By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 25, 2006
I love practically everything about being wired.
I like being able to click on newspapers from around the world, see bloggers smack each other around, Google any person or thing that pops into my brain, watch news videos (and some stupid stuff, too) on YouTube, and generally surf till I drop.
But while I hook up my laptop just about anywhere, IM my buddies and continually check my buzzing BlackBerry, one thing is missing: what I call Ed Sullivan moments.
There was a time, younger readers -- pre-fax, pre-voice mail, pre-MySpace -- when families like mine sat around a black-and-white TV set with a handful of channels, watching many of the same shows. And whether Sullivan's guests were the Beatles, impressionist Frank Gorshin or Topo Gigio (a silly mouse puppet who appeared 92 times), it was a shared experience.
Now, liberated from the stranglehold of CBS, NBC and ABC, we can watch news channels that match our political predilections. Read Web sites that reinforce our opinions. Stream our favorite radio talkers through our computer speakers. Download videos that mirror our obsessions. Add selected songs to our iPod playlists rather than buying the whole album -- oops, sorry, CD. The Googlization of books could mean that you just punch up the chapter, passage or reference you want rather than read an author's entire work.
In short, we can now get anything we want, at the precise moment we want it, tailored to our merest whim. Who'd want to give that up?
Not me, that's for sure. But isn't something lost if you can wall yourself off from views and information that challenge what you already believe? If everything is ordered a la carte? If -- and this really dates me as an ink-stained wretch -- you like turning the pages of a newspaper because you might bump into an unexpected story you would never have found online? If you and your family and your co-workers are plugged into parallel media universes?
While Ed Sullivan moments may be consigned to history, the digital age has brought us a burgeoning army of citizen journalists. And that led Time to declare "you" -- that is, all of us -- as its Person of the Year.
"Journalists once had the exclusive province of taking people to places they'd never been," Managing Editor Richard Stengel writes. "But now a mother in Baghdad with a videophone can let you see a roadside bombing, or a patron in a nightclub can show you a racist rant by a famous comedian." That's terrific, and what's more, the mainstream media don't have to pay them much.
But this people-powered movement goes beyond snapping pictures. Ordinary folks can now help shape coverage and generate buzz without owning a printing press, and even scam the public (remember the faux soap opera of Lonelygirl15?).
Still, many folks are clearly choosing ice cream over the broccoli of daily journalism. The top Google news search of 2006 was for famous-for-no-discernible-reason Paris Hilton.
It's a cacophony out there. Take the recent finding that there are 13 million blogs in America. I don't know about you, but I don't have time to read 13 million blogs. Writing one takes up enough of my life as it is.
"Does it endanger what passes for the national conversation if we're all talking at once?" NBC anchor Brian Williams opines in Time. "What if 'talking' means typing on a laptop, but the audience is too distracted to pay attention?"
And that is one downside of this new digital culture, that we can all drown in it. How do we pick out the stories, sites, blogs, videos and info-shards that are worth our precious time? We can follow the electronic links from people and places we trust, but in an odd way, that's bringing back the old gatekeeper role, with popular portals granting admission to a selected few content creators.
It's nice to be able to gorge on this movable feast. But awkward old Ed Sullivan would have a hard time making it today. Maybe he'd have to sell his best segments on iTunes.
The Doctor Is InFor Sanjay Gupta, television isn't brain surgery. It's harder.
"I still cringe sometimes when I have to watch some of my live shots," the 37-year-old neurosurgeon says after a long day of performing operations.
But five years after CNN hired him as a medical correspondent with no previous TV experience, Gupta had full-time job offers from several broadcast networks. He signed a part-time deal this month with CBS News while remaining at CNN. Gupta also spends nearly half his time teaching at Atlanta's Emory University School of Medicine and performing surgery at its affiliated hospital.
Gupta will be the second physician doing pieces for the "CBS Evening News" -- Jonathan LaPook was recruited last summer -- in an era when the networks, and lots of local stations, consider it obligatory to have an in-house M.D.
Keeping a foot in both medicine and journalism has its advantages but can also create conflicts. Gupta recalls CNN asking him to cover the case of an Emory whistle-blower raising questions about its hospital and concluding that "I just don't think it's right for me to cover that."
During the 2003 Iraq invasion, Gupta was embedded with a Navy unit called Devil Docs and, while covering its mission, performed brain surgery five times, the first of which was on a 2-year-old Iraqi boy.
Gupta, who drew criticism at the time, says it "seemed absolutely the right thing to do" because the unit had no other neurosurgeons to deal with such emergencies. "Someone was dying and I was the only person who could potentially save him." He says he discussed the first operation on the air only because BBC had reported it.
The Michigan-born son of Indian and Pakistani parents, Gupta finished medical school at 22. He was a White House fellow in the late 1990s, writing speeches and crafting policy for Hillary Clinton. Since joining CNN, he has launched the weekend show "House Call," started a column for Time (whose parent company owns CNN) and was named one of People's "Sexiest Men Alive."
Health reporters are perfectly capable of handling the beat, but physicians -- who also cover medicine for the New York Times and Washington Post -- seem on television to be imbued with an extra aura of authority, even without the white coats. "Medical news is very personal, very intimate to people," Gupta says.
When CBS News President Sean McManus learned that Gupta was not willing to leave CNN, he worked out a sharing arrangement, similar to one in which CNN's Anderson Cooper contributes to "60 Minutes." Gupta says that he is eager to reach a wider audience but that his seduction by the bright lights will go only so far.
"I'm a doctor first," says Gupta. "If I had to choose one today, I'd choose medicine."
Fair and BalancedThe campaign chatter on "The Daily Show" was 98 percent nasty to Republicans, and -- hold your outrage -- 96 percent mean to the Democrats, reports the Center for Media and Public Affairs. (Jon Stewart's interviews with public figures were not included in the study.) Knowing that Stewart might well mock the report, the center even offered him a punch line: "I have one thing to say to the pinhead researchers. . . . Give us a second chance: We'll get it to 100 percent."
Correction of the YearFrom London's Sun, as chosen by the Web site Regret the Error:
"Following our article on Princess Eugenie's birthday celebrations, we have been asked to point out the party was closely monitored by adults throughout and while a small amount of mess was cleared away at the end of the evening, there was no damage to furniture, no revellers dived into bedrooms in search of drunken romps and to describe the house as being trashed was incorrect. We are happy to make this clear and regret any distress our report caused."
Howard Kurtz hosts CNN's weekly media program, "Reliable Sources."
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