Head-in-laptop MSM

For somebody who professes to be turned off by smarm, Cathy Seipp sure seems to have a taste for the stuff.

The noted blogger wrote this meow of a column for National Review Online about her time at TCA press tour. The headline reads, "Head-in-Sand MSM," though it could just as well have said: "TV Critics Still Don't Get It." Romenesko linked it, so good on her, even if the column was disingenuous from start to finish, including her oddly unreflective closing wish that there would be "less smarm at these things, not more."

So here's the setup.  Seipp writes:

I was at the Television Critics Association twice-yearly press tour in Pasadena and overheard a guy across the table at lunch — a TV critic from some paper in a minor American city — announce to the person next to him: “I’ve never read a blog in my life. Who has time? They’re just for unemployed people who stay at home all day. No one’s ever made any money from blogging.”

Seipp goes on to make fun of this "minor" critic and his backward MSM ways: "Then he looked at the lifeless form of the newspaper in front of him on the table and said, 'I do believe in fairies. I do, I do, I do believe in fairies.' Just kidding about that last part, but really, he might as well have."

And just like that, "he" morphs into "they," as Seipp assures her readers that the cranky, small-time critic was speaking for all his TCA colleagues:

It’s amazing how, even in 2006, the mainstream media can sound like it’s sticking its collective fingers in its ears and yelling “Not listening! Neener neener neener!” at the mere thought of online competition. ... “Never fight with the consumer,” (NBC's Alan) Wurtzel told me, about these MSM types who seem so sure of kind of news the public ought to want, “you’ll always lose.” He added: “Boy, there are two businesses I wouldn’t put money into right now — newspapers and TV stations. There’s just too many other ways to get news.” 

I guess Seipp didn't want to let her readers in on the fact that this particular critic was just about the last guy in the room who didn't believe in blogs. Probably because she would have had to find something else to write about this week.

The MSM that stands athwart the blogosphere yelling halt!  is a straw man and a convenient fiction, at least at TCA. As Seipp well knows — but failed to point out in her column — occupying several tables on the left side of the ballroom (where the power strips were), throughout the tour, were bunches o' TV critics blogging away all day long.

Early on I began compiling links to our bloggers at the TVCritics.org Web site. I handed off to Sue Trowbridge, and when she got done the count was 39 TV critics blogging from press tour, nearly all of them from newspapers. Some were podcasting, too. That's up substantially from last summer's tour and that total didn't include some trade papers that were also blogging nonstop.  My guess is that next summer, most of us at TCA will be adding some online content to whatever we do for our profit centers.

So there's that. Another thing about Seipp: For a self-proclaimed member of capital-P, capital-M PajamasMedia (TM), she sure doesn't blog a whole helluva lot. At press tour she posted six times in two and a half weeks.  And one of those was chiefly to rave about another blogger's post, Ray Richmond's tongue-in-cheek but mostly useful list of do's and don'ts at press tour. (I'll summarize: Don't clap, don't kiss ass, don't mind if I yell my question out over yours, don't take crap from panelists — right, Cathy? — and don't expect much of the food, since it is, after all, free. Well, except for the trips to the In n Out, located a mere five minutes from the hotel. Hooray Burger!)

To that list of rules, one now needs to be added: When writing a column about press tour, make sure you write yourself into it as either the coolest or smartest critic in the room.

Besides Richmond's alt-primer and Seipp's piece, this tour also produced a condescending writeup from Heather Havrilesky that obsessed over TCA food (which I understood better once someone pointed her out to me — she's pregnant) and Glenn Garvin's indignant fantasy about Roger Ailes taking on the Fightin' Liberals. (My take on that.) 

There may have been more, but please don't forward them to me. I'm too earnest to enjoy this game, as you may have read.  My agenda at press tour is shockingly retro — to get stories and interviews for my newspaper and blog.  Then again, that's why TCA exists: to help us bring our readers interesting news from our beats.  Obviously, some members' mileage may vary.