The Eight Biggest Media Moments of 2012 – #5: Penn sues The Star

Last year The Star fired Steve Penn, a columnist for the metro section. Penn had worked for the newspaper for more than 30 years, which made the termination seem odd at best. However, the editors’ allegations were damning: they said Penn had been copying sentences and paragraphs from press releases, pasting them into his stories and passing them off as his own work.

News folk have always had an uneasy relationship with press releases. In an ideal world, a reporter would start with a press release from an outside source (company, government agency, charity, etc.) and – convinced of the story’s newsworthiness – use it as a springboard to go out and find her own facts and quotes. Someone lazier – or more pressed for time, if we want to give this practice a positive spin – might use quotes directly from a press release, provided of course that the source was clearly identified in the story.

Back in my days working PR, I heard stories about newspaper folk doing what Penn did. In fact, I heard about some reporters who copied entire releases, stuck their bylines on them and passed the whole thing off as their work. At least Penn didn’t go that far. Still, what he did was bad enough, a clear violation of the ethics we all learned in J-school.

If the firing had been the end of the story, it would at best have been one of the Eight Most “That’s Just Sad” Media Moments of 2011. But then Penn put the mess on this list by filing a wrongful termination suit in June. His most disturbing allegation was that he shouldn’t have been fired for plagiarism because what he did was common practice at The Star and in the newspaper industry.

Though I hate to see a big media company get away with firing someone who worked for it for decades, I hope he loses his suit (or at least wins it on grounds other than his “common practice” argument). I’d really hate to see him successfully prove that news writers everywhere are parroting corporate spin rather than going out and gathering the news. As if the newspaper industry isn’t already beset by enough trouble. The last thing it needs right now is erosion of confidence from the few readers it has left.

Pants on your head

I was going to ignore this whole thing. I really tried to.

On January 13 General Larry Platt, a respected civil rights activist with the demeanor of a homeless street performer capped off American Idol with a spirited performance of a self-composed piece entitled “Pants on the Ground.” The routine was a welcome bit of levity at the end of one of the worst Idol kick-offs in the show’s history, not to mention an apt criticism of one of the most obnoxious fashion trends in recent memory.

But in the grand style of American media, things went on from there. Brett Favre (current star of at least one TV ad for jeans) and his teammates sang the song on video in the locker room. Jimmy Fallon did a parody version. Someone with a voice filter and a still photo of the Chipmunks did a squeaky version on Youtube. Platt showed up on the red carpet at the Grammys and did a reprise.

This has to be one of the proudest moments for jeans manufacturers since they used the Peace Corps to convince white people in the ‘burbs that dungarees weren’t just for bikers anymore. Look all you fashion mavens of the lower classes! The TV is mocking you for wearing baggy pants. Time to rush off to the store and buy clothes that actually fit.

What can this masterpiece of marketing synergy do for an encore? Fast forward a couple of years. American Idol 2012 now features none of the original cast of judges. Simon Cowell has given way to Robot Simon Cowell, a box that sits on the table next to a Coke cup and dispenses random insults when its button is pushed. Randy Jackson has been replaced by CGI Scooby Doo.

The final contestant of the first show is … well, honestly it could be anyone from another local hero to a Wayans brother desperate for money. The person’s identity is irrelevant, because his entire head is obscured by an upside-down pair of pants. With no introduction, he bursts into song:

Pants on your head
Pants on your head
Lookin’ mighty cool
With your pants on your head
Can’t see where you walk
Unzip them to talk
Lookin’ mighty cool
Got your pants on your head.

In the days that follow, the quarterback for the Chiefs plays an entire game with pants on his head (hey, how much worse could it be?). Seth Myers writes a skit for SNL in which Barack Obama delivers the State of the Union with pants on his head. Alvin and the Chipmunks IV: Pants on Your Head.

Jeans sales double. Truth, justice and the American Way prevail once again.

Conan, what is best in life?

The focus last week on Super Bowl ads meant that I spared nary a note for the game itself. For the most part the omission is perfectly excusable. This isn’t a sports column, after all. And even if it was, I still shouldn’t be covering football. I don’t know anything about it, or at least not much. The game was close. A lot of bookies lost money. Fans in New York were happy. Fans in Boston were not. That’s six of one, half a dozen of the other, done and done as far as I’m concerned.

The ads sucked (covered that last time). Even the halftime show sucked. It led off with a lighting-effects guitar approaching a lighting-effects heart, but someone in the booth must have noticed the obvious sexual connotation just in time to cut to a different shot before the consummating moment. Then out comes the decaying corpse of Tom Petty to belt out crowd-pleasers until it’s time once again for the players to take the field.

Given the lackluster nature of the whole affair, the last thing we should want to do is prolong the pageant. However, the following day a new Bowl marketing opportunity occurred to me. The game is always followed by a victory parade a day or two later in the city of the team that just took the trophy. Outside the metro area, however, these don’t amount to much. Some video of the players riding around in the backs of convertibles or perhaps a hastily-assembled float of some kind.

I think that’s squandering the chance for another massive media spectacle. Sure, the victory parade is a more limited draw. Somewhere around half the people who watched the game aren’t going to be in the mood to celebrate. And these things usually take place during the day, which further limits the audience.

Though this might not seem like a winner at first, I think the ancient Romans have a thing or two to teach us about how to make this work. For starters, give everyone the day off so it won’t matter when it’s televised. Add a musical guest or two, perhaps someone with ties to the winning team or its city.

But above all, add the losing team to the mix. Make them march solemnly before the chariots of the victors, heads hung in shame. Shackles are optional. Then behind the winners come the wives, girlfriends and/or road skank of the losing team. Turn the music down just enough that as they pass we can all hear their lamentations.

And if it’s in New York, maybe we could get Macy’s to sponsor it.

An Idol moment

Back in the lingering end of the hippie days in the late 70s and early 80s, consumer activist David Horowitz used to have a TV show. He’d come on and rail about how horrible it was that the “butter” on movie theater popcorn was actually some kind of oily goo that had never seen the insides of a cow. He also had a passionate hatred of over-packaging. Seemed like at least once a show he’d haul out a bag of cookies, open it up and show us all the evil travesty of excessively airy plastic trays.

The problem with acting offended by a foot-long cookie bag that turns out to be eight inches of polystyrene is that Americans love packaging, often more than we love the actual product.

Take Coke for example. All this product really offers us is corn syrup and caffeine, with carbonated water as an afterthought just to make it drinkable. Everything else, from the familiar brown color to the uniquely-styled bottle, is just, well, packaging. But take away the magical color and nobody buys it, as Crystal Pepsi proved back in the 80s.

Sadly, I think that spells doom for my latest, greatest show idea: American Asylum.

I’ve gotta start this one with a history lesson. Back in the days before television, people sought entertainment outside their homes. And one popular amusement destination was local insane asylums. England’s Bethlem asylum was particularly well known as a spot where the upper crust and even the newly-semi-idle middle class could pass a few carefree hours gawking at the mental patients. And if the inmates’ gibbering and cavorting wasn’t sufficiently entertaining, patrons were invited to poke them with sticks to get them riled up.

Attending trials was another popular pastime, one that has been a repeated success in syndication. So if it works for courtrooms, why not the loony bin? Let’s parade crazy people across TV screens and let the ad-watching-product-consuming public gawk at them. Should work, right?

On paper, maybe. But in reality, that might be a bit too much like offering consumers a bottle full of caffeinated corn syrup. They’ll drink it. They want to drink it. But they need some kind of packaging in order to make the experience palatable.

And that’s the real genius of American Idol, which recently started its seventh season. Like the carefully-camera-facing beverages on the judges’ table, it what we crave packaged up nicely so we don’t feel bad about consuming it. We want to feast on the auditions of deluded nutjobs who think they’re going to be famous for anything but their own freakishness. We want to watch Simon poke them with a stick to get them going real good. And as long as we can maintain the pretense that this is actually some kind of talent show, everything is nice and socially acceptable.

So poke on, Simon. America toasts your good health with an ice-cold bottle of Coke.