There’s a nasty rumor going around that the first cinematic trailer for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King will be released with New Line Cinema’s next movie, Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd, which comes out next Friday.
I say the rumor is “nasty” because it means I may have to actually go see the piece of crap. Oh, the humanity!
Of course, there are other options. One Tolkienphile has a strategy: “Buy a ticket for something you *want* to see that starts shortly after [Dumb & Dumberer], wander into the ‘wrong’ room until the trailers are over, slap forehead and evacuate to the ‘right’ theatre.” Heh.
(On a tangentially related note, a Google search for dumb and dumberer does turn up the official movie site (item #4), but it also produces the question: “Did you mean: dumb and dumber?” Again, heh.)
UPDATE: But, hey, at least they have a top-level editor who is facing up to it. Contrast the New York Times, which, as Donald Luskin points out, seems more interested in ferreting out “technical journalistic transgressions, violations of rules of process” than in dealing with the paper’s “larger crimes in the domain of results — the systematic distortion of news, analysis and opinion to fit a political agenda.”
I tend to think American print journalism would actually be better off if our newspapers were like London’s newspapers, where every paper has a pretty much explicit bias of one kind or another, and everybody knows it, and the public can pick its poison.
But hypocracy is always bad; it will rot the soul of any profession, and that’s what happens to journalism when papers like the New York Times pretend to be the “newspaper of record” when really they’re blatantly liberal (or when Fox News pretends to be “fair and balanced” when really it’s blatantly conservative). If we’re going to adopt the British system, we have to be up-front about it. Rainesian sneakiness has no place in journalism.
Moreover, because virtually every American city has only one daily paper, and because large numbers of those papers are owned by the same corporate conglomerates (thanks, FCC, for making this situation even worse), Americans don’t really have a true choice among newspapers — unlike Brits, we can’t really pick our poison. For most of us, our only real choice is: a) read what they give us, or b) don’t read a daily newspaper. And that makes it essential for daily newspapers, if they want to remain relevant, to fairly present both sides of the issue, not just the side favored by the newsroom’s cultural prejudices. Otherwise, hell, everybody will just read blogs! :)
