A look at the creative process (Hint: beer goggles might help)
After publication of "Strange Days: Our 12th Annual Roundup of the Idiotic, the Ironic and the Just Plain Weird," frequent N&R blog commenter Bruce Raynor wrote JR (and cc'd me):
01.06.05,03.06.05,04.13.05,06.13.05,09.13.05,10.1/.05,11.24.05 and 08.22.05, 08.24.05.These are dates in your 12.30.05 “THE IDIOTIC…’05” article involving things done, said, or about Republicans and a conservative religious leader. I cannot argue with their inclusion.
What I find strange (but not surprising) is that you did not include any of the many available appropriate inclusions from Democrats and ACLU types.
You continually indicate that you want to represent the community but more often than not fail to do so by your one-sided presentations.
It'd be nice if the process of creating a "Strange Days" column were as simple as Raynor thinks it is. It'd also be a lot less work. (Not that I'm complaining -- getting to do this feature every year is one of the nicest parts of my job.)
But since Raynor raised the issue, and since we're supposed to be all about the transparency here, I'm happy to share with you the conscious/subconscious thought processes that influence what the final column looks like. I'm not going to swear to you that this explanation is complete, simply because of the subconscious part, but after doing this 12 years running, I think I've got a pretty good handle on what happens.
I gather raw material almost every day, all year. My sources include the N&R's section fronts and its wire services, along with stuff I see on TV or hear on the radio (both broadcast and satellite) and the couple of dozen news-related Web sites I visit every day, and weird-news features on such Web sites as Yahoo!, Salon.com (excellent celebrity-gossip column) and Ananova.com. I also stumble on links to potential items while reading blogs. (Did I mention that I get paid, in part, to read blogs? Is this a great country or what?)
The published version typically runs 75 or 80 column-inches -- about two-thirds of a standard newspaper page in our standard type size -- but the initial list I compile every year runs more like 500 before I start cutting. (Why not run the whole thing on the Internet? you ask. Several reasons, but the biggest is that, upon reflection, a lot of it simply turns out not to be funny.)
Deciding what to use and what not to use is not a rigidly analytical process. The factors I *consciously* weigh include (in no particular order or proportion):
As the feature has evolved, it has come to rely less upon the inherent humor of a news item and more upon whatever headline I can come up for it. That wasn't a conscious decision, although in hindsight I'm glad I have gone in that direction because it makes the feature more of a challenge.
So how do I write the headlines? Sometimes an appropriate (i.e., at least quasi-funny) headline for an item occurs to me at the time I stumble across the item (or is supplied by the item source). Most of the time, though, I have to come up with them on my own, usually during a mad rush in December. (Co-workers help out to some extent, but in December they're mostly busy with their own work; if you don't like one, blame me, not them.)
Is the feature politically biased, as Raynor believes? It's not intended to be. I understand that that answer won't satisfy a lot of readers, however. Upon more reflection, I think that the feature's preference for hypocrisy, combined with the fact that, at least nationally, Republicans are running everything, yielded the current year's mix of items about which Raynor complains. But I also would point out that most of the items in this year's feature aren't political.
In the first Strange Days, the 1994 edition (actually published Jan. 1, 1995) and the only one published before Republicans officially took over Congress, the piece took shots at:
-- Republicans Oliver North, Robert Moores (then a Guilford County commissioner) and Jesse Helms.
-- Democrats Bill Clinton, Dan Rostenkowski and Earl Jones.
-- Then-Craven County Commissioner Gerald Parker, whose political affiliation isn't mentioned and presumably was unrelated to his alleged taste for trafficking in marijuana and cocaine.
-- Lyndon LaRouche, whose nominal political affiliation is less important than the fact that he communicates telepathically with squid.
It also took several shots at the county commissioners as a group, and at journalists, both singly and in large groups. Most subsequent installments have done the same, to a greater or lesser degree, and near as I can recall, no one has had a problem with that.
Raynor also takes exception to my mocking Pat Robertson without some sort of balancing criticism of a religious figure on the political left. I've covered Robertson off and on for almost 20 years, beginning with my PTL coverage for this newspaper in 1987-1990 and continuing during my tenure as religion writer in the late 1990s. And the problem with Raynor's complaint is that there is no religious figure on the political left with the influence and reach of Robertson, let alone a figure with that influence who says half the strange stuff Robertson says. The closest you could come probably would be Jesse Jackson, and Jackson was pretty quiet -- indeed, uncharacteristically so -- during 2005.
I'm less bothered by accusations of partisan bias, however, than I am by the notion that some people are going through a feature like this looking for bias of any sort. Talk about missing the forest for the trees. Humor is inherently subjective. Things that I find funny, you might not. My sense of humor was shaped by influences including but not limited to Jonathan Swift, Steven Wright ("You never know what you have 'til it's gone. I wanted to know what I had, so I got rid of everything."), Dave Barry, Richard Preyer, Monty Python's Flying Circus and a genetic disposition toward certain conditions that might fall, if you want to get all technical about it, under the rubric of "mental illness." And more often than I like to think about, something that strikes me as funny does so in significant part because it's also something I've done before, or at least come very close to doing.
I guess that's a long way of saying that anybody who claims to report objectively on humor is lying and anyone who is looking for political bias in a feature of this type might well find what looks like some but is missing a much larger and, I hope, more entertaining point.
Well. That's probably way more than you wanted to know about Strange Days. That said, 2006 has begun, which means I've begun gathering string for Strange Days XIII. If you see something you think should be included, by all means let me know.