Well, hello. I’m a little surprised we’re all meeting up
again like this. I’m more than a little surprised to be launching a project
called “Mixed Media Daily, Year Two.” And, to be honest, I’m a little
disappointed that the subtitle isn’t “Electric Boogaloo.” But I’ll get over
that.
You know what I won’t get over? The way 2016 came to a close. Like the
darkness around a sputtering campfire. Like a venus flytrap around a hapless
fly.
Back in 2011, when I did the first round of Mixed Media
Daily, I thought of the project as an experiment in portraiture, an
homage to a style of media that was slowly slipping out of daily life and into
the history books. In some sense it felt a like an early obit; I imagined that
the death of any newspaper would occur only when they actually (forgive the
hackneyed phrase) stopped the presses. Simpler times!
The Los Angeles Times,
and newspapers in general, I’m happy to report, are still alive. What seems to
have kicked the bucket is the desire of a not inconsequential number of
Americans to digest hard news, to do the minimal mental work required to be
able to call oneself an informed voter. Which may be the same thing as the death
of the newspaper industry, but with one hell of a twist.
How did we get here? How did so many of our fellow citizens
mutate into a pack of political rageaholics who rely exclusively on easily
debunked garbage journalism to justify their vote? Who have such a white-hot
mistrust of mainstream media that they’ll happily believe anything thrown up on
the web by any random, anonymous domestic or international opportunist over a
well-researched piece from a credible news source? There’s no simple way to unpack
this sad, confounding turn of events. Some things we know are worth
considering: Since the election many journalists have written about the
profusion of fake news outlets, sites set up to turn a quick profit by playing
to the latent (or overt) biases of their readership. Traditional news
outlets---cable and network television, and of course, print media---also received
a measure of blame for what some saw as their unfair equivocation of two
clearly unequal candidates. More recently, post apocalypse---sorry, I mean post election---there have been reports of
conservative politicians appropriating the term “fake news” to describe stories
published by legitimate news sources that do not jibe with their agendas. It
all adds up to a campaign of misinformation (hi, Putin!) that is designed to
erode our democracy. That, fellow citizens, is unacceptable.
The saddest thing might be that the truth was out there, and
easily accessible. I read plenty of well-written, well-researched stories that
laid out the truly damning details of our shifty President-Elect’s shifty behavior
in his business and his personal life. After reading each piece, I would think,
should the country be crazy enough to elect this clown, they cannot say that
they weren’t warned. And then the country went ahead and elected this clown.
So here we are. Our
country is in serious crisis mode, but I’m not ready to give up on it. We need every
weapon primed and ready for the coming four-year bar brawl. One of those
weapons will most certainly be solid investigative journalism (Woodward and
Bernstein, anyone?). Of course as much as we need good journalism, good
journalism needs our attention. So I’m going to pay attention. Close attention,
and with a critical eye. And since I’m going to be processing a lot of what
will undoubtedly be fucked-up news, I’ll run it all through the old
illustration filter, so it least it’ll be kind of fun to look at, and maybe
I’ll be able to keep my blood below boiling point.
All of this adds up to a very different mission from the one
I used to launch this project six years ago. The main focus will still be the Los Angeles Times, but in an effort to
doodle a broader consensus of opinion, I’ll occasionally be working from other
local papers (we publish a lot of daily papers here in the Golden State).
If I go out of town, there might be an even farther-flung guest paper in the
mix. That’s the plan for now. It’s sort of a loose plan, but we’re all just winging
it at this point, aren’t we? We’re all stuck in the upside-down, where clowns
become kings, homes become battlegrounds, and pens become swords. It’s a scary
place, to be sure. Let’s not let it scare us into submission.
