Oregon Media Insiders

This past Tuesday, August 12, 2008, I happened to catch the 6:30-7:00 PM block of the Channel 9 News out of Eugene. The new anchors seemed in the vein of the old anchors. The weatherman appeared a bit subdued. Given the whirlwind pace of muggings that have occurred in the newsroom recently, his state of mind should seemed apropos. Everything was in its place until the Sports Report. The sports segment opened cold out of a station break. There was no Sports announcer on-set. No anchor-to-anchor bonhomie. But then, it’s only sports.

Being a serious student of the human condition, I am always on the lookout for tendencies and patterns. Since I began my tumultuous career on the Oregon Media Insiders web site, I have spotted what can only be described as a most disturbing exemplar, an anti-intellectual orthodoxy that seems to have tunneled to the very core of Portland media members.

The content of locally created media web sites has always been regulated in one form or another, however between sometime in the most recent past and now, OMI, in conjunction with the Fairy Blog Mother and “cablenut” formed what the OMI Anti-Media Activities Committee (AMAC)- (known colloquially as A-Mack).

“ When you work in television, you never get to really sense the experience of the audience – you can’t see them or hear them or know what they think.”
Grant McOmie

This quote, taken directly from the Forest Grove News-Times, caps what this critic has said all along about the elitist Portland media. In that crowded coterie of self-congratulatory asses, the honor of the most inflated egos goes to the broadcast television news types. Talk about out of touch.

The Plot Quickens

After wading through myriad comments on Hunter Thompson’s last posting having to do with the lambastation of the Portland Drive-By media, two comments caught this writer’s eye. The first was a comment by the now familiar TALPDX.

TALPDX proclaimed annoyance at my existence. In the course of said critique, TALPDX employed a number of mixed metaphors, a sign of amateurish composition. Of course, if one has followed TALPDX for any length of time, one knows that TALPDX toils in one of the Portland television sweatshops. Hence the hackneyed writing.

Winston Churchill pointed out that, “Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.”

Once again, the average OMI reader displays his/her true colors and demonstrates why television, and Television News in particular, is in dire straits. After castigating this writer for excessive banality, utter vapidness, mind-numbing stupidity and for being a generally poor imitation of the real Hunter Thompson (may god rest his soul) one person who posts to the site asked:

“If this site had the capability to ignore, I would do so. (Does it have that capability?)”

The site owner and operator replied: “not yet But I'll look into it.”

Sayonara

Someone, another anonymous "someone," posted this revealing bit of sagaciousness in regards to another News Anchor appointment in the PDX market:

"Not to mention his NINE Emmys for local broadcast excellence, an Edward R. Murrow Award and an Iris award."

Given the state of television news, especially within the past ten years, the heaviest lifting one must do to win a local Emmy is to be smart enough to fill out the entry forms.

It is growing abundantly clear that there are any number of Doubting Thomases lurking in the safety of their anonymity, afraid there may actually be an embryonic media progression gestating in the Mid-Willamette Valley. I understand the skepticism from the Portland elites - those who view all that lies between PDX and San Francisco as fly-over land, barely fit for human existence.