The Year in Review: 2004

The holidays aren't officially "the holidays" without the dogmatic annual performance of certain seasonal rituals—i.e., fruitcake recycling, misanthropy-inducing office parties, and the wearing of sweaters decorated with cartoon reindeer by people who are, by all objective indicators, older than 12. But if you work in or anywhere near the media industry, the granddaddy of all assiduously performed seasonal rituals is the composition of annual "end of the year" list—or more often than not, lists. They're completely predictable, yet people generally (choose one: like them/pretend to like them/ostensibly read them), so far be it from us to avoid doing them—no matter how much we're tempted. We wouldn't want to deprive you of your annual dosage of Bests, Worsts, and Predictions For Next Year.

We begin our Holiday-Affirming Ritual End of The Year Package with "The Year in Review"—a look at this year's developments in media that caused us to sit up and take notice, (or at the very least, remain slouched in our seats while scratching our heads in a puzzled fashion.) Here are things we noticed, at any rate:

The Rise of Newsertainment

Or enternewsment. Whichever you prefer. Statistically speaking, the most powerful broadcast news anchor in America may be Jon Stewart, given that more 18-to-34-year-olds got their news from The Daily Showduring the Democratic and Republican conventions than from any one of the cable news networks. This changes the meaning of "broadcast news anchor," but more importantly, it may possibly change the meaning of "news."

The Unwitting Photojournalist

Would the news-consuming public know about the atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib if digital cameras and email didn't exist? Possibly, but not likely. Affordable, user-friendly technologies have made documentarians of the masses, with some unexpected results. The predictable surge in cat pictures on the Internet is somewhat redeemed by the availability of photos of people, events, and places that working journalists can't access. And the increasing ubiquity of those technologies (cell phone/camera combos, disposable digital cameras, etc.) guarantees that the volume of photos and films produced will only grow and that some of the most newsworthy images of our time will be inevitably be created by people who never intended them to have any journalistic use.

Citizen Journalist, Redefined

Thanks to j-school wonks like Jay Rosen, the moniker "citizen journalist" may be most commonly associated with bloggers, but when Chattanooga Times Free Press reporter Lee Pitts used military personnel to ask Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about armor shortages in Iraq, the concept manifested itself more directly. It's the journalist's job to ask questions, and for bloggers, "asking questions" typically means "raising issues." For these guys, it literally meant asking questions.

The Counterintuitively Promotional Bad Review

Film critic Roger Ebert called Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny "the worst film in the history of [Cannes]". That was high praise compared to some of the other reviews the movie received. (The Chicago Tribune: "Fascinatingly bad". Film Journal International: "Has to be the most excruciatingly long and dull cinematic excuse for a gratuitous sex scene ever perpetuated". Miami Herald: "Worthless, a work of colossal self-indulgence.") Yet people went to see it. Why? Because they wanted to know how horrible it really was, proving the age-old media dictum that all publicity is good publicity. It's the eight-year-old's approach to media consumption: Someone says, "Hey, do you want to see something really gross?" and you invariably say yes because the curiosity would kill you if you didn't.

The Jerry Springer-ization of Celebrity Journalism

Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton are proof that the public appetite for celebrity has shifted from the merely decadent to the decadent and slightly trashy. Sex tapes, underage chain-smoking, and husbands who are unable to keep their overly baggy pants up or on are no longer PR liabilities, and the media's capacity for generating stories about them is seemingly limitless. The celebrities used to be valuable because they made normal people feel inadequate. Now they make normal people feel smug, and there's no apparent difference in terms of commercial value. According to the mathematics of buzz, Britney > squeaky clean Mandy Moore, and if everyone starts heaving furniture at each other, it'll only get better.

The Big Media Mogul as Underdog

Only Michael Eisner could turn Harvey Weinstein into a sympathetic figure. ("Maybe it really was his sugar intake," we tell ourselves with a startling lack of incredulity.) The infamously bad-tempered and occasionally violent head of Miramax turned into a big teddy bear overnight when he became the underdog in a fight with someone just as bad, but economically more powerful. Eisner's semi-permanent sneer and overweening management style already reinforce the suspicion that Disney may actually be as evil as everyone secretly thinks it is, but the extra nastiness vis-a-vis Weinstein adds to the surreality and conceptual creepiness of a multinational conglomerate that is best known for mass manufacturing feel-good pop culture, promoted chiefly by a cartoon rodent.

The Big Media Blogger (No Longer An Oxymoron)

James Wolcott has a blog. Keith Olbermann has a blog. And it's only a matter of time before Christopher Hitchens has a blog and Blogger.com implodes because it wasn't designed to handle that much output. The blogging format made its name by allowing non-media people to critique big media, and big media responded—how else?—by starting its own blogs. The motivations are, of course, different. The former started blogging because they wanted more exposure, and the latter started blogging because they wanted more distribution. But regardless, the blog/big media dichotomy is proving to be a false one.

The Tyrannical Minority

The FCC slapped Fox with a $1.2 million obscenity fine in October following an airing of reality show Married By America that it deemed "sexually suggestive," citing 159 letters of complaint. As it turns out 157 of the complaints were identical form letters generated by the same organization. The number of complaints doesn't affect the merits of those complaints and 159 complaints isn't an obvious popular mandate, but three letters would have certainly been less likely to get the FCC's attention.

The Collective Forensic Investigation

The aggregate number of Selectric aficionados in the United States is probably not significant, but they all came out of the woodwork to make Dan Rather's life much more difficult in September. A small army of self-appointed forensic experts analyzed the Bush National Guard memos until there was nothing left to analyze and posted the results for the benefits of the public and the journalists who had failed to do the same thing themselves.

The Investigative Rebuttal

When accused of having an affair with then-presidential-candidate John Kerry, ex-Kerry intern Alex Polier did what most wrongly-accused parties would do—she issued a denial. A 6,500 word denial that ran in the pages of New York magazine. If the affair was a "he said, she said," situation, she not only said; she investigated and reported in excruciating detail. Polier tracked down her accuser, chronicled the events that led to her accusation, and ultimately found vindication by using reportage against a bad reporter.

Burger King Media

The fragmentation of mainstream media has resulted in a plethora of choices for you, the media consumer, should you wish to Have It Your Way. And more and more people do. The success of Fox News and the impetus for the creation of Air America imply that a sizable constituency of news consumers prefer news that reflects their personal biases. As indie stations, blogs, and other alternative press outlets multiply, there is, increasingly, something for everyone. Consumers can pick and choose and never have to deal with pesky alternative viewpoints.

The Takedown Piece That Wasn't

When the L.A. Times reported that Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter had received payment from Brian Grazer for consulting on a film that the magazine later covered, the media industry collectively gasped. Fortunately for Mr. Carter, it was the sort of gasp that immediately precedes a long, back-arching yawn. Despite the well-publicized investigative efforts of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times, Mr. Carter's reputation remained intact, and may have even acquired an aura of invincibility for the damage conspicuously not done.

The Artificial Critic

The worrisome ongoing popularity of boy bands and reality TV appears to indicate that America has become completely tolerant of artificially manufactured celebrities and the supposed entertainment they produce. So while Sony's assumption that the public would be equally tolerant of an artificially manufactured entertainment critic turned out to be erroneous, you can sort of understand why they'd make that mistake. (Perhaps they thought the viewing public's rampant buying of bullshit was indicative of a larger untapped market for sale of the same.) When magazines written (essentially) by advertisers are flying off the newsstands, it's hard to argue with the underlying logic of creating media specifically for the promotion of products. Nonetheless: Bad Sony! Bad, bad Sony!

The Accurate Conspiracy Theory

There are a number of vocal right-wingers who think New York Times reporters get top-down editorial directives about how and where to insert liberal bias into Times articles. And there are a number of vocal leftists who think New York Times reporters get top-down editorial directives (usually from the Bush administration) detailing how and where to insert right-wing bias into Times articles. But as anyone who has written for the Times will tell you, there are no centralized editorial directives, period. Systematic insertion of bias of any sort would entail a level of organization and consistency that the Times simply does not have. Recent events in the Ukraine, however, are a kick-in-the-head reminder that journalism-by-dictatorial-mandate does exist elsewhere. The government's sinister use of "temnyks" ("instructions to editorial offices as to how certain subjects should be covered") and violent enforcement was only recently curtailed by mass protests and international involvement.

Anything we missed? Send glaring omissions to elizabeth AT mediabistro DOT com.