‘Victory at Sea,’ the global economic crisis, the War on Terror and the Oscars….
On occasional weekend mornings, I have been watching the DVD of “Victory at Sea,” the Emmy-winning TV series from the 1950s. It’s a spectacular work that basically introduced the documentary to American television as it chronicled the Allied victory in World War II.
The multi-episode series has a resonance for today far beyond its obvious historical value. The series is filled with constant illustrations of the industrial power of the U.S. economy of the time (producing countless aircraft, ships, tanks and jeeps). The U.S. produced so much. This productivity provides a jarring juxtaposition with today’s news: Detroit reeling (General Motors’ market capitalization at just above $1 Billion), banks fearing nationalization, and an economy that has not seen the bottom of the worst downturn in 50 years.
In the America that won “Victory at Sea” everything was possible. Today, in contrast, to some observers almost nothing is possible. The current grim times were the subject of Peggy Noonan’s recent WSJ column in which she laments of the current crisis: “People are not feeling passing anger or disappointment, they’re feeling truly frightened (because this) isn’t stock market heebie-jeebies, it’s systemic collapse. It’s not just here, it’s global. It’s not only economic, but political.”
Perhaps. But I can’t help but feel the pessimism is overblown. Is this the same America that won “Victory at Sea?” In some respects, the answer is no, of course. But it is mostly yes.
For one thing, America is larger and more diverse. Yes, Detroit may be on the ropes, the consequence of misalignment of production and consumer demand and a failure to manage change. But the American industrial economy still can build: supersonic military aircraft, high-performance civilian jets, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines. In the information and life sciences, no country has a advantage over the free-market and entrepreneurial conditions that characterize the U.S. economy. In countless other categories (agriculture, clean-technology) the U.S. still has an edge, and that is notwithstanding a free trade system that generally has helped enrichen the entire world, not simply America.
It is worth remembering watching the thousands of soldiers, sailors and marines in the newsreels of “Victory at Sea” that a decade earlier their fathers were on soup lines and selling apples on street corners — victims of the Great Depression of the 1930s. It was hard to imagine then that less than a decade later the world would be at war, and America’s factories would be at full capacity and then some.
Will the war on terror expand in a way that leads to a similar result? God forbid. But amid today’s unrelenting, terrible news, when pessimism abounds, it is perhaps worth remembering that others have walked in this way before.
And the connection to the Oscars? Well, “Victory at Sea” was an NBC series. It won an Emmy, but not an Oscar. On the other hand, anyone with an inclination to revisit those years on today, Oscar-day, can turn their TV to premium cable, where one station is showing back-to-back WWII classics “Tora! Tora! Tora!” and “Patton.”
News on a printed page?
News on a printed page is a product in tremendous transition, and vital signs are not strong. Several recent headlines (only a few them printed):
– The French government is going to “rescue” that nation’s newspaper industry by providing 18 year olds with state-subsidized free subscriptions.
– Hearst Corp. without warning announces plans to close the Seattle Post Intelligencer if a buyer cannot be found.
– Carlos Slim’s financial “rescue” of the New York Times Co. involves extending the company $250 million at 14% interest at the same time as the company is selling interests in real estate and other assets to raise new cash.
– Fewer and fewer people are getting their news from the printed page as other sources (of course the internet first among them) become more widely used sources of news.
As a longtime newsman, I have been struck by these and other signs of the impending apocalypse long predicted for printed news, and I am hopeful the imminent demise is exaggerated.
But there is one big paradox that is worth pointing out:
For many years, our quality printed news sources (The Times, The WSJ, The Economist and many, many others) have confused tradition with staying power.
Tradition is core to their brands, and maintaining journalistic quality has long been a pre-eminent goal of these companies, as it should be. But for too long, the proprietors and executives who have run these companies have allowed tradition to cloud their vision in looking forward. In many cases, business planning for the coming year was not much more than applying a percentage increase (in advertising rates, in circulation base, in readership) to the prior year performance, and holding a team accountable to achieving those results.
That model is forever broken, I am afraid. Craigslist, Ebay, Yahoo! News, The Daily Show and SMS news alerts are barricades to the future ever being as simple as the past for newspapers and newspapermen. It may be that 2009 is the year that this truth finally becomes self-evident for the industry. It has clearly dawned on a few of the more forward-thinking proprietors. And it long ago was clear to investors, who have driven stock prices for newspaper companies to historic lows.
Recognition by the industry of this situation would be a good thing. The sooner it becomes clear, the more rapidly those companies may be able to focus on new products and new ways of reaching and engaging an audience that is as hungry for news today as it ever has been.
Just not news on the printed page.
