Why The Scene Doesn’t Matter
December 13th, 2007 at 11:13 pm by BrianExample A: This week’s cover story. Though you can pretty much apply that to every week’s cover story from our complacent corporate alt-weekly. Whether it’s nude, potential child p-R0n, Skateboard Jesus, or something deemed “edgy” enough to make a sensible person groan about offering the free rag inside of their business.
But don’t think I’m all negative here. Matt Pulle coming back to The Scene is like Albert Haynesworth coming off the IR and back into the defensive lineup. Real reporting has been lean in his absence. Unless you count exploiting retarded minorities for their Government Is The Solution To All Of Our Problems agenda. Journalistic ethics to be sure. Manipulative retarded ghey rape. Who do you stand against in that moral octagon? Is it possible to not take a side?
Urethra, I’ve found it! Sue the schools for a 19 year old child molester that you would have excoriated them over if they had kicked him out.
Let’s face it. The Scene sucks. They shilled for our new Mayor, Karl “Do Nothing About Crime” Dean, throughout the campaign against a moderate Democrat (Bob Clement) so much that their entire budget should have been considered an in-kind campaign contribution and Liz Garrigan is making the strongest argument from changing the Democrat’s party symbol from a Donkey to a Camel. When she’s not carrying water for generic “Democrat Candidate X” by the bucket, she loyally stores it in the humps on her back.
Anyway, this week was their typical attack on Teh Fred. I read it as I do every Wednesday at 11 am. After all, if the enemy is just going to print their game plan for all to read you might as well Belichick it out. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I consider the source. But Mrs. McMurphy was incensed and she’s the E.F. Hutton of our sleigh bed. When she bends low and whispers “attack those nut gobblers at The Scene” while waving a twelve pack of Sam Adams in between my LCD-glazed eyes, I swoon. What’s left of my mind is amped with bloodlust for our ink stained alt-assbags.
The Cover consists of an ugly picture of Fred, not that he’s GQ material on the outside anyway, but we’re dealing with Very Serious Journalists ™ here. People with very deep feelings about hair, where’s the coolest bar to hang out, and what under appreciated local band is going to be “the next big thing”. Which certainly explains the runaway success of The Pink Spiders.
Journalists who shill for candidates in their pages today in hopes that they can shill on that candidate’s payroll tomorrow. And then float effortlessly in between.
But this time the politically acrid greenhouse gases are being emitted from the ecologically named Jeff Woods:
Here comes another negative article about Fred Thompson. Big surprise.
Yes. A negative story on any Republican in the Scene. I haven’t been that surprised since I saw one of their empty racks. Once.
I was channel-surfing the other night and there suddenly was the craggy-faced Thompson on my TV screen as District Attorney Arthur Branch in a particularly frustrating moment during an episode of Law & Order. “What the hell,” Thompson growled, throwing his spectacles on his desk. “At my age, I ought to be fishing anyway.” That’s funny, I thought, the real-life Thompson has got to be thinking the same thing.
Are you sure it was a fortuitously aired episode of Law & Order that provided you with that bon mot? Are you sure it wasn’t nothing?
If you didn’t know better, you’d think he was doing fairly well in this campaign. Too bad for Thompson he’s not attracting much news coverage anymore since his poll numbers went south.
In fact, after Thompson’s positive performance in the last Iowa debate, Woods had to use The Scene’s experimental new medium reserved for Very Serious Journalists ™ known as “a blog” to quickly insulate his one day old article from September Tenthification:
After unmercifully pummeling Fred Thompson from the beginning of his presidential campaign (see this week’s Scene cover story), the media have apparently decided to keep his candidacy alive for whatever entertainment value he can provide in the runup to the Iowa caucuses.
Tails I win. Heads you lose!
Me titling this post “Why The Scene Doesn’t Matter” and writing to this length is a little contradictory. Woods’ close to 3,000 word Cover Story about an ugly, craggledy, hound dogged face losing loser, allegedly 4th tier candidate surpasses my Mrs. McMurphy induced outrage though. Were Thompson on Tennessee’s Death Row instead of the national stage, he would surely garner a more sympathetic propaganda piece from Whole Foods’ Hamas wing.
Again, I’m not the professional. I’m not the one allegedly with an editor hanging over my head when I decide to spew forth all sorts and manner of loose shit and says “Eh, go with it. Just keep the f-bombs to a minimum so Dr. Ming Wang doesn’t drop his Lasik eye surgery advertisements”.
Fairly or not, the media had succeeded in giving Fred a new public face. In a span of a few weeks, he had been transformed before our very eyes into a character more closely resembling Elmer Fudd than John Wayne.
Betting people are wise not to put too much stock in The Scene’s observations. Prior to Bush’s 2004 re-election, they ran a 15,000 word three part series on why he wasn’t going to win from Nashville’s own William Faulkner of douchebags. That’s a lot of vinegar:
“To friends and friends of friends: This, as promised, was the third and last installment of an op-ed piece run amok. (See www.nashvillescene.com for the previous two.) All I set out to do was gather my thoughts to say, in 800 words or less, why I feel so strongly that President George W. Bush should not be granted a second term in the election of Nov. 2, 2004. What I have ended up with, instead, is not a few hundred words but more like 15,000—all to the same conclusion: four years of Mr. Bush’s leadership is more than enough. For the sake of our country and the future of the world, his time in office should end at noon on Jan. 20, 2005—and that won’t be a moment too soon. If you don’t like that premise, you won’t have liked this essay.”
As with many things in the Nashville Scene, if you don’t like the fragile premise that their open relationship with journalism is based on then you won’t like their essays.
And as for Mrs. McMurphy, when you’re picking up papers (by the armload I might add 
) to potty train the dog, in the future it would be better to pick up a periodical that’s not pretending to be something it’s not.
December 14th, 2007 at 1:57 am
Dear Brian,
Having read your exquisite take down of your city’s corporate owned alt-weekly, The Nashville Scene, I endeavor to take down in a similar manner Louisville’s corporate owned alt-weekly, The Louisville Eccentric Observer (LEO). Whether I am successful or not is not important, for shall I find myself incapable of the basement-scene-from-Pulp-Fiction ass-raping that you delivered to your alt-weekly that I have been planning for mine, that is okay. We all can’t be perfect, but I have a goal, which I believe attainable, to show what a big bunch of tofu eating self-important ass hats we have to unfortunately deal with 130 miles north of you on I-65 every week up here.
I consider it a challenge, one I hope to be up to.
Sincerely, Lee fron DN
December 14th, 2007 at 10:30 am
[...] Brian McMurphy takes aim at the Nashville Scene accusing them of carrying water for the left and unfairly piling on Fred Thompson: Anyway, this week was their typical attack on Teh Fred. I read it as I do every Wednesday at 11 am. After all, if the enemy is just going to print their game plan for all to read you might as well Belichick it out. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I consider the source. But Mrs. McMurphy was incensed and she’s the E.F. Hutton of our sleigh bed. When she bends low and whispers “attack those nut gobblers at The Scene” while waving a twelve pack of Sam Adams in between my LCD-glazed eyes, I swoon. What’s left of my mind is amped with bloodlust for our ink stained alt-assbags. [...]
December 14th, 2007 at 11:00 am
I don’t know what the Scene was like in its hey-day, but near as I can tell it isn’t a newspaper, its a advertiser supported weekly magazine. There are many weekly magazines out there, National Review, The Nation, The New Republic, etc…which have points of view and take sides on issues. Granted, the Nashville Scene writes in a quasi-tabloid manner, but, when you are trying to grab the attention of a large swath of people, sometimes that is the only way to do it; serious wonky articles only work in publications that have targeted audiences.
Should they have been more respectful to that wrinkly old man who dodders on about Federalism and new politics while using whatever time he has to bash other candidates old school style; maybe.
But ultimately I think your rage is misplaced and should be directed at your candidate who managed to turn near 24 hour a day coverage of his impending entrance into the Republican primary, into a campaign which sits complaining about the fact that “the issues” aren’t being discussed enough. As if the Media is supposed to fawn all over him because he put out a few position papers which in reality have no more insight into the problems of America than a week of Phil Valentine.
Face it, you’re pissed that Fred Thompson until now has generally fallen flat in this campaign. He and his cohorts can blame the media for not being fair to him because he “won’t play their game,” but if he thought he could somehow win this campaign without taking advantage of free media (newspapers and television) while having to come back to Tennessee every couple of weeks to throw a few more fundraisers with John Rich and Gretchen Wilson, than they have nobody to blame but themselves.
December 14th, 2007 at 12:25 pm
OK, but seriously. What’s the matter with Fred?
December 14th, 2007 at 8:24 pm
First off, let me say that it doesn’t go unnoticed from these quarters that the main two people taking umbrage with this are people that The Scene lovingly bestowed their “best bloggers” tin foil crowns. I’ll give them credit for noticing people who blog outside of their employ. Anyway.
Second, there is more diversity of opinion at NRO, TNR, and the Nation than in the Scene’s room. It’s an ideological closet locked from the inside. Walter Jowers and the no longer present Willy Stern were the spots on the domino in their game.
Rumors of “my rage” are mildly exaggerated.
Any casual reader here knows my stand on Thompson’s campaign. Unlike any other candidate considered “serious”, he has not put together a traditional organization. He is comfortable in his own skin, however wrinkled, possibly to a fault. But his message resonates with people on the right ad the middle.
People often bemoan the money associated with running for the Presidency. Why should it take $200 Million to run for a job that pays $400,000 a year? Envelope stuffers, phone bank operators, signage, greasing local party flacks. Or in the case of Ron Paul, identity thieves and spambots as evidence by the link to the “fredthompsonforum” in The Scene’s comment thread. Do a DNS search on them.
Contrast that with Romney who has been running for two years. Unarguably doing everything he was supposed to do organizationally yet he’s losing ground.
Hit the comments threads around the web. People aren’t psyched about Romney or Giuliani. Candidates who were considered shoe-ins just a few months ago.
If Thompson does it his way and is in the top 3 in Iowa, then it will be nothing short of amazing. The more he’s in front of the camera, his stock goes up.
By my count, I picked on 7 Scene cover stories in addition to their unoriginal rehashing of every Thompsonian faux pas since he announced his candidacy (Hammond’s SNL skit, Terry Schiavo who care?)…..three months ago.
It’s a substance over style candidacy. That he hasn’t electrified the Democrat base hardly speaks to where we will be three months from now. If you were standing in a bath tub full of water and Fred tossed you a toaster, you still probably wouldn’t be electrified.
But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to see it anyway.
December 15th, 2007 at 10:56 pm
I almost never read The Scene but did read The Scene of this crime after picking up a copy when I was in Franklin Friday. Yeah, Fred has been treated unfairly by the print media (the ones I read). I hope these newspapers quickly arc on into irrelevancy and are rapidly replaced by something more serviceable, balanced, informative, and mature.