The $100 million vault
Catching the eye Thoughts are free, and so are their reproducers. This is especially true when the original is called Michael Moore and delivers journalistic innovations à discretion.
Column Thoughts are free, and so are their reproducers. This is especially true when the original is called Michael Moore and delivers journalistic innovations à discretion. It is rather rude, Mbwana, to walk through the rooms of friendly hosts and ask: Who did you steal all this from? (The more interesting the answer, the more likely you are not to be invited back, by the way). If we walk through immaterial rooms of ideas, the same question is a compliment: "Who did you steal this from?" Culture has always been a chain of thefts - the simplest definition of a classic is that it has been stolen from by a great many people. Good ideas remain good ideas, even if they are not your own to begin with. An expert, according to Bert Brecht, is someone who does not repeat what has been successful. This was no theory with Brecht: several dozen of the cheekiest verses in his Threepenny Opera came from Kipling and Villon.
Anxious minds do not call theft by its name: They prefer to use words like inspiration or import-export. The number one export country for promising ideas is undoubtedly America. Whether in banking, music or journalism: without American chewing gum, German (Swiss) brains would have a strong Aryan bad breath.
The hottest candidate for current thefts is a newly rich dollar millionaire: Michael Moore. After all, his hit "Fahrenheit 9/11" was the first documentary film to break the magical 100 million dollar barrier. A number of things can be imported from this and Moore's other work for the Swiss market:1 An astonishingly large audience is interested in information, politics and polemics - as long as they are entertaining.
2. what Moore delivers is the big picture: big politics and little people at the same time. He delivers what the media does not - an overview in the chaos of individual reports, opinions and local reports. With simple cuts from Washington strategists to disoriented soldiers in Iraq, from General Motors managers to debt collectors in Detroit, he provides the answer to the question often neglected by the media: What the heck is the hiccup of politics and the jargon of the economy to us?
3. what is interesting for copyists is that Moore entertains with great complexity. He jumps back and forth at breakneck speed between such different genres as commentary, cartoon, reportage, satire, expert opinion, self-dramatization and human drama. The mix of official politics and local reportage, seriousness and humor, fact and fiction is obviously appreciated and understood by the blockbuster audience. The conclusion for us: many Swiss media products are too clean and not bold enough. They follow through with their arguments and tone from start to finish. (Take a look, Mbwana, at how rarely the perspective is changed in reports! There's hardly ever a swivel between the microscope and the view from Mars and back. Quality journalism in particular loves the safe, clean semi-distance of the desk: no raw meat, never the cold eye of God, instead Valium with level).
4 Conveniently, a how-to book by Moore has just come onto the market: "Hurray America!". Unfortunately, the title corresponds to Moore's writing style: in writing, his gags are as clumsy as a political Peach Weber. Which makes the material all the more sensational: ready-made ideas on how to make self-produced reports. For example, Moore's program "TV Nation" bought its own America-wide holiday from a congressional lobbyist for 5,000 dollars, asked neoliberal Republicans whether they would pay back the subsidies they had personally received, and had an ex-KGB spy investigate whether Nixon was really dead.
Some things in this book, Mbwana, are highly usable, i.e., barkable. What exactly? Well, since I'm planning to help myself soon, I'd rather leave more precise details where we thieves feel comfortable: in the gray of the night.
> Constantin Seibt is editor for politics and economics at the weekly newspaper (WOZ) and will also be a columnist for Weltwoche from September.
Anxious minds do not call theft by its name: They prefer to use words like inspiration or import-export. The number one export country for promising ideas is undoubtedly America. Whether in banking, music or journalism: without American chewing gum, German (Swiss) brains would have a strong Aryan bad breath.
The hottest candidate for current thefts is a newly rich dollar millionaire: Michael Moore. After all, his hit "Fahrenheit 9/11" was the first documentary film to break the magical 100 million dollar barrier. A number of things can be imported from this and Moore's other work for the Swiss market:1 An astonishingly large audience is interested in information, politics and polemics - as long as they are entertaining.
2. what Moore delivers is the big picture: big politics and little people at the same time. He delivers what the media does not - an overview in the chaos of individual reports, opinions and local reports. With simple cuts from Washington strategists to disoriented soldiers in Iraq, from General Motors managers to debt collectors in Detroit, he provides the answer to the question often neglected by the media: What the heck is the hiccup of politics and the jargon of the economy to us?
3. what is interesting for copyists is that Moore entertains with great complexity. He jumps back and forth at breakneck speed between such different genres as commentary, cartoon, reportage, satire, expert opinion, self-dramatization and human drama. The mix of official politics and local reportage, seriousness and humor, fact and fiction is obviously appreciated and understood by the blockbuster audience. The conclusion for us: many Swiss media products are too clean and not bold enough. They follow through with their arguments and tone from start to finish. (Take a look, Mbwana, at how rarely the perspective is changed in reports! There's hardly ever a swivel between the microscope and the view from Mars and back. Quality journalism in particular loves the safe, clean semi-distance of the desk: no raw meat, never the cold eye of God, instead Valium with level).
4 Conveniently, a how-to book by Moore has just come onto the market: "Hurray America!". Unfortunately, the title corresponds to Moore's writing style: in writing, his gags are as clumsy as a political Peach Weber. Which makes the material all the more sensational: ready-made ideas on how to make self-produced reports. For example, Moore's program "TV Nation" bought its own America-wide holiday from a congressional lobbyist for 5,000 dollars, asked neoliberal Republicans whether they would pay back the subsidies they had personally received, and had an ex-KGB spy investigate whether Nixon was really dead.
Some things in this book, Mbwana, are highly usable, i.e., barkable. What exactly? Well, since I'm planning to help myself soon, I'd rather leave more precise details where we thieves feel comfortable: in the gray of the night.
> Constantin Seibt is editor for politics and economics at the weekly newspaper (WOZ) and will also be a columnist for Weltwoche from September.
