Dear Mainstream Media: On the Internet, It's Clear You're a Sloppy Arrogant Cur Who Hates Your Readers

Late Sunday night (11:04 PM EDT to be exact), the season finale of Mad Men ended. With the Twitter instant-reaction window closed, proper recapping of “The Phantom” began in earnest. By Monday morning, a philistine who somehow missed the show — on any given Sunday, perhaps the 17th or 18th most-watched program on cable — could turn, in Manhattanite media alone, to the New York Times or New York Daily News, New York magazine or the New Yorker, Gawker or Gothamist. (The Girls-crazy NY Post only gets to Men on Tuesdays.) In its fifth season, Mad Men has truly transcended television in at least one respect: Its paragraphs-of-secondary-analysis–to–lines-of-primary-dialogue ratio now hovers somewhere between Hamlet and the Gospel of John.

Naturally, the sheer volume of Monday-morning Mad Men exegesis became a topic for Monday-morning Mad Men exegesis. By Week 5 (“Signal 30”), John Swansburg at Slate was defending the enterprise against an anti–blogger swipe from David Simon, who’d evidently prefer the laity not try to interpret prestige-TV scripture for themselves. (The Wire creator had to walk back his disdain, sort of, in a conversation with Alan Sepinwall, the Martin Luther of TV recapping.)

In many ways, the quasi-controversy is dissolved, like much online, by the law of large numbers: 90 percent of recappers could be tasteless anterograde amnesiacs and there’d still be more edifying insta-essays to comb through on the typical post–Mad Men or –Breaking Bad Monday than hours of watchable television ABC (or, for that matter, AMC) puts on in a year.

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Naming just a few: Over three seasons (since 2009), Swansburg, Julia Turner, Patrick Radden Keefe, and assorted interlocutors have perfected a breezy, vaguely flirtatious banter for Slate’s “TV Club” (not to be confused with The Onion A.V. Club’s also excellent Mad Men recaps) that could teach a thing or two to Matthew Weiner and his writing staff’s increasingly turgid didacticism. On a totally different tack, Adam B. Vary at Entertainment Weekly took over recapping duty this year with chronicles that sprawl effortlessly across thousands of words; his finale text had this reader clicking past ten jumps (surely a web-design don’t) to find out what happens next in a story I had just seen. Indeed, forget Jessica Paré (Megan) or Kiernan Shipka (Sally)—the real breakout star of Season 5 may well be Vary, who either doesn’t sleep or writes at the speed mortals type. The results are CliffNotes as imagined by Borges.

And yet if David Simon’s “the internet is no place to talk about TV, let alone HBO” snobbery is misguided, his recap disquiet is also not exactly misplaced. It’s an economic mystery, really: How can a program that, on a good week, attracts about a tenth the viewership of N.C.I.S. support an ecosystem of discourse that’d make Harold Bloom blush? For the culture-journo pros at Slate or EW, it just means an exponential ballooning of weekly word-count expectations since the age of ink and paper. But these days, everyone from Esquire to the Baltimore Sun to the New Orleans Times-Picayune is expected to man the Don Draper beat. The smarter old-media barons have learned that there are masses of nobodies who will recap (and much else, as long as it has a byline) for free. The smartest have realized there are otherwise well-compensated somebodies willing to do the same.

Thus, the Mad Men coverage of the Wall Street Journal, part of its “Speakeasy” culture blog:

Editor's note: Every Sunday after the newest episode of "Mad Men," lawyer and Supreme Court advocate Walter Dellinger will host an online dialogue about the show. The participants include Columbia University history professor Alan Brinkley, Stanford Law Professor Pam Karlan, and Columbia theater and television professor Evangeline Morphos. Dellinger will post his thoughts shortly after each episode ends at 11 p.m., and the others will add their commentary in the hours and days that follow. Readers are invited to join in with their thoughts in the comments.

Sounds awesome, right? Jurists and academics are fanboys too!

Unfortunately what follows is at least as unsettling, corporate ethics–wise, as Joan Harris prostituting herself to a Jaguar salesman for a partnership:

Forget the actual so-asinine-they’re-almost-sweet observations for now. Look at the text. No, your eyes are not deceiving you. Under the banner of the crown jewel of a $33-billion media hydra, sentence after sentence is being ended with two spaces after the period.

By this point in history, every decent person knows two-spacing is an atavistic, unconscionable act that is simply never done. (In fact, the Motherboard CMS automatically resolves any such attempts down to a single space; hence the need for screen shots above.)

But one can’t really blame Dellinger (born 1941) or Karlan (born 1959). Long-lost typing classes and decades of space-bar muscle memory have set them in their ways. In their day jobs, each no doubt has an army of eager research assistants or paralegals to quietly clean up the master’s word-processing. The real scandal here is institutional: Would the Journal allow such floating blobs of white space — or apostrophes facing the wrong direction, or periods lurking outside quotations marks — in the print paper?

For some of us, copy-editing is an aesthetic end in itself; seeing a hyphen where there should be an n-dash can be physically painful. But a rigorous style guide — even when you violently disagree with a particular rule therein — is also symptomatic of a deeper commitment to quality and trust: That, in their print versions anyway, the Times will never use a serial comma and the New Yorker will always cling to the diaeresis (don’t call it an umlaut) means someone is paying serious attention to the appearance of words, and so almost certainly their meaning and truth-value as well.

If, after five seasons of hype and histrionics, Mad Men has said something provocative and novel about the human condition, it’s this: In eras, like 1960–68, later remembered for tectonic upheavals in cultural mores and social power structures, it’s often the already powerful that, even as they mourn their own waning dominion, get to ride the liberatory wave long before the truly (or even relatively) downtrodden. Campus radicalization against the Vietnam War was made possible by a class privileged enough to be politicized at age 18 (under higher-ed draft deferments), rather than shipped off immediately. (And thus the rise of the six-year graduation plan.) In Season 5, it’s silver-fox, three-martini exec Roger Sterling who pursues LSD enlightenment; the token black secretary and pioneering female copywriter have to actually be in the office on time.

And so it is with the new-media “revolution.” Since the days of Britannica whingeing about Wikipedia, the barbarians-at-the-gates scenario imagines a discursive universe where the barriers to entry are so low that anyone can say anything without any fealty to the sort of standards and decency that having a storied dead-tree tradition — or shareholders — would demand. But who is it that’s actually taken the road to vomiting out content acquired for free as filler for ad sales, considered so inessential to the real business that no one can even be bothered to hit backspace a few times to save volunteer contributors from looking like idiots? The Wall Street Journal. (See also Forbes.com’s infernal blog network or, for that matter, the inverse Huffington Post strategy of hiring a roster of terrific journalists to retroactively legitimize its infinitely larger stable of unpaid, undersupervised, fact-averse typing monkeys.)

Of course, there are plenty of independent bloggers (and tumblrers and tweeters) who misspell and misconjugate and leave two, three, fifteen spaces after certain punctuation marks — and plenty more commercial upstarts with a fraction of the copy-edit or fact-check resources to fully police their scribblers. Substantively their episode recaps might be revelatory, or nonsensical, or indifferent. Punctuation isn’t everything. But the Wall Street Journal not only has such resources, its Mad Men coverage trades on the reputational legacy of the print edition to rise near the top of any Google search, without having to be anywhere near as good as, say, a housewife or critical theorist on Blogspot. We accept this because, as Don Draper might say, a brand is not simply about knowing what your’re getting; it’s a fully formed mentality to slip into, an aspirational way of being.

Even in the Murdoch era, the Wall Street Journal stands for certain things: market evangelism and a crazy uncle of an op-ed section, yes, but also meticulousness and elan, a certain white-shoe polish. There is much great content under the overall Speakeasy umbrella. But the yawning post-period gaps that make Dellinger & Co.‘s Mad Men recaps nigh-unreadable—all twelve this season! — whisper a Sterlingesque insouciance: This isn’t really the Journal. It’s just the web! Get it up quick; the kids will eat anything.

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