There’s this absolutely ridiculous article in the 11/3/03 New York magazine about gay adoptions.
Person after person after person is wealthy and successful, with, like 2 homes, houses on Fire Island, Marc Jacobs’ wardrobes, (adopted) kids in private schools, etc. They profile these people who’ve hired surrogate mothers at the cost of untold thousands of dollars. Their careers are as things like vice-president of marketing at places like Kenneth Cole and what have you.
Now, I’m not sure who the target audience of New York magazine is, but if you look at their advertisers (Macy’s Bowlmor Lanes, CNN, health clubs), the audience is just a typical New Yorker, maybe a little upscale. (So then why not call yourself, “New York Plus”?) Well, I’m no hermit by any measure, but I don’t personally know any gays who are that well-off. It just kills me that the work-a-day gay is almost completely invisible to the media. Such elitism.
Thank God that we don’t have to give up promiscuous hedonism in order to erode those unfair stereotypes of us as promiscuous hedonists - we just have to adopt/hire a surrogate mother to bear us children! :rolleyes:
There is NO magazine money in pitching your magazine to poor people.
It’s not our job to represent everyone…this ain’t government here. We expect to be well paid. We’re in it for the money.
Therefore, why bother to represent all classes when just representing one will result in more money and getting invited to the corporate box at the Superbowl?
It should also be noted that the non-existence in the mainstream media of non-rich gay men is not a new thing. I can remember it being bemoaned by the Democratic Socialist (c’mon, who wasn’t some kind of socialist in college…besides the Young Republicans?) president of our Lesbian and Gay Student Alliance when I was at Penn State 11 years ago.
What burns me is that the gay folk getting the most media attention are likely to be the gay folk who have bought into the “post-Gay” philosophy of sticking their heads in the sand because nobody’s shooting at them.
It’s not just a US thing. Supplements in British Sunday papers are equally vacuous and snobbish. Lots of features about £150 nailbrushes and Pygmy-liver moisturisers and so on.
Yet you flip to the back – and what do you find? Ads for £15 brown slacks, reading glasses and books about the wonders of vinegar. :rolleyes:
There is this thing called freedom of the press, which says that newpapers, magazines, etc. can write about pretty much whatever they want to write about.
JC’s basic point is sound: there’s this other thing called the free market, which says that publications will write about stuff if there’s a paying audience that wants to read about it.
While newspapers are (at least theoretically) in the news business, magazines aren’t, at least not by definition. A magazine is about whatever the heck it wants to be about. For instance, Oprah has a magazine with herself on the cover every month. What’s the deal there? I don’t know, but it sells, therefore it is. (See point #2.)
If it bugs you that a magazine or newspaper is writing for a ridiculously rarefied demographic, the best course of action is to not read it. Really. If the only people who read New York magazine are the sort of folks it writes about in the article discussed in the OP, then it may find that even a rarefied clientele won’t keep it going if there just aren’t that many of them.
But we’re not likely to find out. People the world over seem to be fascinated with the doings of celebs and other exceedingly rich people. I personally don’t get it, but I’ve accepted that that’s the way people are. Remember a show called Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous? I never saw it (mostly because I rarely turn on the TV for anything besides the NFL and sometimes the MLB playoffs) but apparently it had great ratings for quite a few years. And those supermarket tabloids, which are basically celeb gossip sheets - who buys those? It ain’t other celebs; it’s working schubs. Like I said, I don’t understand it, but it’s the way people are.
If you’re a conservative, don’t you feel silly for criticizing the media for doing exactly what you say it should do - that is, follow the dictates of the free market? (If you don’t believe in free markets, this doesn’t apply to you, of course. But I see at least one poster here that I recognize as a conservative from other debates, criticizing the media for kissing up to the rich.)
I never read New York Magazine. The doings of the kind of people they write about are utterly uninteresting to me.
I do, however, read the New York Times. Which is supposedly a newspaper. It’s supposedly the newspaper of record. But as far as I can tell, it’s editorial policy is that only affluent white people who live in Manhattan (or possible Greenwich, Connecticut) matter.
A week or two ago, in the Sunday magazine, there was an article about a new trend, rich, highly educated, white women who are choosing not to work outside their homes, preferring to stay home and raise their children. There was lots of navel-gazing, narcissistic drivel from these women about how this isn’t anti-feminist, it’s actually empowering, and so on and so on.
Well, as far as I’m concerning, I don’t give a rat’s ass about what these women do. They’ve gotten themselves (or been born into) a position in life where they have a lot of choices. And that’s all well and good. I have no problem with people who are lucky or smart or driven enough to have a lot of money. I really don’t. But it’s hardly news that rich women have choices. Instead of agonizing over whether they’re betraying the movement, ad nauseam, they should be grateful that they’ve got that choice.
What is a news story is how many women with children there are for whom staying home is simply not an option. They’ve got to bring in some money just to feed those kids. That’s tough enough. They don’t even get to think about staying home. And it’s doubly hard for them because of the unavailability of affordable day care. Or of affordable health care for their children. Or health insurance. Thinking about whether said children will attend Dalton or Choate-Rosemary Hall or the School of Ethical Culture isn’t even an option.
What is a news story is that we, as a nation, don’t give a damn about helping the not-so-rich to raise their kids. We’d rather take the easy way out and put tons of money into massive prison-building projects to house those kids a few years down the road than give a hand to those mothers (and fathers) who are struggling to raise their kids as best they can. Those mothers who have to work, even if they’d rather stay home with the kids. Those mothers who desperately would like to send their kids to a decent school, but are instead forced to drop them off at the nearest prison-prep school.
Yeah, I think all kinds of publications that seem to be aimed toward rich folks are actually aimed toward normal folks, and the publishers just figure that normal folks like to read about rich folks, which I think is probably true to some extent (or the magazines would stop doing it).
One example is the Robb Report (or the Robb something), which is essentially about the “luxury lifestyle”; it contains pic after pic of luxury cars, boats, houses, etc. I’d always suspected that it was really aimed at normal folks that liked to dream about owning that kind of stuff instead of being a shopping guide for those who really can afford it.
My suspicion was confirmed when an article about stock options for executives actually defined what an option was. :rolleyes: I’d like you to find me a guy who can afford a $250,000 car and who has no idea what the difference between a put and a call is.
Oh, my. You really don’t know New York magazine, do you? It’s a completely upscale magazine, always has been - it’s the sole financially viable descendent of the New York Herald Tribune, which was the last local newspaper to go for much the same audience as the Times. (New York originially was the Herald-Tribune’s Sunday supplement.)
Just FYI, Macy’s, CNN and health clubs are all evidence of an affluent readership. Bowlmor Lanes is actually one of the best see-and-be-seen spots - name DJs spin while you bowl. It’s bowling for the quotation-mark set.
As far as the rest of your most: yawn. Life unfair, film at eleven.
Look, in the Washington Post’s Sunday magazine, their restaurant reviewer rarely bothers with places where dinner for two stays under $100, and on the whole seems to prefer places where the tab will run over $100 per person. IOW, he sticks to reviewing restaurants that even upper-middle-class Washingtonians like myself aren’t going to visit very often. What does that tell us about the editorial policies of the Washington Post?
Precisely zip. There’s no requirement that magazines, even magazines associated with big-city papers, be informative. Newspapers’ Sunday magazines exist to provide some space to do stuff that doesn’t fit particularly well in the rest of the paper. And consequently, reading them doesn’t give you much of an idea of what’s going on in the rest of the paper.
I don’t know how well the New York Times covers issues of disparity in education, since I don’t read the Times very often. (The Washington Post periodically addresses that issue, if you’re wondering.) But I do know that I can’t judge how well it does so by reading its Sunday magazine.
Sorry, but I disagree - Macy’s has never been geared to a particularly affluent consumer (in fact, it’s always been known as a department store for the middle class), nor do I believe people who go bowling can ever be referred to as a “set” of any kind, although I’ll concede that when bowlers are NOT bowling, they may very well be any kind of person of any “set” at all. Ditto with CNN (free on the web, available on cable with a basic subscription) and health clubs (subsidized by Oxford, health insurance, many employers). Finally, Oxy, I know this is the Pit, but I am a Christian, and I’m just going to keep the rest of my thoughts to myself on those points, thank you anyway for the opportunity to shine, and for your contribution to the thread…
LMM, I also read that article. My thoughts: Why should I care about these women who have all the choices in the world, and the discrimination they say they face? How can the average person empathize with them? The author tries to argue that it is BECAUSE of the confluence of two things - these women’s success and the fact that they reject the stresses that go with that success - that these women are so very important to care about and read about, since they should have been the last people to whom this should have happened, but I don’t find that argument either convincing or fully satisfactory. Rather, again, what I see is a self-absorbed, elitist media covering the story of their friends and friends-of-friends, just doing a sloppy, half-assed job of getting the full story, or educating the paper’s readership on issues which are not all that likely to impact them. Then newspapers wonder why circulation has declined over the last 30 years. Well, maybe because 1. they can get the news from a lot of different sources; and 2. the soft, human-interest stories you share are about people your readers can’t relate to.
But the larger point is that for those of us who look to the mass media to educate us about issues which concern us, people in general, i.e., issues impacting people who are representative of the communities in which they live, we have much to be disappointed about. (And just forget all about any true muckraking - that simply doesn’t exist anymore.)
Many media outlets today seem to be more about infotainment than journalism, because infotainment sells better. I would then suggest that we look at our sources in a light which lets us see our sources more truthfully as what they are, whatever that happens to be. In the case of New York magazine, it’s entertainment, it’s fun, light, but it is apparently not reliably good journalism since commerical considerations (writing stories about the rich and famous) appear to trump journalistic considerations (educating the readership about current events impacting them).
On the bright side, one news source I happen to respect is the Atlantic Monthly, which I first started reading back when they excerpted Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickeled and Dimed a few years back, before the book was even finished. I also happen to like the BBC.
You know, sometimes it would be nice if someone could be left to rant and rave about something on the media without people yelling at them to stop reading/watching it. I’m as guilty of doing it as the next person, but I’m starting to realize how annoying it is.
That was once correct, but it’s less and less true anymore. For the past 25 years, the department stores have been conceding more and more of the middle income market to mass merchandisers. Macy’s is a great example - take a quick visit to the 8th floor to see what I mean.
…what? Have you ever been to Bowlmor on a weekend night, or are you basing your views on Honeymooners and Laverne & Shirley reruns? It’s a club scene, dominated by the affluent and the affluent-in-waiting (read: NYU students & overeducated twentysomethings).
Except that CNN does media advertising bragging about the affluence of their viewers. Yes, they’ll take anyone, but that’s not the group they’re selling to people who place media. And while there are lower cost health clubs, they aren’t taking out full-page ads in New York - NYSC is about the cheapest they run.
If you’re trying to polish your Christian virtues, I’d suggest that ignorance and sanctimony aren’t a good start. There is a reason that envy is one of the seven deadly sins, where wealth (in the absence of avarice) is not.
