Of Jamie Lee Curtis' Oscar "Snub"

When hypothesizing about upcoming movies' box office performance I don't give much thought to whether those movies are "good" or not according to some artistic criterion. As I am speculating about movies weeks or even months away from release there is no way of knowing that--all as, to be fair, cinematic quality according to any standard has an at best shaky relationship to box office receipts.

Likewise when I consider a film's Oscar prospects I do not go by quality (again, the nominations come out often before the general public has had a chance to see the films in question), but rather the boxes ticked by the film individually and the ceremony as a whole given the extreme politicization of the affair--aspects of which have been formalized in this age of "representation and inclusion standards" you can read right on the Academy's own web site.

So does it go as I look at the Academy's "snub" of Jamie Lee Curtis, "failing" to accord her the nomination many (including the folks at Variety) took for granted as coming to her for her role in The Last Showgirl. In fairness the film's makers ticked at least some of the right boxes, and so would have such recognition--given the obvious push to build up Gia Coppola as a filmmaker the way the Hollywood community built up her aunt Sofia a generation ago, as well as the desire to recognize the film for its thoroughly Academy-friendly theme. This is all the more the case given the fact that the film failed to make the cut in the other categories, all as "Best Supporting Actor/Actress" prizes in particular fulfill a "consolation prize" function in such situations. However, there are only so many slots for all the contenders to go around (perhaps not an impressive bunch by many a critical standard, but a robust enough bunch where the Academy's priorities are concerned), Curtis had not just the nomination but the prize itself for her role in Everything Everywhere All At Once just two years ago (in which, not incidentally, her characterization, on-screen impression, etc. were also a pointed contrast with her on-screen image in her younger years)--all as Demi Moore's turn in The Substance may have made her a front-runner for Best Actress, and that film's similarity of concern at multiple levels (extending from the situation of those aging while working in show business to the self-referential casting of the lead) in turn pushed the Academy in the direction of doing something else with the Best Supporting Actress prize, leaving Curtis, and Showgirl, empty-handed.

How Did January Go at the Box Office?

As remarked here previously 2024 was a terrible year for the box office, weaker even than 2023, with this largely a matter of the first half of the year or so before, from June forward, a number of major hits came to the rescue (the sequels to Inside Out, Despicable Me, Deadpool, Beetlejuice and in the fall, Moana 2 and Wicked especially, the $2.8 billion collected by which six films represented a third of the whole year's box office gross). January had been especially weak, taking in about 40 percent of the 2015-2019 average in real terms, in part because the slate of holiday releases that normally help carry the box office in January was so tepidly received--all as the month's new releases failed to draw moviegoers to the theaters. (Thus, as Aquaman 2, the Color Purple remake, the Hunger Games prequel and the rest underperformed horribly did Wonka, with a mere $200 million, prove the holiday season's box office champion, while the month's supposedly most promising release, the musical remake of Mean Girls that nobody asked for, fell flat.)

The fall season of 2024 having been rather more robust (with four films at least roughly matching Wonka's gross, and Moana 2 and the musical Wicked doubling it) one might wonder if January did better. It was an improvement, but not much of an improvement. The January 2024 box office take was just a little under a half billion dollars (with $496 million), while the January 2025 box office has gone just a little over the mark, sufficiently little that year-on-year inflation (about 2.9 percent) left it only very marginally better than the prior year's performance (its $544 million total really just a scarce 6 percent improvement, leaving January 2025 with about 42-43 percent of the 2015-2019 average for the month).

Even granting how little is expected of January this was an inauspicious start to a year which, more like 2023 than 2024 in this respect, will sorely test Hollywood's tendency to "business as usual."

Putting the Computing Revolution into Economic Perspective

For decades it has been common for economists, looking at computers' rising technical performance and falling costs ("You can buy an Ipad for fifty dollars!"), to argue that the contributions of computing to productivity, value creation, growth, must be far vaster than the figures suggest, to the point of rendering figures on manufacturing value added and even Gross Domestic Product meaningless as a basis for analysis of the economic trend as a result of their gross understatement of the progress they are sure we must be making--the more in, I suppose, because they are mesmerized (or want to be mesmerized) by images of wonders ceaselessly pouring forth from an ever-innovating Silicon Valley.

Alas, that image is at odds with the reality that the change in information technology is profoundly unrepresentative of the rest of the economy, as we see looking at the way our houses are built, our food is produced, our clothes are made--while even in areas where one can make a case for a revolution really being ongoing, like energy (where the rising productivity and plummeting cost of renewables has created enormous potentials), Big Oil and the rest have, with the help of their allies across the business world and government and the media, fought back ferociously and very successfully against that "disruption" that "business intellectuals" so love to talk about).

At the same time even in tech the progress is a far cry from the hype. Aside from the fact that really big developments have been few in recent years (just remember--the Iphone that is the favorite example of this innovation will be old enough to vote this year) there has been a very great deal to offset and limit the value delivered by these machines whether the issue is their contributions to the productivity of business, or the goods they bring to the consumer, sufficiently so as to dispel illusions of vast improvements in product and in life just not reported in the numbers. Below are ten of the more obvious:

1. Computing devices remain incapable of, on an autonomous basis, interacting with the physical world (comprehending it, navigating it, manipulating it with human dexterity, you know, like with a car that actually drives itself), with all that means when we are "living in a material world"--or even coping with situations of less physical kinds requiring great versatility (as you see every time you confront the vileness that companies serve up as customer service). The result is to severely limit the jobs they can do, as the pandemic reminded even the most obtuse--while the great wave of automation of physical and even mental work the pandemic was supposed to bring on has, as of 2025, yet to materialize, looking now like just another piece of techno-hype flogged by the hucksters in Silicon Valley and their courtiers in the media.

2. In most hands, at least, a computer all by itself is little more than a "brick." That is to say that computers' usefulness depends on (besides electricity, of course) computer software, Internet connections and, as a practical matter, outlays for a lot of the things you will hope to do online--all of which, of course, do register in the value added figures. (If you want online grocery delivery, for example, you are expected to pay a fee for the delivery, without which the computer does not connect one with any such service--not incidentally, a service arranged electronically but still performed by a human being in a vehicle and not a machine.) For comparison purposes, consider an analog-era television set--which so long as it was plugged into the wall could get a signal without the extras. Indeed, it seems plausible that the list of things one can do without paying extra charges is shrinking all the time in a period of ever more pervasive paywalls, decreasing site functionality, and consumer exploitation-driven "platform decay," with the price for many of the extras not falling (you get more bandwidth for the fee you pay your Internet Service Provider, not cheaper bottom-of-the-market Internet service), with the general inflationary wave through which all but the super-rich are now suffering exacerbating the costs.

3. By and large our use of computers has, in the form of digital substitutes for pre-digital services, replaced old goods rather than introduced really new ones into our economic life, making this a matter of replacing one way of filling a need with another--with these digital alternatives substitutes often entailing sacrifices of utility when they are compared with the original that are all too often overlooked by those singing a new world of convenience. (Ordering your groceries online you are likely to find your choice of goods more limited, and the method of ordering more cumbersome and less flexible, than would be the case were you to shop in person, as many complain about getting a lower quality of item than they would get were they to do their shopping themselves.)

4. Where those things that computers can do are concerned there has been a tendency to diminishing returns that makes the "on paper" improvements in technological performance remote from the actual value delivered. Yes, your computer today is hundreds of times faster than those we had in the 1990s. But has it made you hundreds of times more productive as a user of e-mail? I doubt it. And the same could be said of a very great deal else, with all that means for the increased value delivered by the devices, and the productivity they yield--all as the list of really fundamental tasks they enable us to perform has not grown anywhere near so rapidly as the speeds and sizes in the performance specifications. (Indeed, many computer activities are less efficient than before, most obviously because of an increasing burden of computer security, more on which later in this list.)

5. Even when perfectly functional computers (and the software and Internet connections that go with them) remain far from user-friendly, and highly unreliable, with the fact exemplified by a recent Danish study showing that 11 to 20 percent of users' time is absorbed in dealing with computer problems, with, again, obvious implications for any growth in value added, and the productivity gains yielded.

6. Computers' performance gains have been substantially absorbed by what their users would generally regard as disutilities--specifically software devoted to the surveillance of the user, and the subjection of the user to advertising and other forms of marketing (the computer user does not want ads more "relevant" to their inferred needs, they want to not be spied on or marketed to at all)--and where not actual disutilities in the aforementioned matter, at best irrelevancies (as with many features of which almost all of the users will know and care nothing, but which absorb copious amounts of memory and at times interfere with the functioning of features they do care about, as happened when an update produced problems with Bitlocker for many last year).

7. The benefits of computer use go along with the high cost of computer crime--and the efforts required to combat such crime, reflected in the existence of an over $270 billion cybersecurity industry, and one might add, the amounts of users' computing power absorbed by such programs as antiviruses, and the periodic updates of software to patch up holes in the systems sold them. This extends to extreme inconvenience for computer users who as a matter of course are expected to display increasing sophistication in matters of "cybersecurity," whether coping with multiple strong passwords, understanding and using multi-factor authentication and passkeys, the operation of highly imperfect antivirus programs, assessing the risks in the unsolicited e-mail, QR codes and other material with which they are barraged, etc.. All of this too has significant costs from the standpoint of not just money, and time (which happens to be money as the adage has it), but well-being, with "cybersecurity fatigue" already a known problem a decade ago, and inducing many to make even less use of the Internet than they might otherwise do (avoiding this or that site just to not have to open another account with information the company will inevitably sell or leak, just to not have to deal with yet another wretched password).

8. The advent of the smart phone, which has admittedly been an important innovation, has entailed important trade-offs. Portability has come at the price of usability, with small touch screens no substitute for full-sized keyboards, while it is also the case that the mobility of the devices (with all the risk of damage or loss associated with carrying a little piece of plastic everywhere), and the usage of wireless communications that goes with them in public places, has exacerbated the security problem.

9. Computer hardware and software of all kinds tend to have short product cycles, translating to rapid depreciation--with this, again, detracting from the value delivered, as users are required to expensively replace the worn-out or simply outdated item. A fact that has been acknowledged as contributing to the difference between "Gross Domestic Product" and the less well-known but in many ways more illuminating "Net Domestic Product," it is also the case that replacement entails costs beyond simply buying and turning on the new equipment. One has to integrate that piece of equipment into an existing network (indeed, buy a personal computer and you are likely to find this part of the default version of the set-up process), transfer old files into it, and on top of that spend time learning to cope with what is likely to be a different model--and all that, again, the more often for the rapidity of depreciation.

10. Those enthusing over the benefits of computing for the public tend to overlook the still extant "digital divide"--a very large part of the population left out of the benefits of computer use because of poverty or old age (in societies which are both increasingly poor and increasingly elderly), a situation highlighted by the David Cameron government's cynically making the "Universal Credit" system with which it replaced much of its social safety net "online only" (rendering access more difficult for exactly that part of the population which needs the system most, as it is least equipped to deal with such a system).

Would I say that these hard facts of the computer age means computers have not, on the whole, brought net benefits? Even very significant net benefits? I would not. (Returning to the examples given above I think it a very good thing that people can order groceries online, and access the Internet on the go.) However, when we remember the limits as well as the wonders of the digital revolution, the costs of computing as well as the gains--and the fact that, in line with the calculation of economic growth using methods that make the proverbial divorced cancer patient an economic hero, many of the costs, as with fixing the problems of unwieldy and unreliable machines or the cost of computer security, are registered as gains--the view that computers are somehow yielding radical gains far beyond what is discernible in the economic statistics seems much more questionable.

Of course, in saying that I think it fair that one could imagine things to have been otherwise in a different situation--one where, for example, governments took steps to protect computer users' privacy rather than leaving information traffickers free to monetize their personal information, or businesses bravely pursued such potentially productivity-enhancing measures as telecommuting rather than fighting against them every step of the way (while the free rein of anticompetitive practice in an age in which antitrust is a dead letter, the locust-like short-termism that is the great legacy of "shareholder activism," and an intellectual property regime that has gone utterly out of control, were not all doing their parts to stifle any sort of meaningful technical progress in this sector as in so many others). However, intriguing as that possibility may be, and valid and indeed useful its consideration, we can only speculate about that--and such speculation a whole other discussion than this one, an appraisal of the place of "tech" in the world that we have actually got.

The Politics of the Term "Entrepreneur"

The rather tongue-twisting four-syllable term "entrepreneur" denotes a person who launches a business venture. Annoying as its pronunciation may be the term is essentially unproblematic as a descriptor. However, it has become much more than a functional descriptor in recent decades, instead become a word to conjure with this no accident, ultra-right economists and their epigones having gone to great lengths to make it so.

Consider the "entrepreneur"-centric vision of the economy they propound ceaselessly, virtually without challenge in the mainstream. The proponents of that vision endlessly direct our attention to the shiny new "startup" (for them, another word to conjure with), and those who launch them in acts of visionary risk-taking so important that they can say that "never have so many owed everything to so few" as they exalt them as the only makers in a world of unappreciative and generally worthless takers. Hyperbolic as this may sound, all this is in fact quite explicitly stated in the work of George Gilder. The Sexual Revolution-and-"women's-lib"-hating kulturkampfer-turned-Reagan-White House-court-intellectual-and-ultimately-would-be-prophet of "tech," "Silicon valley" and the "information age" who did so much to make the current American cult of the entrepreneur with books like his "theology of capitalism" Wealth and Poverty and The Spirit of Enterprise, in the latter hailing entrepreneurs as "the heroes of economic life," declared them the ones who "know the rules of the world and the laws of God," who "sustain the world," and expressed the hope that "the entitled children around the world" would "come to see and follow their example and earn their redemption and their happiness, reconciled with the world of work and risk"--such that when he fuses religion and capitalism that way one scarcely does any mental work at all drawing an analogy between how, just as Hegel made the state "God on Earth," Gilder and those who follow him make the entrepreneur into that.

As one might guess from such extreme and blatantly irrational (I suspect many would say, utterly unhinged) rhetoric the view I discuss here is not a very good guide to reality. Those fixated on startups give us an image of the economy bearing nearly no relation whatsoever to a scene dominated by long-established corporate giants--all as their "technostructures" are what make those companies and the economic world generally go round, as the startup scene, where it exists at all, so often amounts to nothing, and frequently less (as seen in the fraud that was "genius" Elizabeth Holmes' once ballyhooed Theranos). On those rare occasions when companies are launched in the fashion now associated with the startup, and actually develop into something of consequence, one often finds that those who did the launching relied, even at that stage and at the highest level, on the skills of other less celebrated persons, and frequently many of them--because the job is a big one that only a superhuman would really be able to do by themselves, and because even by ordinary human standards the "entrepreneur" who ends up with all the credit so often brings rather less in the way of technical and organizational skills, business sense, personal effort, than they are given credit for (as John Kenneth Galbraith showed in busting the myth of Henry Ford as such a superman).

And all that is before one even considers how even then nothing would have happened without all the rest of their workers down to the plant floor, the intricately developed system of societal and global market relations that even in the eighteenth century had Adam Smith remarking how at a certain level the thousand people who might be involved in the making of a single coat, the equally societal and global machinery of scientific and technological progress (how often do the "entrepreneurs" actually have any inventions to their credit?), and the government which furnishes innumerable public goods and often much more than that to the successful "enterprise" in a way that makes ridiculous Gilder-like claims for entrepreneurial "visionary risk-taking" rather than "optimizing calculation." Empirical examination of how business operates (and plain and simple logic, too) makes it very clearly that risky visions are something businesspersons flee from in real life, as instead their "risk-taking" consists mainly of asset-trafficking as they rent-seek and speculate in a global economy turned casino, placing their bets on stock and real estate and other such assets, then unfailingly scream for bailout by governments which fill their coffers by taxing everyone but them--all while the record where "bringing good things to life" is concerned makes it very clear that government had to bring much to the table to encourage the "entrepreneurs" (an industrial economy doesn't happen without industrial policy), sometimes strong-armed them into getting lines of business (sometimes, very gangster-style indeed in its choice of method), and frequently just did the job itself (with America's extraordinary World War II defense production happening specifically because government did not wait for the "entrepreneurs" to get their act together, but went out and built the plant itself, leased it to business to produce what was needed, and then sold it off to the private sector at a deep discount), with all that means for just who was really the maker, who the taker.

Indeed, it is exemplary of the dissonances between the "Cult of the Entrepreneur" and lived reality that, desperate for anything in it that would seem to correspond to their image of the world at all, the propagandists pay such disproportionate attention to Silicon Valley relative to the rest of the economy--and at the same time provide such a wildly distorted image of the development, contributions, standing of American tech. (Cutting government and established business out of the picture they present the computer age as having all come out of Bay Area garages, exaggerate both the impact of their goods and their macroeconomic contribution to the economy in such areas as employment or the trade deficit, constantly overhype their work to produce hyperbolic images of the rate of progress they are making as they uncritically pass on the sector's stupid hucksterism, and sell fantasies of its supposedly matchless prowess punctured again and again by the competition--most recently, by DeepSeek.)

In this context the word "entrepreneur" and its derivatives (like entrepreneurship) have been one-word summations of this market fundamentalist dogma, and their utterance repetition and affirmation of that dogma--all as anyone attentive to the discourse of the times well knows, respectful utterance of the words ceaseless, making of a fashionable buzzword a holy chant of the market fundamentalist. ("Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship . . . entrepreneur, entrepreneur, entrepreneur.") But few are those who point this out, the utterances of the truth, unlikely to get much attention because of how much they are shut out of the mainstream, and those few occasions when they can get any sort of hearing for the truth buried again and again under an avalanche of Conventional Foolishness, which as with so much Conventional Foolishness endures because it is so flattering to and convenient for those in power. Thus are businessmen who on close inspection were not just profoundly lucky Josiah Bounderbys but deeply venal incompetents deified--as at the same time we see not only exploding inequality, but technological stagnation and deindustrialization, with all they have meant for our world.

"Personal Responsibility!" They Snarl in Your Face

The term "personal responsibility" can be used in a lot of ways. However, there is a particular usage that grates on a great many nerves.

Consider the flinging of the words "Personal responsibility!" in the face of those who, for example, have lost their jobs in an economic downturn and have every reason to expect an even more than usually hard and long search before they find a new one, an outcome that is never certain and often means harder work for lower wages--all as the executives who caused the downturn, insisting on their bonuses as their companies extort the government for a bailout paid by the taxes of working people like those who have been losing their jobs, never hear such talk from the deferential legislators before whom they testify.

In that image, with its combination of "bound but unprotected/protected but unbound" inequality with a sanctimonious callousness in a situation where the fortunes of most are not reducible to individual morality, we have the essence of that utterance, and its grating. Here "Personal responsibility!" means leaving individuals to cope entirely on their own with systemic failures in which they had no say because those who have power derive short-term benefit from the situation and thus have no interest in altering the situation whatsoever, and indeed every interest in resisting any alteration to the situation whatsoever--climate change, pandemic, the insanities attendant on hyper-financialization, the ever-worsening nightmare of personal cyber-security, etc., etc., ad infinitum and ad nauseam--with the communication of this the nastier for the attack on those who would criticize the situation in any way being dressed up as morality by those too stupid to know the difference between "morality" and "moralizing," or simply taking too much pleasure in striking poses of superiority as they say mean and hurtful things to others to respect that difference.

What Makes a Victim "Worthy" in the Eyes of the Media?

In discussing the "worthiness" the media accords the suffering of some victims as against others many point to how far away they are. However, those specific criteria cannot and do not account for everything, with Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent selecting for comparison purposes two very similar incidents--the murder of a civilian, and indeed specifically a Catholic priest who had become politically active, by forces of state repression. One such case was in Poland, the other in El Salvador--and going by their attempt to quantify the quantity and quality of the coverage the two incidents received Herman and Chomsky determined that a priest killed by state personnel in (Communist) Poland was, as victims go, at least a hundred times as "worthy" as a priest killed by state personnel in (Anti-Communist) El Salvador in the eyes of the media. What made the difference from the standpoint of "Establishment" media was whether or not coverage of the incident supported or called into question the prevailing ideology, and with it served or hindered the maintenance of public support for the prevailing policy. The victim whose suffering's being publicized serves the interests of authority a worthy victim, and vice-versa--in this case, how discussion of that suffering stood in relation to the promulgation of Anti-Communist ideology and the sustenance of support for a Cold War then going into overdrive.

The Media Waxes Philosophical About Victims, Worthy and Unworthy

One of the more famous aspects of Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky's critique of the news media in their classic Manufacturing Consent is their discussion of the media's double standard regarding "worthy" and "unworthy" victims. The worthy victim is a victim worthy of our interest and sympathy, and a fight for justice; and the unworthy victim is the opposite, "undeserving" of such concern; with the coverage they each get matching that.

The worthy victim gets far more coverage, far more prominent coverage, and far more emotive coverage than the unworthy victim, with the last in particular worth expanding on.

The worthy victim is humanized. The account of the crime against them, in its intense detailing, emphasizes the brutality done them. We are made aware of the indignation of others over the incident. And there is a demand for justice.

Thus when the victim is a worthy one the media is apt to present all of the above in emotive language, and give us too those pictures worth a thousand words, showing us their faces, likely smiling, in photos taken back when they were alive--while we are warned about the graphic images that show what remains of them now that make such a contrast with those living images we saw earlier. The journalist's report, and the images, will also make clear to us that they had attachments--that they had a family--that they loved and were loved, by parents, spouses, children, friends, coworkers, in whose lives there is now a gaping hole, and who cry out for answers and accountability. (Indeed, rather than just humanizing them the media gives the impression of canonizing them.)

By contrast, if the media speaks of unworthy victims at all, it refrains from emotive language, often does not mention individuals, and if it mentions individuals says little about them. Their faces remain unknown to us as the report alludes to what happened to them only briefly, providing such details to which the journalists deign to offer (of which there are unlikely to be many) in the most distant and impersonal and "clinical" fashion. They display no interest in those they left behind, and there is certainly no concern for any aftermath. Indeed, Herman and Chomsky contrast the coverage of worthy victims so "generous with gory details and quoted expressions of outrage and demands for justice" with the "low-keyed" character of what little coverage the unworthy get that is "designed to keep the lid on emotions."

I find the essentials of this characterization of the media's conduct indisputable, though I think that with a few decades of additional hindsight (and one might see, the decline of certain sensitivities that even in the '80s were more developed than now, to go by how affairs like the Iran-Contra episode could still outrage, and seem awfully small time next to what we have today) it is worth enlarging on what seems a minor point in their original discussion. This is that those reporting the incident not only treat the incident very differently depending on whether the victim is worthy or unworthy, but strike a different attitude toward the meaning and value of human life altogether as they do so. Herman and Chomsky remarked this in some degree, noting how the "low-keyed" character of the coverage of unworthy victims tends to entail "regretful and philosophical generalities on the omnipresence of violence and the inherent tragedy of human life" telling us "Don't get too worked up over such things."

Today it seems to me that the philosophical double standard has gone much further. With the worthy victims not only is it that we get lectures on the sanctity of human life, each and every last one, and the absolute unjustifiability of any violence against any human, ever, but in discussion of the unworthy we get not just talk of the omnipresence of violence and tragedy in sad and regretful and "philosophical" tones but, increasingly, a hastening to justify what was done that often goes as far as their assuming an attitude of that "Welcome to the real world!" swagger to which small men who want to feel big are so addicted as they condescendingly tell us in that way feminists call "mansplaining" that that real world is not just a place where violence is omnipresent and tragic but a harsh and brutal place that requires even the gentlest of us to compromise so-called principles for the sake of making the world go round, with consequences that aren't always intended. And anyway, what do you care about those people you're calling victims anyway--people who don't look or sound or think or believe like you, people you would never want to meet in a country you would never want to see--getting abused, tortured, killed? The very people whose very animality forces us to do these things--making us the real victims? The fact of the matter is that to keep you safe sometimes we have to do nasty things, and the truth is that deep down even those unappreciative liberal scum who can't handle the truth want those things done, because deep down they know that's the way it is. ("You want them on that wall. You need them on that wall.")

As logic goes it's as laughable as it is appalling, a mass of begged questions as dense as a neutron star. But they aren't looking to win with logic. Instead they appeal to selfishness, ignorance, fear, bigotry, shame, misanthropy, moral nihilism--to the worst in us--while rubbing the faces of those humanized worthy victims in the faces of their audience as they dehumanize the unworthy, and all this backed up by outright bullying as they make anyone who would speak for the unworthy victim a traitor against whom the public is to be whipped up, and in dealing with them authority may not be in their view obliged to regard itself as wholly constrained by "democratic norms." Many see right through it, and even refuse to be intimidated--but the media in question makes sure that they don't get a platform from which they might challenge the Narrative, all as they pat themselves on the back for their "objectivity" and "responsibility," and their giving their audience all sides of the question.

The Ideological Side of Media Bias

Media critics from Thorstein Veblen to Theodore Dreiser to Upton Sinclair to, more recently, Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky, Norman Solomon, Thomas Frank and Matt Taibbi have made it clear over and over again that economics is the key to the news media's functioning in a society such as ours--who owns the media outlets and what their interests are, and how they make their investments pay; who subscribes to them and advertises in them; how they come by their news, who they fear as able to inflict financial pain on them by withholding advertising money, credit and means of circulation, or striking back with a lawsuit; how they hire and fire the staff that does the job they demand of them.

All of that, of course, has made the news media in a "free" society as much a propaganda organ operated by and for the powerful for their ends as the press in any more officially dictatorial one--and indeed it seems that with so many having covered this ground before so thoroughly, with results that are incontestable to any even slightly aware person, there is little anyone can add to all of the foregoing. Still, if economics dictates the fundamental task there is the distance to be covered between the fundamental economic interests behind the media and the specifics of the media's standards, procedures, practices, legitimacy--as seen in, for instance, the news media's notions of "objective" coverage, its stress on politics relative to policy, its understanding of the uses of expertise, its propensity for "both sidesism"--and it has seemed to me that "centrist" ideology has been hugely important in the mainstream media's mode of operation, the more in as that ideology has been a constant even as so much else has changed technologically, organizationally, commercially and even socially and politically as the institution evolved from the overwhelmingly local and print periodical-dominated press of Dreiser and Veblen's day, to the multinational corporation-controlled digital media of which Taibbi writes.

The Fart-Smeller and the Swaggerer

At least from the standpoint of life in the year 2025, legitimizing "things as they are" unavoidably means getting people to go along with a great deal that is blatantly and undeniably stupid and vile. (Indeed, this is one of the principal jobs of those whom conventional wisdom hails as "experts" in such areas as finance or national security.)

Those who do the legitimizing go about their jobs in different ways, with the poses they strike as they speak their "truths" striking me as worthy of comparison and contrast at the moment.

There is the pose of thoughtful humanity facing a world that is not what it would like it to be but from which it bravely refuses to shrink, and which after much soul-searching it has found cannot be changed. ("Human nature" and all that.) I wish it were otherwise, they say, but "it is what it is," they tell us--often as they pull that "smelled a fart" expression that stupid people think conveys gravitas.

Then there is the gleeful "Welcome to the real world!" swagger that says "This is the way the world is, and if you're not okay with it that's your problem because you're not clear-eyed and tough like me." Of course it is just the pseudo-machismo of an idiot bully who will prove anything but clear-eyed and tough when they deservedly find themselves the ones at the sharp end, but they are probably not smart enough to know that their obnoxious pose is a pose.

Considering those poses I don't know which hypocrisy is worse.

Boxoffice Pro Issues its Forecast for Captain America 4's Opening

I previously estimated that Captain America 4's worldwide box office gross would be well short of that of the third film from 2016 even in current dollars, and that the tracking-based estimate for the opening weekend, positing a gross of some $86-$95 million in the first three days in the domestic market, suggests the film's finishing with $500-$600 million taken in worldwide as the most probable outcome.

Boxoffice Pro had then not yet put out its own forecast (these days they do so just three, rather than four, weeks in advance of a film's release), but they have their estimate out now--some $70-$85 million for the three day period, as reported almost two weeks closer to the release date. Assuming the same combination of legs in the domestic market, and a commensurate international response, as I forecast in the prior piece, this implies a range of more like $400-$500 million.

Boxoffice Pro's assessment says nothing about a decline in expectations, but all the same, their figure's being even lower, and that with just three weeks to go until the movie's debut, reaffirms the impression that this is not what the backers of this movie need given the film's $350 million+ cost for production alone, and Marvel Cinematic Universe's combination of a shaky market position and big plans now. Indeed, between the price tag for the movie (implying a need for a gross of $600 million or more for the backers to just break even given the structuring of revenues), the billion-dollar hit that Captain America 3 was in current dollars, the (almost) billion-dollar hit that Captain America 2 was in real, inflation-adjusted dollars, the billion dollar hit that Deadpool also was, and the public relations importance of the billion-dollar mark generally these days, it seems that nothing much short of--you guessed it--a billion dollars will do given the need of the MCU to show that Marvel's really back (for all its success, Deadpool & Wolverine was too idiosyncratic a film to prove that by itself). The result is that nothing short of a great "overperformance" relative to the current expectations will save the day here, with all that implies for the franchise in which the relaunch of Captain America is so important an element.