Daniel Bradford, publisher of All About Beer magazine, launched his own blog yesterday. In Bradford On Beer, Daniel is planning on turning his attention from the business side of the beer world to the sensory pleasures of the beer itself, hoping “to make [him]self worthy of something like judging at the Great American Beer Festival.” Over the next year he’s going to “study, travel, taste, research, talk – whatever it takes to get me to the next level!” And his new blog he hopes “will be the public record of the trip, with all its embarrassing gaffs, exciting discoveries, foolish malapropisms, fascinating people, and beer, pints and pints of great beer.” It should be a fun and entertaining read. I certainly love a good malapropism. You just don’t see enough of those anymore, probably because most people only use simple words thus avoiding any accidental misuse by overreaching their vocabulary. But I’m sure Daniel’s word choices will be the very pineapple of perfection. Welcome to the Blogosphere, Daniel.

Sierra Nevada Brewing is justly famous for their use of big, aromatic hops and helped to popularize Cascade hops in the 1980s. But as palate shift has moved the bar every higher, they’ve never had a packaged IPA, only the occasional draft offering. That’s about to change with the release of Torpedo IPA in six-packs beginning at the end of this month.

Warning: this post has nothing to do with beer. It’s about the media, politics, economics and other mundane stuff that makes the world work the way it does. Those are all subjects I revel in but usually try to restrict to talking about only if they have some relation to beer. But occasionally I stray. This is one of those times, because I found this too interesting not to share. If this isn’t something you’re interested in, please feel free to ignore it. We will return to our regularly scheduled beer posts again shortly.

If you’re a regular reader here you know I’m skeptical that the mainstream media has our best interests at heart or is making any real effort to inform the populace in an honestly open manner. Big media is itself big business and so they tend to report in such as way that serves those same interests. I think the model of how this works, as described in the book Manufacturing Consent, by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, is largely correct. But Glen Greenwald, writing on Salon, brought to light another very interesting way of looking at how the media functions. It originally came from a book examining how the media covered the Vietnam War. That book, by Daniel C. Hallin, was titled Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam. In it, at Page 117, is the Holy Grail, or in this case the Holy Doughnut. Using a very simple diagram, Hallin neatly describes a continuum with three spheres of public opinion and how they affect public debate, especially by the media. Jay Rosen, a professor at NYU’s Journalism School, has written a wonderful analysis of Hallin’s model at his blog PressThink. Entitled Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the Press. I highly recommend it. It’s slightly different than, but entirely compatible with, Manufacturing Consent. In a nutshell, here’s Rosen’s description.

It’s easily the most useful diagram I’ve found for understanding the practice of journalism in the United States, and the hidden politics of that practice. You can draw it by hand right now. Take a sheet of paper and make a big circle in the middle. In the center of that circle draw a smaller one to create a doughnut shape. Label the doughnut hole “sphere of consensus.” Call the middle region “sphere of legitimate debate,” and the outer region “sphere of deviance.”

Here’s how Rosen explains each of the three spheres.
 

1. The Donut Hole or Sphere of Consensus

The sphere of consensus is the “motherhood and apple pie” of politics, the things on which everyone is thought to agree. Propositions that are seen as uncontroversial to the point of boring, true to the point of self-evident, or so widely-held that they’re almost universal lie within this sphere. Here, Hallin writes, “journalists do not feel compelled either to present opposing views or to remain disinterested observers.” (Which means that anyone whose basic views lie outside the sphere of consensus will experience the press not just as biased but savagely so.)

Consensus in American politics begins, of course, with the United States Constitution, but it includes other propositions too, like “Lincoln was a great president,” and “it doesn’t matter where you come from, you can succeed in America.” Whereas journalists equate ideology with the clash of programs and parties in the debate sphere, academics know that the consensus or background sphere is almost pure ideology: the American creed.

1. The Donut or Sphere of Legitimate Debate

The sphere of legitimate debate is the one journalists recognize as real, normal, everyday terrain. They think of their work as taking place almost exclusively within this space. (It doesn’t, but they think so.) Hallin: “This is the region of electoral contests and legislative debates, of issues recognized as such by the major established actors of the American political process.”

Here the two-party system reigns, and the news agenda is what the people in power are likely to have on their agenda. Perhaps the purest expression of this sphere is Washington Week on PBS, where journalists discuss what the two-party system defines as “the issues.” Objectivity and balance are “the supreme journalistic virtues” for the panelists on Washington Week because when there is legitimate debate it’s hard to know where the truth lies. There are risks in saying that truth lies with one faction in the debate, as against another— even when it does. He said, she said journalism is like the bad seed of this sphere, but also a logical outcome of it.

3. Off the Donut or Sphere of Deviance

In the sphere of deviance we find “political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject as unworthy of being heard.” As in the sphere of consensus, neutrality isn’t the watchword here; journalists maintain order by either keeping the deviant out of the news entirely or identifying it within the news frame as unacceptable, radical, or just plain impossible. The press “plays the role of exposing, condemning, or excluding from the public agenda” the deviant view, says Hallin. It “marks out and defends the limits of acceptable political conduct.”

 
To me, this is catnip, fascinating stuff to think about and talk about. The Rosen piece is long, and has plenty of interesting ancillary bits, like the original author, Hallin chiming in with his own thoughts, along with plenty of interesting comments from journalists and academia.

Greenwald, which is where I originally read about this also interviews Rosen on the radio, and there’s a transcript of it if you want to read it. It’s also quite interesting. I know where I am on the donut, nibbling on its outer crust. Off the grid, as usual.

There you are, read on if you like. Otherwise, back to the beer.

Tom Dalldorf, publisher of the Celebrator Beer News, just e-mailed me from the now embarrassingly named Ted Stevens Airport, with the results from the Alaska Beer & Barleywine Festival. Here are the Top 3:

1. GnarlyWine, Lagunitas Brewing, California
2. Old Gander Barley Wine, Sleeping Lady Brewing, Alaska
3. Big Woody Barley Wine, Glacier Brewhouse, Alaska [Note: link is down]

Congratulations to the folks from Lagunitas for their big win.

I wasn’t going to write about the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation spending $400,000 to manufacture a link between the internet and underage drinking, because it’s such a sad burlesque that it’s virtually meaningless. Essentially, nearly a quarter-million dollars will be used to fund a study conducted by UNC-Chapel Hill to test “how easy it is to order alcohol from the Web,” according to the Raleigh News & Observer. The entire article is opinion, paranoia and propaganda, a fitting take given the study’s results will almost certainly be more of the same.

Throughout it they admit that no one really knows if kids are obtaining much booze over the internet at all. They just don’t know, but boy are they worried. But even if there are a few that manage to get some delivered, it’s pretty clear that it’s not the primary way anyone, kids or adults, obtain beer, wine and liquor. Other normal channels are much more convenient, easy and cheaper, especially for minors. But that’s an old story. It’s easier to create attention and buzz by appealing to peoples’ fears about that series of tubes known as the internet.

As I said, I was going to pass on commenting about how this is simply an attempt to further an agenda, not a meaningful attempt to get at the truth. From the way they’re framing the study from the outset it’s an obvious fait accompli what the results will be. I really didn’t feel like going through the wearisome task of examining how studies like this are used increasingly as tools of propaganda (a trend well-documented in the book Trust Us, We’re Experts by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber). Happily, my friend Tomme (thanks, Amigo) sent me a link to a rebuttal to this rubbish from the wine world. In The Tools of Farce, Tom Wark (writing on his Fermentation Daily Wine Blog) gives an appropriately scathing analysis of exactly what the New Drys are up to. It’s worth a read.

In case you’re curious where the title to this post came from, it’s the title of an Elvis Costello song (I’m a huge Elvis fan) that came to me as I started writing this. This Sad Burlesque was on The Juliet Letters, released in 1993. So I fired up the iPod to give it a listen, only to realize that the lyrics are eerily appropriate to this post, so here they are below.

I write in hopes that by the time you get this letter
We may live to see a change for the better
Or are we so devoted to these wretched selfish motives
When the cold facts and figures all add up
They cannot contradict this sad burlesque

This sad burlesque
With miserable failures making entertainment of our fate
Laughter cannot dignify or elevate
This sad burlesque

Now can they recall being young and idealistic
Before wading knee-deep in hogwash and arithmetic
The pitying smirk
The argument runs like clockwork
Will run down eventually and splutter to a stop

P.S. Well by now you know the worst of it
And we’ve heard all the alibis that they’ve rehearsed
The smug predictions
If it’s not a contradiction
Keep faith in human nature
And have mercy on the creatures in this sad burlesque