Is Jon And Kate Plus Eight The Future Of Journalism?
Are you sick of reality “stars” Jon and Kate Gosselin? Probably. But that’s not going to stop the media from writing about them, since they apparently just discovered the story, and in a room in Minnesota, some news types are wringing their hands over missing it for so long.
Andy Borowitz helped us step into Dimension X when he wrote earlier this week about a University of Minnesota School of Journalism conference, in which some serious self-doubt commenced over whether or not media organisations have managed covering the Jon and Kate saga proficiently:
“You open the New York Times, and what do you see?” said Davis Logsdon, Dean of Minnesota’s journalism school. “Kim Jong-Il, Sonia Sotomayor — but not a word about Jon and Kate.”
Mr. Logsdon said that if the media continued to ignore important stories like Jon and Kate, “they will continue their slide into irrelevance.”
His umbrella positioning and bizarre ass-backwards logic about why the media’s becoming irrelevant aside, he’s right: there are important issues to cover regarding this thing. Child labour laws – which the show is currently being investigated over – childrens’ mental health care issues, the distinction of labour laws as they pertain to “reality” television programming, maybe even something on what it’s like to insure eight kids, and how insurance companies view the parents and surrounding factors as variables and liabilities. Another one of the panel’s attendees was thinking of something slightly different:
Tracy Klugian, who heads the centre for Reality Show Media Studies, said that the media are leaving major questions unanswered: “Is Jon really having a fling with the 23-year-old schoolteacher? And what about Kate and the bodyguard? The American people look to the media to investigate these issues, and the fact that they haven’t done their job is a scandal.”
Or, in other words: if we don’t get on this Jon and Kate thing now, journalism’s fucked!
Now, yes, this is just some assclown in a room saying assclownish things. But there’re a few pretty frightening elements about this, chief among them being that (1) they’re telling budding writers to pen Jon and Kate stories under the pretenses that the people need to know those things, which is ridiculous – if the New York Times should write about Jon and Kate, at the most craven level, it’s because of the SEO traffic; and (2) this is an actual journalism school, teaching actual students how to go about working as actual, real (!) journalists. Someone’s getting hosed, and whether it’s the Nu Class themselves or the readers of whatever papers these kids get farmed out to has yet to be seen.
Meanwhile, people other than supermarket tabloids (and us) are actually starting to write about Jon and Kate. The aforementioned story about the show being investigated for labour law violations is a start in the right direction, and the New York Post recently made some decent – if not, tabloid-flavored – attempts at putting together a coherent picture of the perks said “reality” stars are getting as well as devoting a recent wide-eyed 2,100 words to documenting the phenomenon (that manages to get the headline wrong and heartily begin with an H.L. Mencken quote).
Elsewhere, however: the New York Times’ Gail Collins thinks the TV show is a bad idea, wow, the HuffPo has conspiracy theories, and Michael Wolff is off doing other batshit things, like comparing Jon and Kate to Sonia Sotomayor, which I can’t even begin to explain.
Insert any ideals about journalism you might have here: there’s a story to be had, a real scoop, something that the public wants to know about Jon and Kate that we haven’t been given yet that actually resembles something that isn’t a cross-section of an actual news organisation and TMZ. Maybe that’s why the Jon and Kate story really is important to the media: it’s one giant test being taken as we speak that’s going to dictate what’s news and what isn’t. And people want the news, right?
Probably not. Here’s Jon shopping at Barney’s. Here’s the family on vacation. Here’s a body-language expert talking about how sad Kate is. And here’s the story about the show not going anywhere, anytime soon. That’s not the worst part: while the lifestyle, Kate’s hair, and Jon’s “job” might be fake, the kids are real. And it will continue to look this ugly from every. Single. Angle. Imagine how they feel. Christ.
- Next Post: Afternoon Victory: A Winning Lottery Ticket »
- « Previous Post: A Pervert’s Communism, Whitney Port’s Aestheticism
Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
@minou: As usual, you are the voice of reason.
Why are all these people complaining about grammar and pageview-whoring when what we really need to talk more about is Kate's hair? This woman's hair perhaps the most powerful and concise statement on contemporary American culture and values that I have ever seen. It's stupendous, her hair. And tragic.
"...which the show is currently being investigated over."
PUHLEEZ don't dangle the damn preposition.
You wouldn't be regurgitating this story for some traffic yourself now, right? Yeah. Thought so.
I've asked this question before and I've even tried to google it but how do these people (and others, like Little People, Big World and WorkOut etc) GET a reality show. I mean who knows them and decides, this would look good on TV. Do they submit themselves to a station. I'm not clear on who finds them and how.
@AcerbaFemina: I watched it, and have ceased to watch it, as things have gotten out of control. The show was on peacefully for years without this sort of attention. It was a nice show and it was fun to watch the kids do things. You're right, this kind of attention IS pointless.
@persimmon: Damn, Gina.
Gonkette
If this were the '80s, you would know Andy Borowitz as a sitcom writer who wrote for "Square Pegs" and "The Facts of Life," and especially as the guy who created "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. (And if you're wondering how someone can monetarily afford to spend his life as a print satirist, that's how.)
His screenplay Dinner for Schmucks is reportedly in production with Austin Powers / Meet the Parents director Jay Roach and stars Steve Carell and Paul Rudd. So, there's that, too.
@Moff: I'll just throw out this related thought and then we'll pretend this never happened: Huffington Post sometimes does an awful job of writing headlines and properly noting what's satire and what's serious. I only ask that a website/blog give me an inkling of what the story's about, so I don't waste my time clicking on a piece in which I have no interest. In this way, Huffpo is like an effin' college paper, but lazier.
Awesome X
I'd add a witty comment but the comment God will decide it is lame and it will vanish. So since this will be deleted anyway I'll be concise: Kate rules, Jon drools.
PrunellaCreon
The irony here is what you yourself wrote a couple of posts ago, when accusing other outlets of sub-par work (a post in which, by the way, you got several details wrong, but whatever):
Hopefully, none of the reporting on it will continue to be as grandstanding, shoddy, and scoop-happy as some of this. It really doesn't help.
Glass houses and all ...
@Moff: See, we all thank our lucky stars for the existence of Google, in our own ways.
@Moff: Assumptions make an ass out of you and me, as the obnoxious idiom goes, but it's fair to say that he probably does exist somewhere out there.
@Foster Kamer: I totally wouldn't have realized it was fake, because I didn't read it that closely, if I hadn't Googled Klugian because I wanted to see if he or she lived close enough to me for me to hit her with a board with a nail in it.
@pfft: Couldn't agree more on all counts. I've updated the post to reflect my fuckup and the philosophical sadness about this.
Can they just shut the hell up about Jon and Kate Gosselin? They're just media whores looking for attention. Just cause you have multiple kids doesn't mean you have to exploit them. Whatever happened to letting your kids be kids? Did anyone even WATCH this show before this controversy? It's pointless. Seriously.
AcerbaFemina
@skahammer: Well, I did, as evidenced below. But dude, I know you've spent a fair amount of time on the Internet, so you know that my presumptions about the average intelligence of many readers are not unfair.
People don't notice shit. People fail to notice shit even when it's spelled out for them, in big block letters, with surprising frequency. And people especially fail to notice fake shit when it looks exactly the same as real shit. And people don't read to the bottom, and people immediately jump to insane conclusions, and further, every day people are quoted in real news stories saying things just as ridiculous as in this one. These are just facts of being people.
I don't think HuffPo is doing anything wrong. I just don't think this helps them gain any credibility.
@Foster Kamer: No worries. Moving on.
Speaking of "journalism", clicking on Borowitz's name reveals that his other headlines include
"Student ejected from national spelling bee for using spellcheck"
"Palin-Prejean alliance predicted in Book of Revelations"
"NBC to Produce Just One Episode of Jay Leno Show; Will Rerun It Until Someone Notices"
...and no record of any recent conference on the Minnesota Journalism school site.
[www.sjmc.umn.edu]
Looks like you should have had an extra coffee with brunch today. On the other hand, that this could have been taken seriously is a good (bad) sign of the desperate and flailing state of the media right now.
pfft
@Pareene's thing. I wouldn't have pegged Vice readers to be so damn earnest.
@Moff: You guys are both right. Running an update now. It came up on my feed as news! And the thing does - and actually could - read as news. Which, yeah: kinda fucked up.
@ladeedah: I know, but anyone with a couple weeks' experience in print or online media knows that a single tag, listed among a dozen others, doesn't stand out enough to clue a lot of readers in. It just doesn't. And it's not fair to blame the readers -- it's a responsible news outlet's job to distinguish very clearly when something is fake, and any editor worth their salt knows what a capacity readers have for failing to notice things (particularly when they're not expecting to be fooled) and compensates for it.
If a satire falls in the forest and nobody hears it, is it still satire?
belltolls
@Moff: I quote to you the article's kicker:
"Us magazine has been on top of 'Jon and Kate' from the very beginning," Mr. Logsdon said. "But they can't do it alone."
That wouldn't convince you to at least Google a name or two as backup?
@SarahHeartburn: Although now that I think about it, perhaps it might be interesting to meditate for just a moment on what would cause someone to be so eager to miss the joke and take this patently absurd story seriously.
A Cultural-Revolution-style "self-criticism" might be just the ticket for a slow spring Sunday.
@skahammer: I think it was a reasonable mistake to make, though. The article isn't marked as comedy except in the tags, it's (sadly) not implausible, and Andy Borowitz isn't anywhere close to well known enough that one should automatically know anything under his byline is satire.
@Moff: One of the tags on the article is "Comedy News". I think that even they knew this was satire.
@skahammer: En masse. For good.
SarahHeartburn
@Meretrix: Yes, spending twenty seconds Googling "Davis Logsdon" will reveal who's getting punk'd here.
We should probably just move on from here.
Google tracy klugian, and what comes up are a bunch of Andy Borowitz articles citing a person with that name (or "Tracy Klujian") as a source, but with a different job and location every time.
Which struck me at first as Possibly Scandalous. But then I looked closer, and he's a humor writer. Pretty sure the Jon & Kate story is satire, Foster. It's certainly not especially distinguishable as such, though -- great work, HuffPo!
Uh, isn't Borowitz a parody writer, a la "The Onion"? I assumed all his quotes in this story were deliberately faked.
Never seen it. Never will.
I love Jon and Kate; they did some work on our last fission weapon.
the_illmatic
Here's an Op-Ed proposal for the Times: How sending Jon + Kate to North Korea as punishment for its nuclear testing will bring Kim Jong Il's regime to its knees.
Though, I suspect that Kim rather likes Kate's hair since he rocks the semi-bouffant himself.
If Mady did not fight with her brothers and sisters, her parents would still be happily married. Journalism would be healthy and strong because Jon and Kate plus the eight would be happy. Pennsylvania would not be spending money investigating the show.
Of course if Mady acted like a good little girl, her parents may not have sought out fertility treatments, leading to sextuplets and the show.
The show should continue if it is Jon & Kate plus seven plus another one, named Mady, who is in reform school in North Dakota.
I blame Mady.
Peggy:Prostitution Whore
@VoxPopuli: We could trade them for Lisa Ling's sister +1.