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Brooks Peterson

Brooks Peterson's column is published Mondays. Brooks also sits on the Caller-Times editorial board and can be contacted at petersonb@caller.com

Monday, August 30, 1999

Save big bucks! News fluff now at bargain rates

Corpus Christi Online

Now, I would be less than completely honest were I to deny that I am flattered by the fact that our nation's two pre-eminent weekly news mags are currently fighting over me.
   Not to secure my professional services, you understand (which is a little puzzling, when you stop to think about it, but we won't travel down that road today . . .)
   No, what we have is Time and Newsweek duking it out in my post office box: Scarcely a week goes by that one or the other of these publications doesn't send me a come-on notifying me that, thanks to my unique standing in the community (eh?), I qualify for Professional Subscription Rates.
   Didn't know that subscribing was a profession, did you?
   Just kidding, Of course, what they really mean is that, inasmuch as I am such a solid citizen, pillar of the community and so forth - just like a doctor or a lawyer, by gadfry! - it is particularly important to them that their publication should grace the table in my waiting room.
   Of course, the fact is I don't have a waiting room. What I do have is a matter of occasionally heated discussion: Some unimaginative souls maintain it is a slum; I prefer to think of it as a work in progress.
   But you know what? Time and Newsweek don't really care. They just want me to subscribe. And in order to lure me into the fold, they are offering me the most astonishing cut-rate deals. The way I figured, if I subscribed to both of 'em for, oh, say, five years, I could buy a Mazda Miata with all the money I'd be saving.
   OK, a second-hand Miata. But still . . .
   The price is right, no error. But there's this sticking point: I'm not at all sure I want either of them.
   Care to know what I really do want? I want the OLD Time and Newsweek back, and I don't care who knows it.
   I know this will confirm the suspicions rampant at this establishment and in other important quarters that I am some kind of throwback who wandered into the joint through a freakish gap in the space-time continuum, but . . .
   See, I can remember when Time and Newsweek were news magazines. More than that, they were news magazines written by adults for adults - and with, I suspect, more attention being given to getting the story right and telling it compellingly than to such latter-day obsessions as demographics and target audiences.
   Back in them days, youngsters (I remembers it like it wuz yesterday), you'd see guys like Charles De Gaulle and Ike and Konrad Adenauer and Nikita Khrushchev on the covers of Time and Newsweek. Serious stories about Really Big Deals. Oh, sure, there was coverage of the cultural scene - much of it entertaining and opinionated - but the thrust was to give us the world in more depth than a daily newspaper or (pfui!) television could hope to do.
   And now? Fluff. Great soaring mountains of fluff, hyping the trivial, celebrating the trendy . . . and in all too many instances obscuring the substantial.
   Oh, sure, the odd natural disaster may find its way onto the covers, and when another nut runs amok with automatic weaponry, he stands a fairly good chance of finding his way onto the marquee.
   Consider the utterly unscientific investigation I just concluded in the Caller-Times archives, where copies of Time, Newsweek and other mags appear every week (and disappear with astonishing regularity).
   Let's look at the issues of Aug. 16. What do we find on the covers of Time and Newsweek, my little campers? Do we have the continuing, and deadly, drama in the Balkans? Do we have political tumult and economic chaos in Russia? Or Indonesia? Do we have insights into the vague discontents that economic good times in America cannot dislodge?
   I'll tell you what we've got: "The Blair Witch Project," that's what we've got. Smack on the covers of both of Time and Newsweek.
   Did I mention that these are America's pre-eminent news magazines?
   Now, I've got nothing against "The Blair Witch Project," a chilling little horror flick turned out for a pittance by a bunch of Hot Young Filmmakers. It deserves some attention both in terms of its, er, artistic merits and its significance as a show-biz phenomenon.
   But on the covers of both mags?
   So OK: Maybe it's a fluke. But that still leaves us with the gratingly cutesy approach that both journals (and many others) have adopted: Newsweek's "Conventional Wisdom" and Time's shameless imitation thereof, "Winners & Losers," both of which gaily decide who's In and who's Out, who's Up and who's Down. Guess we can't be trusted to decide such matters ourselves.
   Call me a knuckle-dragging cave dweller if you will, but I dare to suggest we have a right to expect a little more in the way of pith and moment from these publications. These days, sadly, both stand revealed as pith poor.
   (Peterson can be reached by phone at 886-3772, and by e-mail at petersonb@caller.com)



Brooks Peterson

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