Dear Tucker:
Whoa! The opening graf of my last dispatch wasn’t in the least meant to be stinging. By “I tend to forget who owns you. …” I only meant you-the-Standard, not you-the-guy. It never crossed my mind that this could be construed as a criticism. I don’t have much difficulty, in my own life, separating my larger thoughts about whether media conglomeration is a bad thing for the free flow of information in a democracy from the reality that someone’s gotta write me checks. This has its uncomfortable moments, which will probably increase in frequency as everything converges toward the Internet porn industry, which will apparently end up owning everything. But geez, Tucker, of course you didn’t want to write ill of Rupert Murdoch, and if I’d had my wits about me I wouldn’t have invited you to. In my book, that doesn’t make either of us a weasel.
And I can’t even pretend that my warm recommendation of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal piece was part of a larger principled objection to Murdoch as a businessman or Corruptor of Journalism. It’s unclear to me that keeping the New York Post alive is a huge gift to humanity, and I think it’s vicious as often as it’s lively. But I give him a lot of credit for funding the Standard, which I read with huge pleasure, despite almost never agreeing with anything I read there. (I would read it for Andy Ferguson’s book criticism alone.) No, I was just enjoying a juicy read–an impulse that Murdoch of all people knows something about. I don’t think that a pragmatic tact about the people who pay us requires that we all high-mindedly refrain from laughing (if only in private) at their midlife black turtlenecks.
On another subject entirely, which circles back in a way to that anti-drug ad we were talking about yesterday, the Journal (again with the Journal! I’m starting to worry that I should be working in more plugs for my paymasters at the WaPo) has a front-pager about the new move on college campuses to abandon the scare tactics with which they’ve tried in the past to discourage binge drinking and promote instead the idea of moderate drinking. This issue has been covered elsewhere and poses an interesting question. The last story I read about it offered some pretty persuasive evidence that all the ads about binge drinking tended to persuade students that binge drinking was the norm and that students, being a suggestible bunch, behaved accordingly. On the other hand, promoting moderate drinking obviously signals resignation to the reality of underage drinking.
But the Journal piece has a new wrinkle, which is that the booze industry is now cozying up to universities–the University of Virginia is the story’s main guinea pig–with funding for the new programs, which go by the icky name of “social norms marketing.” The dean of students at UVa is quoted as saying, “We could have a very interesting conversation about what [Anheuser’s] motives are. But I guess I’m a pragmatist.” (Gee, maybe this isn’t another subject entirely after all.)
I guess I’m with the Florida State University official who says, “In the end, you end up working for Budweiser and giving them publicity.” So up with the new experiments in subtler advertising; down with industry funding. What do you say?
Soberly,
Marjorie
