Grossly unprofessional; deeply informative

Deploying the moose against Bloggingheads.tv

2006.05.30 — Business | Politics | Internet | by Derek Jensen

Mickey Kaus and Robert Wright are two smart guys with substantial credentials and wide-ranging contacts in the world of journalism. They are not, however, professional television producers. While I like their concept and their content, their packaging—if I may "deploy the moose"—stinks like rotting meat. In their rush to bring great thoughts to the world via the Web, Kaus and Wright have produced some of the most hilariously bad "television" ever.

A stuffed moose—along with an Al Gore mask—is what passes for a gimmick in this not-ready-for-any-time pseudo-television endeavor. Kaus decided to "deploy" the moose (he credits it to Pinch Sulzberger as the "unaddressed important issue") against Wright to address the "unsanitary" nature of homosexuality in response to Wright's argument that an aversion to homosexuality is not on par with mankind's aversion to the stench of rotting meat because rotting meat is "unsanitary." If you follow that argument, you have self-selected to be a regular viewer.

Don't get me wrong, the discussions to be found at Bloggingheads.tv are stimulating, enlightening, complex, thought-provoking, and refreshingly progressive (altho Kaus is at times an apologist for the right). Guests have included David Corn of The Nation, Julia E. Sweig of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Jonathan Alter of Newsweek (who is famous enough to get his theme song on The Al Franken Show sung by Linda Ronstadt). You don't find this range of opinion and honest disagreement on the right. Conservatives are, by nature, joiners (and, almost paradoxically, exclusionists).

The personalities are likable. Wright is philosophical and argues technical points like a champion debater (in his Meaning of Life series, he often corners eminent thinkers into conceding points they don't actually agree with because he argues a very narrow line, then he applies the concession broadly). Kaus is a gut-thinker, arguing more from experience and feeling, and admits to generalizing from his own experience; luckily, he's a pretty typical guy, just more articulate. Wright takes false umbrage at a blogger who accuses him of being a robot. Kaus shrugs modestly when a blogger dismisses him as a hack (which he's not) or an apologist (which I just said he is).

Their guests are often even more knowledgeable than they are about the inner workings of the political process or background on Iraq or South America. So episodes with them (there are always only two speakers) are often more like interviews. Sometimes, neither Wright nor Kaus appear, but the guests (especially David Corn) have gotten pretty good at keeping the topics tight and moving the discussion along. They just haven't gotten the camera work down.

Bloggingheads.tv is nearly perfect for radio; it's too bad it's not restricted to the audio portion. Some of the video is so bad it's bizarre. Participants record their side of the discussion in shared offices, home offices, city apartments, suburban bedrooms, and in at least one case what appears to be the lobby of a college dorm.

In many cases, the barking of dogs or the wail of emergency sirens punctuate incisive arguments. This sort of thing is endemic to podcasting in general, but compare Cranky Geeks or some other semi-professional video podcasts. They're miles ahead of Bloggingheads in presentation, even tho they lag severely in content.

Note: Bloggingheads recently removed its video podcast feed and now only offers a text summary RSS feed; you have to go to the site to watch or download the video manually. Someone should tell them that, despite what the Web site says, they are no longer podcasting; they're just offering audio and video for download.

UPDATE 2006.06.02: The podcast feed seems to be up and running again. Correspondence from their tech guy suggests that others also requested it be reinstated.

The first female Bloggingheads guest, ABC News consultant Jacqueline Shire, recorded herself in front of her open closet, a bizarre contrast with Wright's cluttered, professorial study. A recent dia-vlog (their strained portmanteau term for a video dialog weblog) ends in mid-sentence when a power outage cut off one end, and they posted it anyway. The only explanation is a note on the site, not an addendum to the video feed, let alone a warning at the beginning.

Their logo and even their fan merchandise appears to have been designed by the same advertising genius who came up with the packaging that made generic products so tempting. You want branding? They abbreviate the show "bh.tv" but they don't own that domain (they do own bloggingheads.com, tho). If they abbreviated it "BHTV," then they'd have a parallel to TV station call letters, which would make some sense, and they wouldn't tempt viewers to go to an incorrect web address.

It's hard to figure out what Wright and Kaus are up to, actually. Since they post hour-long video files twice a week, they're Web traffic costs much be fairly huge, yet the show and the site are free and without ads. What is the purpose of such bare-bones, yet highly erudite video discussions? (Wright says it's to create a global media juggernaut.) It's as if we found Plato's Dialogues written on cocktail napkins in Plato's own hand "just to get the ideas down." That would be great, but don't publish them that way.

Whenever I see awful video paired with good audio, I wonder what could be done with the audio to improve the experience overall. Bloggingheads could at least be illustrated with charts and graphs and with images of quotes from the guests, the way Tim Russert shows written quotes from newspapers and such. It could be turned into an animated talk show, with cartoon guests seated around a glass coffee table. It could even by synched to a Japanese science fiction movie edited to dramatize the arguments with martial arts fights.

Nah. It'd be better as ordinary radio... if they could get rid of the barking and sirens.

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