He Wants His MTV--If It Plays Fair

MTV doesn’t move Baltimore Sun columnist and TV pundit Jack Germond.

“That stuff drives me up the goddamn wall,” he says in the May issue of the Washington Monthly. “I wouldn’t watch it if you paid me.”

A spokesman for the conservative watchdogs at Accuracy in Media dismisses MTV as “entertainment.”

But Christopher Georges of Washington Monthly says these folks, and other smug inside-the-Beltway journalists and politicos, are asleep at the wheel.

He thinks there was more than hype and giddiness at work when, at an inaugural ball, Vice President Al Gore told MTV: “Thank you for winning this election. You did it.”

Fifty percent of people under age 35 rely solely on television for their political news, a recent Times Mirror poll found. Increasingly, they are abandoning network news for MTV and “Entertainment Tonight.”

Given these statistics, and the fact that these viewers are essentially political “blank slates,” Georges is nervous.

In a precisely argued essay, he points out the ways in which MTV’s election coverage was subtly or overtly biased in favor of the Clinton-Gore ticket.

For instance, MTV picked the bright and respected musician Dave Mustaine, of the still-hip band Megadeath, to cover the Democrats’ convention. Neanderthal Republican rocker Ted Nugent covered the other guys.

Nugent’s reports included some “pretty goofy stuff,” admits Mike McCurry, an MTV consultant who happens to be a former Democratic National Committee official, Michael Dukakis and Bruce Babbitt campaigner, and who now is a spokesman for Clinton’s State Department. “Hmmm,” Georges says pointedly.

“MTV,” he writes, “is arguably one of the most influential political players in the American media--but it’s only playing halfway. If MTV is going to profit from the perks that come with playing in the big leagues--such as wielding the power to influence the opinions of millions of Americans--shouldn’t the network bear the responsibility of playing fairly?”

Instead, the network treated the candidates the way they treat the Red Hot Chili Peppers or the moronic, furball-regurgitating cat and hairless, neurotic Chihuahua namesakes of “The Ren and Stimpy Show”: as part of a mutually beneficial marketing hoopla machine.

“But Clinton and Gore,” Georges asserts, “are not Ren and Stimpy.”

Required Reading

* Monster Kody is a murderer whose “Monster: The Autobiography of an L. A. Gang Member” is picking up publicity momentum well before publication.

A white editor at the Atlantic Monthly Press called Monster “a primary voice of the black experience.”

But author Leonce Gaiter isn’t joining the editor or the chorus of (mainly white) Monster enthusiasts.

“To me,” he writes of the Atlantic Press editor in the June/July Buzz, “this is a white man who thinks that a monster who butchers African-Americans is a major voice for all African-Americans . . . “

Gaiter examines what he sees as the sick motivations behind this Monster madness (gangsta chic it might be called) and rips into that mentality with clearsighted, blistering fury.

“There is no conspiracy here,” Gaiter says, “just ignorant, racist minds at work. I am an African-American man, and I have killed no one. My parents worked, educated themselves, and raised their children. I graduated from Harvard. My sisters hold advanced degrees. This is the black experience.”

* Times are tough at NBC.

“How tough are they?”

Well, according to the June Spy, they’re so tough that one disgruntled soul has been scrawling hell as the destination beside each button on the 30 Rockefeller Plaza elevator.

The magazine’s “the Webs” column takes yet another jab at the beleaguered network, not for rigging the “Dateline” exploding-truck sequence, but for capitulating so quickly on the affair.

Spy implies that the network rolled over even before an investigation had been conducted, not because getting busted for using igniters in a filmed explosion of a GM truck was such a blatant breach of ethics, but because General Electric, NBC’s parent company, is a major GM supplier and was afraid of losing business and advertising.

Writer Jane Craig absolves NBC of guilt too readily, but her main point, that the media failed to examine the complex potential for quid pro quo, is well taken.

“If there is one thing journalists should have salvaged from the 1980s,” she writes, “it is the reflex to ask, does a big corporation stand to benefit from this?

* When tough times hit South-Central Los Angeles in the 1950s, black jazzmen had a saying: “California is the place where great musicians go--to die.”

The April/May American Visions (The Magazine of Afro-American Culture) reports on the current “re-emergence of the L. A. Jazz scene,” in an article titled “Blue Spirits Rising.”

(Subscription: $18 a year; six issues; P.O. Box 37049, Washington, D.C. 20078-4741.)

* Trekking the steep, South Kaibab trail of the Grand Canyon or strolling into the Saturn Bar in New Orleans with former Band guitarist Robbie Robertson, Men’s Journal has hit its stride.

The May/June issue is 176 pages of stunning photography and intelligent escapism, with a couple of serious profiles (“60 Minutes’ ” Ed Bradley, catcher Carlton Fisk) thrown in to give readers something to do when they finally make it to that Class V river in Chile.

Scott Thybony’s hypnotic Grand Canyon travelogue and the accompanying photos will make readers haul out the canteens and backpack (in that order).

Laurence Gonzales’ “Secrets of Storyville,” with photos by Joyce Ravid, forgoes travel-story formula by hanging out with Robertson as he wanders around his beloved New Orleans.

The best-written article of the bunch--Charles Gaines’ “Fat Boy’s Lonesome Traveling Fishing Guide Blues”--is also the most annoying, for its gullible glorification of its macho guide’s condescending attitude toward his clients (“geeks”).

Only a true city-slick dweeb would swallow hook, line, hand-tied fly and sinker the vainglorious guide’s bitchin’er-than-thou pose.

But the story does capture the lure of the sport and it does offer good advice: You want most in a fishing guide what you want most in a bird dog, “a slobbering, breakneck passion for what he or she does.”

That sort of wisdom, coupled with insider gossip is what makes a good magazine seem like a cool club’s clubhouse.

This publication would probably be read equally by women, if it had a few more inside and a different title. But it’s better off gender-segregated than weighted with a title like ‘Humans’ Journal.”