In college, I worked as a videographer for four years. I would tape various goings-on around campus like lectures on architecture and graphic design, football practices and various conferences dealing with issues like healthcare and terrorism.
It was all wonderful learning, considering that I was often skipping classes to shoot these things for seven bucks an hour. Out of the hundreds of events I shot, the most rewarding by far came when I was assigned to be the videographer for a class called "Living Writers." This was a survey class for incoming freshman, run by the incredibly talented authors and poets of Syracuse University's well known MFA writing program. It wasn't like most other classes, or indeed like any other class. The program would bring in a different writer every other week to read a selection, usually from their latest work, and then submit to a question-and-answer session in which the mostly disinterested students would be lined up and forced to ask questions.
In this way, I saw an parade of great writers and poets, from Dave Eggers (whom I later worked for in San Francisco) and Stuart Dybek to brilliant SU faculty members Mary Karr, Brooks Haxton, and George Saunders.
And in reading through the latest issue of GQ I found that Saunders has a fantastic and hilarious piece on, for all intents and purposes, young journalists and how we often unwittingly help to numb the public's consciousness. It's an excerpt from his new book, "The Braindead Megaphone."
Here is an excerpt of the excerpt:
There's no conspiracy at work, I don't think, no ill will, no leering Men Behind the Curtain, just a bunch of people from good universities, living out the dream, cringing a little at the dog-crap story even as they ensure that it goes out on time, with excellent production values.
How does such a poor, potentially harmful product emanate from such talented people? I'd imagine it has to do with survival; each small piece of the machine doing what it must to avoid going home to Toledo, tail between legs; each doing the best it can, within the extant constrants of time and profitability, each deferring his or her "real" work until such time as he or she accumulates his or her nut and can head for the hills or get a job that lets him or her honor his or her heart.
A Hollywood director once told me that everyone in the movie business was trying to make Richie Rich III in order to garner sufficient power and influence to someday make Citizen Kane.
This first requirement of greatness is that one stay in the game; to stay in the game, one must prove viable; to prove viable, one has to be watched, one has to be watchable, and a convention of Watchability has developed—a tone, a pace, an unspoken set of acceptable topics and acceptable relations to these topics—that bears, at best, a peripheral relation to truth: that is, to the difficult, endless, perhaps-not-so-fun-to-watch process of searching out real truth.
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