Jen Friel, Sam The Eagle, TTAC's Disinvitation To The Dodge Dart, And The Slut Event Horizon

No sense beating around the bush on this one: TTAC won’t have a Dodge Dart review for you to read when the embargo expires later this week. We weren’t invited to the event. If you want to find out what it’s actually like to drive the Dart, you’ll have to read about it somewhere else. If you want an honest review, you will have to wait until I can rent one, I suppose.

Yesterday, Jalopnik’s Matt Hardigree teed-off on Chrysler for inviting sex blogger Jen Friel to the Dart release. Although Hardigree himself is embroiled in a long-term struggle with our own Derek Kriendler for the unofficial title of Most Interesting Young Auto Writer, a battle he cannot help but eventually lose, I heartily recommend that you check out Matt’s article when you have time, because it’s a fun read, and it’s straight out of the Jack Baruth Handbook For Dissing The Living Shit Out Of Hack Writers & The Auto Industry In General, Yo. When I read stuff like that, I feel the same way Madonna must while watching a Lady Gaga performance.

What Matt doesn’t realize, however — or doesn’t say, at any rate — is that Chrysler’s decision to effectively replace TTAC with Ms. Friel isn’t an anomaly. It’s the arrow-straight path to the future,and it is part of a bigger trend that affects everyone from your humble author to the New York Times. Here’s why.

I want to talk about the idea of efficient markets for a moment. Most Americans are brought up to equate “efficient” with “good” in this context. Sometimes, an efficient market is a good market. Imagine, if you will, an old frontier settlement with a single general store. The owner of that store effectively controlled what goods and services were available to the residents of that town, and he also effectively controlled the prices of those goods and services.

If the settlement expands and becomes a town, then a city, a second store will eventually arrive, and then a third. At that point, you have competition, which means that prices will drop. Good for the market, right? Of course. Let’s suppose, however, that the original general store had been so profitable that the owner had been able to sponsor the local Boy Scout troop. The arrival of additional stores, and the pricing competition that results, would eventually reduce his margin to the point where it would no longer be possible to sponsor the Scouts. At that point… poof! No more Boy Scouts, but everybody pays fifty cents less for soap. Is that good or bad? Depends on whether you’re a Scout or a bulk soap consumer, right?

Once upon a time, newspapers were like frontier general stores. They had effective monopolies, or something close to it. If you wanted to advertise, you had to do business with them. If you wanted to find out what the weather would be tomorrow, or how much your new neighbors paid for their house, you had to buy the product. Simple as that. Like aristocrats who felt their wealth imposed a noblesse oblige, most newspapers took the profits created by what we would today call “channel ownership” and spend some of them on giving you the vegetables. The vegetables, of course, are what’s good for you. Investigative reporting. Exposing the corrupt. Safeguarding the public. Printing the truth. And so on.

Make no mistake, though, “exposing the corrupt” never pays the bills at a newspaper. Printing classified ads and yesterday’s baseball box scores is what pays the bills. The idea is that you, the newspaper owner, owe the public something since you are profiting from your ability to distribute information to them. You charge them for red meat but you make sure there are vegetables on the plate. It’s that simple, and it’s what gave us everything from Woodward and Bernstein to Consumer Reports.

Automotive “journalism”, however, never got the memo about noblesse oblige Sure, every once in a while Patrick Bedard would put his foot up some kit car builder’s ass, and CAR magazine once ran an investigative series by Jamie Kitman about the dangers of leaded fuel, but by and large, autojournalism is all red meat, all the time, with as much salt and sugar as they can pile on. “New Camaro ZL1 Tells The Shelby To Step Outside!” “Ferrari 458: World’s Greatest Car?” “Top Sport Sedans Go Head To Head In Ibiza, Spain!”

When the Internet came along and access to information was truly democratized — when “citizen journalists” began reporting on CNN and the Arab Spring was covered on Twitter by the people doing the springing — the newspaper world took a monstrous hit. Why put a classified ad in the paper when you can put it on Craiglist? Why wait for tomorrow’s paper to get the box scores? They’re online now. Need a weather forecast? It’s on your iGoogle. All of a sudden, newspapers didn’t control the flow of information.

The major papers have fought back by attempting to raise the price of vegetables, putting investigative articles and real content behind paywalls. Whether that will work or not is anyone’s guess, but if it does work, it will be because the Times still has the knowledge, tools, and ability to do the kind of real journalism that the HuffPo can’t. Bloggers earning twenty-five bucks a pop to aggregate content from their basements can’t break Watergate, Travelgate, Iran-Contra, et cetera. Even an article like the one done by Frank Greve on the autojourno game itself requires too much time and effort to ever come from a traditional blog. Vegetables. Tough to grow, hard to swallow.

The car rags didn’t have any vegetables, with the possible exception of reliable instrumented testing, and that’s why they are disappearing. Motor Trend may be on its hands and knees sucking-off the Nissan GT-R right now, but Jalopnik can do it sooner, faster, and better, plus they can run an article about some drunk skank who ran into a tollbooth. It’s the Connery-in-The-Untouchables approach. They put a picture of a Ferrari on the cover? You put a picture of a crashed Ferrari on the website. They declare the Chevy Sonic to be the best car ever? You do the same, plus run a story on a guy driving an electric scooter on the freeway.

Now, let me show you Jack’s Foolproof Chart Of What Young Male Readers Like, from Least to Most:

Detailed reliability data

You get the idea, right? It’s always possible to increase viewership by moving farther down the list. Jalopnik is farther down the list than Car and Driver, but that doesn’t mean they get to cry “Hold!” at the Mugshots of girls who have done slutty things level. Somebody’s gonna take it farther.

Jen Friel takes it farther. She writes about getting fucked, for lack of a less direct description. By 103 guys on OK Cupid, by random “buddies”, whatever, whenever, she’s down. She’s not terribly attractive in the conventional sense, so she’s “approachable” and that plays even better with a lot of her audience than it would if she looked like a young Kim Basinger. She’s more interesting to young men than a Ferrari would be, even if that Ferrari is being driven into a toll booth at high speed. Her stuff isn’t great writing, and some of it doesn’t even rise about the level of functionally illiterate teen sexting, but that doesn’t matter.

Given the choice between inviting someone with years of experience owning and racing Mopars — namely, moi — and having someone attend who could put a brief advertorial for the Dart in-between stories of being eyeball-fucked and out-skanking strippers at a club, Chrysler followed the money. The future, if you will. What does that future contain? The Slut Event Horizon, where everything having to do with young and young-ish men will probably be sold using as much sex, violence, and spectacular imagery as possible. Face it: this is how Jalopnik beat the car rags, and it’s how they will eventually be dethroned. Plain and simple.

Those of us who are of a certain age will remember “Sam The Eagle” from “The Muppet Show”. Sam was very conscious of his dignity, and he was anxious to censor prurience, violence, and just plain silly behavior out of what was planned for each night’s show. Of course, he was always frustrated in this attempt. Once, in the middle of decrying nudity, he was informed that he was “naked under his feathers” and, after considering the issue, he ran off the set in shame. Let’s face it: once you’ve tried this, how can you complain when this is even more popular? Sam The Eagle wouldn’t understand, but I do.