From "Writing" to "Content": Reflections on LAT Editorial "All Work, No Pay" re Payment of Huffington Post Writers

As I wrote on Jeff's FB page, the LA Times may be regarded as a leftist rag with great derision by the right, but compared to the SB News Press, it represents the very best in journalism. The News Press makes the New Haven Register or Connecticut Post look like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, depending upon one's political persuasion and thus journalistic preferences.

Today's Op-Ed is by Michael Walker, a talented author who wrote "Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock-and-Roll's Legendary Neighborhood." (I loved that movie , by the way, with Frances McDormand and Kate Beckinsale, about a music industry mother of a doctor son, engaged to a beautiful but solitary scientist, slowly seduced by the world of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. There is an amazing scene where the son walks in on his mother and her boyfriend, as well as fiancee or girlfriend, not having a threesome exactly, but certainly having an interesting time....)

The dispute at the center of the article is between the Huffington Post, which does not pay its writers, and the slighted scribes, who feel exploited, and are very cranky at the moment. Arianna Huffington sold the paper to AOL for 315 million in February, so she isn't exactly hurting for cash. Last week, according to the LAT, the Newspaper Guild urged its 26,000 members to boycott, the equivalent of a "virtual picket line" until some sort of compensation is determined.

Huffington, a tough broad I am sure, though I do not know anyone who knows her, has taken her cue from a tough broad about whom I know a little bit, Mitzie Shore, the owner of the legendary Comedy Store on the Sunset Strip, which gave many luminaries in comedy their start (Leno, Letterman, Murphy, Crystal...) Shore did not pay her comedians because she regarded the Comedy Store as a "workshop" which also launched careers, careers that would prove to be lucrative. Like Shore, Huffington argues that she gives writers tremendous visibility and that this will lead to high-paying gigs. This may or may not be true, and I know a writer for the Huffington Post , Thomas Lipscomb, who wrote a piece in support of humanitarian aid to Libya. I have not spoken with him about this but will write him a private message this evening as he always has illuminating perspectives on a wide range of topics, whether I agree or more frequently, disagree.

The comedians, some of whom subsisted on "pilfered Saltines," while Shore reportedly pulled down some 20 grand a week, organized a strike and they prevailed. Huffington's position is if these writers want to strike, it's fine, because she'll just find new writers. In this era of blogging, FB, Twitter, she may very well be right.

What simultaneously interests and disturbs me is Walker's provocative penultimate paragraph: "The no-pay policy espoused by the Huffington Post is also the Web's fundamental underlying business philosophy--what the stand-up comedy business might have become had Letterman, Leno and the rest not thrown down the gauntlet. The reality is that the complicity of writers and entire publications in serving up endless freebies to the metaphorical Comedy Stores of the Web has gone a long way toward transmuting 'writing,' for which professionals have long received pay, into 'content,' which consumers expect to be free" (emphasis mine).

The comedians apparently never intended to work indefinitely for free, but having set that precedent , they gave Mitzie Shore (Paulie's mother), the opportunity to exploit them. 

What I find most offensive about the idea underlying Walker's claim about writing and content is that true writing--whether in journalism or not--is desperately undervalued in our increasingly illiterate and sound byte-addicted culture with ADD. Now, "straight news," as opposed to editorials, is supposed to be , as Dragnet said, "Just the facts, Ma'am." I am not a journalist and a true journalist would quarrel with this simplistic and patronizing characterization of his work, which he may or may not claim, is an art form. I do believe that the writing of some great columnists--the Woodwards and Bernsteins of the world (or Charles Krauthammer or the comparable left-wing journalistic deity)--rises to art. At least, there is art to the writing, whether or not that writing itself should be considered an aesthetic object.

But certainly, the kind of tacky , neon-laden website that bombards a reader with facts , without any essential organization or finesse, is not the same as an orderly, integrated account of a given issue. I also find it upsetting that writers are always the low men on the totem pole, even (or especially) in Hollywood. SAG , I think, has more power and visibility than the WGA, and as I wrote on FB this week, besides the obvious fact that there can be no TV or film without the writers (there is never a shortage of actors, at least in LA and NYC), many a mediocre actor has been saved by a great writer.

And this may be a bit of a stretch--but it's my blog , so I can say anything I want--I think the failure to distinguish between content and style/form is a serious intellectual problem in our culture, particularly our literary culture. I was trained at Yale, as a critic, though I spent more years at UCSB, so I am of course on one end of the spectrum in my literary-critical leanings. I take exception to the rejection of the high/low culture distinction. Sue Grafton may be entertaining (I think other detective writers are better), but she is not Milton! While the levelling of the distinction between a philosophical and a literary text, as advocated or better, described, by deconstruction does not essentially bother me, the denial of a distinction between a poem and a newspaper article does. And I am not here even concerned with distinctions between fact or fiction, or with the complex notion of truth in life vs truth in art (versimilitude). I am merely talking about form and style.

Part of why I hated UCSB so much was the intense cultural studies focus of that department. As I wrote in my inaugural post from NYC, I don't want to focus on race, class, gender, sexuality, history, or politics in the study of literature . Of course Wordsworth talks about the French Revolution in The Prelude (Book 3 of the 1850 Prelude), but when Alan Liu (former chair of my ex-department of whom I was not a fan on any level, and he didn't think too much of me either but it did not matter as I took no courses with him), writes about the Imagination apostrophe (or the Crossing of the Alps, I don't have it here and it's been awhile) in terms of Napoleon, I get cranky.

If I wanted to study history or politics, I would do so. I like both, though I prefer history to political science. I chose to study English because I believe in the category of the literary; I believe that the analysis and understanding of literary langauge--whether in fiction , prose, or poetry--has value. I am a rhetorical critic or a proponent of rhetorical poetics (and I think deconstruction has much to teach us, though I think also that literature is essentially ethical, at least at its best, and that interpretation must move beyond the aporia, beyond indeterminate meaning or endless play of signifiers). That is, I think form is crucial and that poems and novels have rhetorical and narrative structures which demand our attention.

In short, literary texts are not simply about the what; they are about the how. And when we, as a culture, devalue writing and accept "content" as an acceptable substitute, we at once witness and preside over the demise of literacy and critical thinking.  I am not pinning this heavy load on little Ms. Huffington. I am merely saying that apart from the issue of economic justice here, there is an in some ways even more insidious subtext: writing does not matter. And that does matter.