapers prove that you’re more likely to encounter an independent mind operating in the sports pages than the arts section. Hoisting his reputation high and escorting it into paradise, critics from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Wall Street Journal write as if toeing the correct line handed down by some cultural commissar.

To the Journal’s Barbara Rose, he’s “the biggest innovator in art after Jackson Pollock.” The Los Angeles Times‘ Christopher Knight regards Rauschenberg (along with collaborator Jasper Johns) as “the most important American artist to emerge into prominence in the 1950s.” The Chicago Tribune’s Alan G. Artner writes that Rauschenberg “was one of the most influential artists in the second half of the 20^th Century.” The New York Times‘ Michael Kimmelman salutes the artist for having “time and again reshaped art in the 20^th century” and for giving “new meaning to sculpture.” Even mild dissenter Blake Gopnik of the Post, who no longer likes Rauschenberg’s Combines as much as he once did, acknowledges the man as a “master” and the maker of “some of the most influential art of the past 50 years.”

Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott of the NYT, in a joint bylined article from Cannes, give a shout-out to those disappearing film critics. Speaking of the fest, they say that “the excitement is tempered by a sense that those films are facing unusually difficult prospects back in the United States.”

Tempered excitement on the Riviera! Those poor people. Anyway, here’s one of the things doing the tempering:

The number of film critics writing for traditional print outlets has thinned dramatically in the last year as media companies face shrinking revenues and uncertain futures. Whereas big-budget commercial releases can almost always buy a solid opening weekend at the box office with wall-to-wall publicity and advertising, smaller films depend greatly on the support of critics to find their audiences. That’s especially true these days, with so many films opening theatrically — more than 600 titles in 2007—and competing for a seemingly shrinking audience.

The disappearing film critic is one of those memes that’s been floating around for the past year or so. But all the commotion about it doesn’t make sense. There are a number of things going on.

1) Critics have been disappearing for a long time. Dailies across the country have been cutting back on both film-writer positions and film coverage newsprint space for a decade. The New Times chain, now totaling nearly 20 alternative papers, has moved almost entirely to national critics. (I helped set up the beginnings of that system more than 10 years ago.) Yet art films have been doing quite well in that period; look at the Academy Award nominations for the last three years.

2) This doesn’t take into account the tsunamis of writing about film on the web. Some of it is silly, but a lot of it is substantive, but by any measure there are oceans more intelligent writing about film available to normal people than there was ten years ago.

3) With the rise of companies like Amazon and Netflix, more indie and art films are available to more people than ever before as well. (And let’s not forget the effects of the intermittently useful reader reviews on Amazon and elsewhere.) But of course, that (and No. 2) brings up the difficult issue of …

4) … consumer choice. Life is great for movie fans… you can get the movies you want when you want them, and there’s a lot of places to get advice on what to watch. What Dargis and Scott are talking about is one teeny-tiny slice of the pie right now: The slice, from the studios point of view, that used to feature folks in de facto monopolistic positions (i.e., daily newspaper film critics) speaking to voluntary recipients of hegemonic information delivery systems (i.e., daily newspaper subscribers) via actual recommendations published on pressed paper pulp (i.e., free publicity on newsprint).

Yes, those days are indeed gone, but who cares? Indeed, as the pair say in that same paragraph, there are oceans more traditionally released films in the U.S. as well. Kind of a puzzle, isn’t it? You gotta figure the distributors are trying to make a buck; it’s counterintuitive that they would they release more movies if, as Dargis and Scott imply, the audience is shrinking. (I’m sorry— “seemingly” shrinking.)

This really comes down to a minor marketing problem for the folks in the art film publicity game. Tell them to call Starbucks; over time they will learn how to market their films effectively to an empowered audience. The rest of us are doing fine.

——–

Previously in Hitsville:

The year of the disappearing film critics
More on the disappearing film critics 

Here are the hedlines of todays “Arizona Living” section of the Arizona Republic, the metro daily of Phoenix:

“Wooden Memories”
“Test your hearing”
“Free burrito for teachers”
“Post office food drive”
“Fight Crohn’s and colitis”
“Mom and Estában”
“Healthful salsa non-guilty pleasure”
“Great gifts for teachers”

I’m not going to bore you with what the stories and blurbs were about, other than to note that the big lede spread feature was the first one, “Wooden Memories” (titled differently online), which was about how some people really like holding on to those wood-shop projects they made in high school and which may have been, from that majestic hedline on down, possibly the most boring story ever written. (I can’t say, because I couldn’t read the whole thing.)

The page is a clear example of a key part of what’s wrong with newspapers. Arrogance is part of it, of course; the people putting the paper out every day just don’t give a rat’s ass about the folks who are buying it. And they don’t go out of their way to tell them anything interesting or useful.

But the real problem is the flip side of that: Timidity. It’s clear that everyone involved long ago had any bit of originality or innovation beaten out of them. They know that they can’t go wrong producing and designing the page to appeal to some imaginary doddering grandmother, so they scour the day’s press releases and then sit around and brainstorm to zero in on the bloodless, the trivial, and the utterly mundane.*

In this context, their attention to detail in this quest is indefatigable. Inside there’s a story about the “Guru of Grand Canyon hikers,” which is as clichéd as you’d imagine, and, most impressively, a short filler AP item (”Jump-start day sweetly, swiftly”) about how the Tootsie Roll company has a new product: “Maxxed Energy Pops, a cleverly packed energy drink in the form of a lollipop.” It’s almost hard to believe that life forms above the level of a somewhat dense tree sloth took part in the selection, editing, hed-writing and publishing of that piece of prose.

I love newspapers (I get three a day, not counting Variety), but it’s hard to love an organization that is working that hard to make itself irrelevant. And Phoenix, by the way, is now the fifth-largest city in the country; it’s odd how the sun-belt cities that now make up fully half of the top ten biggest cities in the country have not yet managed to distinguish themselves journalistically. I assume the Houston (fourth) Chronicle is a not-insignificant operation, but you don’t hear much about the papers in San Diego (sixth), San Antonio (seventh), and Dallas (eighth).

*In all fairness, incompetence plays a part as well, on the part of the top editors, who don’t make the section editors put out an interesting product; to the section editors, who are of course deserve the biggest blame; and the reporters who write the crap. In the case of the wooden shop projects, if someone put a gun to your head and said do some journalism on this subject, you would of course run a few photos of an inelegant but beloved footstool or two, add a quote or two from their defiant owners, and then refer people to the web, where you could run a photo gallery and invite readers to send in their own pictures. The relative benefits to that approach are obvious, but of course when the alternative is running a story that no one in the sentient universe would read (indeed, a story that virtually screams, “Why are you paying money to have this crummy newspaper delivered to your home?”), the same could be said about hitting yourself on the head with a hammer.