From xx609@prairienet.org Thu Jan 30 12:42:05 1997 Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 11:34:09 -0600 (CST) From: Media Poll To: ftp@etext.org Subject: The Media Poll - No. 3 _______________________________________________________ THE MEDIA POLL Number 3 January 30, 1997 _______________________________________________________ By John Marcus Featuring: -NET COVERAGE: THE UNHOLY TRYST OF CONVENIENCE -THE MEDIA POLL 10: GENERIC CELEBRITIES -------------------------------------------- [To receive The Media Poll by email, request a free subscription at xx609@prairienet.org] NET COVERAGE: THE UNHOLY TRYST This week's "poll" was prompted by a reader who suggested we follow up on her impression that an unusually high number of articles about the Internet seem to focus on "certain negative, sensationalist topics" such as "sex, pedophiles, terrorists, and censorship." The media, if this is true, seems capable of only finding the bad stuff interesting, making the Internet Story one where crime and/or prurience meet data communications in the ultimate unholy tryst of convenience. OF COURSE, THERE IS TRUTH in this Story. My entirely clinical research for this column showed that porn is just around the corner anywhere you go on the Net. I found that if you do a keyword search using a service like InfoSeek for some kind of vaguely sex-related term, not only will you get a ginormous amount of the filthiest hits you ever saw, you'll also get instant ads popping up on the screen touting HARDCORE this and UNCENSORED that. Seems logical now, but five years ago few Net gurus would have forecast that cyberporn would become *the* killer Internet application second only to e-mail. [Certainly it's one of the market drivers behind the whole WebTV gamble.] I'm sure our correspondent would admit that since certain old-fashioned barriers to becoming a pornography consumer, such as having to be seen in public requesting and paying for socially unacceptable magazines and videos, do not exist on the Net and therefore have encouraged a prolific new distribution channel for the industry. And wouldn't you agree that so-called "chat rooms" and unmonitored bulletin boards make it easier for child molesters and stalkers to at least initiate their sordid projects? THE FLIP SIDE, of course, is that this is all "just around the corner" in the real world as well, in more or less the same proportion, and that talking up sleaze and negativity on the Net is just as sensationalistically skewed as the damning of television for ruining society or blaming Ice T for the poor relations between police and inner-city youth. [I heard that "Cop Killer" is being banned again somewhere, which will surely do nothing but keep it from being deleted from the record company's back catalogue even longer.] But is it true? Can our correspondent's "impression" be substantiated by cold hard facts? Let us throw the switch on the Media Poll machine, using the usual limitations (top 50 U.S. newspapers). . . . The first column (after the year indicator) lists the number of articles mentioning "Internet" or "World Wide Web". The next column lists the number of articles mentioning one of those terms AND words such as sex, pornography, censorship, terrorism, etc. The last column indicates the percentage of such stories in relation to the total. Internet Internet Sleaze etc. + "negative" Quotient term(s) ----------------------------------------------- 1993 1,527 199 13% 1994 10,111 1,061 10% 1995 36,826 4,461 12% 1996 71,942 7,206 10% Do you find it at all troubling that one out of every ten articles that mention the Internet in our largest circulating newspapers also mention one of our designated "negative" terms? Does that mean only nine concentrate on the "positive" - i.e., the revolutionary effect the Net has had on science, education, libraries, news, mass communications, the software and computer hardware industries, and personal communications? Let's not get alarmed yet. Analyzing the data for trends, one is struck by the rock solidity of the sleaze quotient. Even back in 1993 when the porn-friendly Web was still under development, roughly the same percentage of articles about the Net couldn't stay away from the more difficult and seamy aspects of the medium as last year. It is certainly significant that despite the wild growth in total coverage, this sub-sector of media Net coverage held its ground. True, there were over 7,000 "negative" Internet stories last year compared to just 1,000 in 1994, and that may be what is creating the impression that they're out of control, but the full context should be noted: at least the sleaze quotient isn't growing, and 10% isn't that bad, is it? BUT IS THIS SAMPLE realistic? Just how many of these "Internet" stories are really about the Internet? A free-text search can't predict relevance too well: half of these stories might have only barely mentioned the Net in a throwaway reference. They could be about anything. So let's look at our sample again and zero in on those articles where "Internet" or "World Wide Web" are in the *headline* of the article--this should limit the pool to stories actually focusing on the Net: Internet Internet + Sleaze etc. in "negative" Quotient headline term(s) ----------------------------------------------- 1993 166 29 17% 1994 1,245 145 12% 1995 4,631 714 15% 1996 7,489 1,093 15% With this better-focused sample we notice two things: 1) The Sleaze Quotient is just as steady as before 2) The Sleaze Quotient is even higher! Things may not be getting worse every year, but 15% is enough to make you think. Fifteen percent. What's that, one out of seven? Dear readers: I leave further analysis up to you. Dear journalists: is that the best you can do? ________________________________________________________ THE MEDIA POLL 10: GENERIC CELEBRITIES I have a thing about "generic celebrities." Not much of a thing. It's just that sometime during the 1980s I noticed there seemed to be a generic celebrity of the year--or even month--usually the product of some media-saturated scandal or other. And after the new celebrity's scandal died down, he or she remained on the public stage for some time longer due to his or her firm impression onto the soft clay that makes up the collective American psyche: Donna Rice, Tammy Faye Bakker, Leona Helmsley, Oliver North's secretary whose name I can't believe I've forgotten*, Oliver North himself. Many of these personalities have nearly faded away completely from the spotlight, but the 1990s have made sure we're not in short supply, producing Tonya Harding, the Bobbits, Gennifer Flowers, and Richard Jewel. BUT LATELY my definition of the term has been changing as I recognize another class of generic celebrity. These are the people whose celebrity is so great (as in large, massive, *gros*) that it cannot be classified in any one category of fame, such as politician, entertainer, athlete. These people may have been actors or sportsmen at one time--and that is how they developed their fame--but since then they have transcended their original fields of endeavor and are now more famous simply for being famous. They are distinguished from the people in the first paragraph by the fact that they did at one time actually *do* something for which they were *celebrated* (well, most of them did, anyway). But like the purely sensationalist media personalities above, they are either on TV all the time or they are *talked about* on TV all the time because they are *beyond* TV. (Some are the punchlines of jokes every night on late night TV.) Can O.J. be called just an ex-football player anymore? To call Oprah Winfrey a talk show host is really far from accurate. And Martha Stewart and Richard Simmons: just what the hell are their jobs, anyway? Below, then, is my 1996 list of Top Generic Celebrities. Who would you have put on the list? 1996 Top 10 Generic Celebrities (by number of mentions in the top 50 U.S. newspapers) -------------------------------- Ross Perot 15,637 O.J. Simpson 14,393 Dennis Rodman 12,799 Madonna 8,414 Michael Jackson 5,498 Jack Kevorkian 3,616 Larry King 3,319 Oprah Winfrey 3,271 Martha Stewart 2,679 Mother Teresa 2,647 Howard Stern 1,788 Sarah Ferguson 1,196 Richard Simmons 459 YES, I KNOW, there are 13 people in this "Top 10." This just goes to show how potent are the appearances of people like Howard Stern (11) and Richard Simmons (13): they just seem to be in your face all the time. (On the other hand, maybe they are beasts of broadcasting whose print exposure doesn't measure up.) Surely the top 5 listed here are no surprise. Rodman (3) in particular has extended his reach deeply into the realm of generic celebrityhood. A couple years ago he was Top 50, I'd say, and now he's easily Top 3, getting 52% more coverage than his ex-girlfriend and headline default setting Madonna (4). What's truly scary, though, are the Top 3's relation to the total number of articles published *on anything* in 1996. THERE WERE, according to my sources (the DataTimes news database service), 2,784,239 articles published in the top 50 U.S. newspapers last year. This means that Dennis Rodman actually appeared in 0.4597% of *all* articles published in 1996. And that the Worm infests itself into just about *one out of every 200 articles* published. Same thing for H. Ross (1) and O.J. (2). Meaning? Richard Simmons' braying ubiquity may be limited to TV, but our 10's dominance over the morning read is undeniable. Add up all the numbers above and one of these people that are famous just for being famous is in one out of every 40 news items. For every 40 headlines, for every 40 leads, soon to follow, inevitably, like The Partridge Family after The Brady Bunch, will be Jack or Oprah or Larry or one of their MP10 kin, there, and there, just because they're there. . . [*I remembered: Fawn Hall] NOTE TO READERS The "You Heard it There First" and "Popular Arts in Review" features will follow in future columns. If you hadn't yet noticed, my publishing schedule is fluid, so ignoring arbitrary deadlines should result in better and more frequent, if shorter and less diverse, columns. ----------------------------------------------- INSPIRATIONAL LYRIC: "My '98's booming with a trunk of funk/ And all the jealous punks can't stop the dunk" -Chuck D, 1988 [Don't Believe the Hype] ----------------------------------------------- Note to Bandwidth Police and Content Cops: Very shortly I will stop posting the full text of The Media Poll on (relevant) newsgroups and will provide just headlines and a pointer to a soon-to-be-functioning web site. In the meantime, I trust this modest and infrequent column hasn't overwhelmed anyone's resources (or patience). For now, past issues of the Media Poll are available in The Etext Archives, a two-gigabyte archive of Net-based e-zines. Point your browser, as they used to say, to http://www.etext.org/Zines/ASCII/TheMediaPoll/ or you can retrieve them via ftp at ftp.etext.org/pub/Zines/TheMediaPoll To subscribe to the email version, email xx609@prairienet.org To complain, email xx609@prairienet.org The Media Poll is Copyright 1997 by John Marcus