The Media Lag

I have elaborate and somewhat evidence-free theories of generational turnover in the press and so forth that renders me predisposed to agree with this theory of media out-of-touchness from Jim Henley:

Also, demographics mean that media operations will always lag the popular mood. The people with the jobs in newsrooms now are the Alex P. Keaton generation. Careerism means that now is their day. But it’s not Alex P. Keaton’s country any more. During Alex P. Keaton’s time, in fact, the Lou Grant Generation ran America’s papers. It wasn’t Lou Grant’s America by then either.

That seems about right to me.

Comments

That seems about wrong to me. You're assuming that the "popular mood" is defined by people a generation younger than journalists. I can see why a twentysomething might do this, but what's the basis for it?

Posted by Ronnie Pudding | September 12, 2007 10:04 AM

It seems like Henley's basically saying "people over 40 are conservative and out-of-touch," which is a generalization so breathtakingly half-assed one would think it came from a Dowd or Friedman column.

By the way, I turned 40 recently.

Posted by James Gary | September 12, 2007 10:15 AM

Whippersnappers.

Posted by merciless | September 12, 2007 10:18 AM

james, the baby boomer generation (that would be mine) gave bush his strongest vote of any age cohort if i'm remembering my election exit polling from 2004.

not that i'm saying the generation is "conservative and out of touch!"

Posted by howard | September 12, 2007 11:21 AM

the baby boomer generation (that would be mine) gave bush his strongest vote of any age cohort if i'm remembering my election exit polling from 2004.

Yeah. Judging from my own personal experience, boomers and Gen-Xers are much more conservative (socially and politically) than either people of the World War II generation or people who are Matt's age.

But I'd like to hope--if I had a blog--that I wouldn't be so presumptuous as to make Henley-like generalizations on the nature of journalism with nothing more than that to back it up.

Posted by James Gary | September 12, 2007 11:57 AM

Yes, but the Lou Grant generation (whoever that was) didn't have the equivalent of the intertubes to deal with, did they? Pity the Alex P. Keaton dinosaurs in today's newsrooms...

BTW, that makes David Broder and George Will...what? Dinosaurs?

Posted by Amit Joshi | September 12, 2007 1:01 PM

I'm 41, and people over 40 are conservative and out-of-touch, and when you turn 40, you'll never be "cool" again. The upside is that you're not too far away from being able to cut in line at a sales counter, drive erratically, and fart out loud in public without excusing yourself.

Lou Grant, A.P. Keaton,..., shared social symbols seem to have evaporated. I was trying to think of what the equivalent would be for the 90's and couldn't think of any one figure or personality that had as much impact (good or bad). Anyone?

"BTW, that makes David Broder and George Will...what?" ... utterly irrelevant.

Posted by Rihilism | September 12, 2007 1:39 PM

"that makes David Broder and George Will...what?"

Somewhere in the middle: call it the Murphy Brown generation.

Posted by Trevor | September 12, 2007 2:04 PM

And someday Generation Y(glesias) will run the newsrooms. But by then the newsrooms will be solar-powered coffeeshops on high ground in the midwest, and the whippersnappers of the day will attack Gen-Y for being fundamentally unserious in their failure to understand the threat of the half-man, half dolphin chimerae that advance relentlessly from the warm, algae-clogged seas.

Posted by SDM | September 12, 2007 2:39 PM

I was trying to think of what the equivalent would be for the 90's and couldn't think of any one figure or personality that had as much impact (good or bad)

Yeah, it's tough. Bart Simpson? Mulder and Scully? Keyser Soze? 1990s protagonists tended to be slack and introspective, which I guess didn't resonate well with mainstream America.

(It hardly needs to be said that for icons of the present we have Britney Spears and Paris Hilton--cartoon characters who are rich, immature, and utterly f*cking stupid in real life, as befits our reality-based Web 2.0 culture.)

Posted by James Gary | September 12, 2007 2:40 PM

I'd have to go with Bart Simpson (or the Simpsons). But with 500+ channel cable at full saturation and the cranking up of the intertubes, societal group awareness may be gone (for now, at least, until we get the brain implants and begin sharing long-chain proteins).

Posted by Rihilism | September 12, 2007 3:02 PM

That seems about wrong to me. You're assuming that the "popular mood" is defined by people a generation younger than journalists. I can see why a twentysomething might do this, but what's the basis for it?

That's a good point. If we're now at the point where the levers of power are manned by people with an "Alex P. Keaton" mindset, what's to say we're not in Alex P. Keaton's country, and we're out of touch with that?

Posted by Senescent | September 12, 2007 3:13 PM

Bah. Tried to quote things a new way, failed. That first paragraph should be italiced, or however you get things in that centered shaded block.

Posted by Senescent | September 12, 2007 3:14 PM