As someone who enjoys writing and bullshitting about politics I’m the natural audience for cable news but I almost never watch it anymore. Over the course of the nineties cable news degenerated into an incoherent, unwatchable mess and I lost interest. The information content plummeted to near zero and the chattering yahoos took over. At this point CNN, MSNBC and Fox News have evolved into little more than gossip channels, differing from E! or mindless sports blather only in topic. There isn’t much point in watching them unless you enjoy that sort of thing, which I don’t.
The overwhelming majority of the time I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Political junkies have a right to mindless entertainment the same as anyone else. The people who run the cable news channels are trying to pay the bills and they do so by showing commercials to the small minority of people who like to follow politics no matter how far away from an election we are. The problem is that for the next two months political chatter actually matters and when the great bulk of the public tunes in they are woefully underserved by the usual dreck.
Not to go all McLuhan and risk some kind of Annie Hall style smack down here but in this case the medium really is the message. CNN, Fox News and MSNBC didn’t send all of those famous people to Denver and St. Paul on expense account to not have them on screen. It doesn’t take seventy-three situation rooms to put a camera in front of Barack Obama or John McCain, but that doesn’t matter because their primary motivation is not anything that could be called journalism, or even merely coverage. The primary motivation is to get people to watch CNN/MSNBC/Fox News and in order to do that they have to become part of the story. Each network has its own cabal of correspondents and analysts to ensure that you (yes, you!) want to hear their opinion and won’t change the channel until you’ve done so.
As I’ve written before anyone who thinks the cable channels are out to serve the public and act as journalists, in the old fashioned sense of the word, is hopelessly naïve. Cable news serves its customers extremely well, but its customers are not the broad public but rather a thin slice of it. The general citizenry wants information about the candidates, their positions, and the sources of their campaign funding; in other words hard information. But the cable channels don’t provide that, they’re busy talking about pregnant teenagers and perceived social gaffs and did you hear that Hillary and Sarah got into a fight in the second floor girls bathroom between math and English class? Their audience is the political newshounds, the ones who think they already know the basic stuff and therefore care about every single squiggle of the news cycle.
As per usual the place to turn for concise exposure of televised stupidity is Media Matters (via Pandagon):
During MSNBC’s August 26 coverage of the Democratic National Convention, NBC News chief Washington correspondent Norah O’Donnell asserted that during the upcoming Republican National Convention, “[t]he Republicans … are going to use from Day One through Day Four to hammer [Sen.] Barack Obama” and asked MSNBC political analyst Mike Barnicle of the first night of the Democratic National Convention, “[W]hy not position a senator, like Claire McCaskill [D-MO], up there for five minutes and let her throw some red meat out to the crowd?” In fact, McCaskill did speak on the first night of the Democratic National Convention, and in that speech, McCaskill repeatedly criticized both Sen. John McCain and President Bush. However, MSNBC did not air the speech during its live coverage of the convention.
It’s a staggering display of ignorance to have the Washington correspondent for one of the three cable news networks not know that a US Senator had spoken the night before at the convention she was supposedly covering. Forgetting some of the specific content of a speech is certainly understandable, there are a lot of them after all. But O’Donnell didn’t even know McCaskill had spoken! If there’s a sports equivalent to this it would be something like an NFL analyst criticizing a player on Monday for sitting out the previous day when in fact he started the game and made the highlight reel on SportsCenter.
CNN/MSNBC/Fox News put their talking heads on instead of convention speakers because it’s better television and there’s a perverse but undeniable logic to that choice. Any television set that gets the three cable news channels also gets C-SPAN and if someone wants to merely watch the speeches all he has to do is pick up the remote. The Democratic and Republican parties certainly thought their speakers were worth watching or they wouldn’t have been given speaking slots. By and large the news channels disagreed because many of the speeches are boring; they’re mostly delivered by people who aren’t interested in you the home viewer, whereas the talking heads are professionals. They make the big bucks because they can make television compelling enough to make you the home viewer want to stick around after the ads for clean coal and prescription drugs.
The dishonesty of it all was up for public display this week thanks to Mike Murphy and the immortal Peggy Noonan:
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, indeed. The on camera talk is blatantly contradicted by the more honest thoughts expressed once they thought they were off air. The on-screen - ahem - analysis is completely disingenuous, but nobody really cares because everyone knows that it’s actually theater, not discussion.
Watching CNN/MSNBC/Fox News before and after the acceptance speeches I was awed by the stupidity. Listening to these morons actually kinda pissed me off and it certainly made me want to stick around after the commercial break if for no other reason than to feed my self satisfying and righteous anger. But talking back to my teevee doesn’t do anything other than make me feel slightly superior until I realize that I’m doing exactly what they want me to do. I wouldn’t argue with a sitcom or a rerun of Howdy Doody, why should I argue with these shows? The cable news channels operate on approximately the same mental level and the only intellectually honest course of action is to turn them off and simply ignore them.
Anyone who’s ever watched more than three episodes of The Daily Show has seen one of their uproarious montages of cable news stupidity. To be sure those are spliced together for maximum comedy, but they also actually happened. Subjecting myself to a little bit of the real thing for the Obama and McCain speeches instantly reminded me why I don’t watch these channels. I just can’t stand them, not because it makes me angry, but because I feel embarrassed that anyone would degrade and humiliate themselves for money and fame by going on teevee and acting like clowns. Pornography is more honest and the people involved actually have less to be ashamed of.
Packaging this low brow entertainment in the traditional garb of sober journalism was a stroke of marketing genius and it’s been done so well that a great many people cannot tell the difference between the two. The obvious question is, what effects does this have on the real world (including the outcomes of our elections)? I don’t think there’s any way to really answer that question, but I don’t think I’d like the answer.
