“What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he's around? Nobody is going to be taken in if he has a long, red, pointy tail. No. I'm semi-serious here. He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing... he will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important. Just coax along flash over substance... Just a tiny bit.” – Aaron Altman, Broadcast News
I was thinking of Broadcast News last night, because I was more or less fuming at the empty suits the major networks are using to cover the DNC.
Now, I’ve gone out of my way in the past to defend the media. It’s an easy target that everyone likes to pick on. When you feel strongly about a party or a candidate you’re bound to see bias in the way that the media covers elections. It’s pretty much human nature. So I don’t buy the “the media has a political axe to grind” conspiracy theories for the most part.
But last night was a shining example of how it’s not the bias, it’s the stupidity that is the real problem with television news coverage of politics.
I was trying to watch the gosh-darned convention, and I couldn’t because these plastic people were talking nonstop, telling me what I should think about the convention. On six out of the seven channels, the pundits were blathering on over the speakers. At one point, one of them was saying, “The Democrats should be attacking McCain more!” I then turned to PBS (the one channel that seemed to actually allow us to see the convention speakers not named Clinton) and the guy at the podium was bashing McCain! At the very same time! If the pundit had turned around and listened for one minute, he’d have seen the very thing he claimed was missing!
And then there was the reaction to Clinton’s speech. I turned to Fox News and they were somberly saying how she didn’t seem to “really” praise Obama and support his candidacy. I then turned to CNN and they were saying what a great job she did in praising Obama and supporting his candidacy.
It just goes to show how useless these pundits are. Let’s be honest, most of them are paid to look good in a suit and speak clearly. They’re not great thinkers. They don’t even have to be well-informed, obviously.
So why are they on my television??
If you missed it, here’s Sen. Clinton and Mark Warner. Warner’s speech was more low-key, but a good message for Democrats, I think. “This election is not about liberal versus conservative. It’s not about left versus right. It’s about the future versus the past.”
1 comment:
I think it's less that the people who are in media have political axes to grind than that there are a host of structural reasons that tend to select people who end up with a particular political perspective. In itself that's not unique to media - if Bob the Barber tends to like talkative, outgoing conservative guys, the talkative, outgoing conservative young barber guy's a lot likelier to get hired than the retiring, liberal female barber. But political views are amplified in this area, simply because it's a part of what they do. I think that, even beyond politics (and I don't really mean conservative/liberal so much as accepting the basic socioeconomic assumptions that mainstream politicians endorse), access to politicians is a factor here. You want access, you need access; and if you're constantly questioning the very assumptions of those politicians, you're less likely to get it. There's also the issue that high-level press get to know politicians quasi-personally; naturally, you don't want to offend someone you more or less get along with. And the tendency for nearly everything to become ideologized (a tendency rushed along with great force by the current administration) makes that worse: it used to be there were plenty of areas that seemed outside of politics...but now, you can't talk science, you can't talk history, you can barely talk sports without running into a some sort of ideological litmus test.
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