This past summer felt very long to me. Long and stupefying. Now that I’m back on campus and my brain is going again, the summer seems pleasantly harmless in retrospect. But I remember pointedly that at times the world seemed quite bleak. Someone who doesn’t know me might imagine that it was my removal from Wesleyan’s thriving activist community that left me feeling stultified. In fact, ironically, it was my consumption of mass politics, the most poisonous intellectual fare of all.
I often flipped through my television channels after coming home from work. At first, cable was a refreshing blast from my high-school past. I must confess a certain primal joy in simply pressing “channel up” at arbitrary intervals, continuously, for hours, stopping for poker or Jon Stewart or really attractive women. This exaltation in my remote control power, though, soon gave way to a morbid fascination with the channels in the thirties: the dreaded cable news networks, and their armies of opinions.
One program in particular sticks out in my mind, and I suspect will stand as a formative political experience for me. It was Tim Russert’s show featuring Bill O’Reilly and Paul Krugman interacting with each other. To call it a debate would be doing violence upon our language. If only Russert’s measly presence as moderator hadn’t given the program some shred of legitimacy, Krugman almost certainly would have walked out and O’Reilly would probably have declared himself King of the World. His presence merits its own article, but for now suffice it to say that he is perhaps the most impressive bully I have ever witnessed. Krugman’s information, which seemed surprisingly moderate and reasonable to me, had no chance of standing up against his onslaught, a vitriolic hodge-podge of anger, abuse and arrogance.
After watching most of the show (the channel up button getting exercise every commercial break), I was in a state of shock. Why had I watched this? Why would O’Reilly and Krugman even bother talking to each other when their dialogue was cruder than many conversations resulting in the handing over of milk-money? This second question at least has a relatively straightforward answer: Both were plugging their new books, recently published and sure to occupy places on The New York Times’ best-seller lists by now.
And with that, a revelation! Never mind, for the moment, which side is in the right. That’s not as important to the point I am making, although I recommend you all to go to “www.factcheck.org” for the most unbiased information I’ve found. The real battle, I realized, is not between the Krugmans and the O’Reillys of the world. It’s not between MSNBC and Fox News. I don’t really even think it has a lot to do with Kerry versus Bush, to be honest. No, the most relevant battle is between information and infotainment, and let me tell you, the side with Jim Lehrer (a Latter-Day Saint if ever there was one) at its helm is rapidly losing the war.
Someone in the last ten years realized that Jerry Springer got better ratings than Judy Woodruff and they figured, as long as there is some demand for the news, if it were more like Jerry’s show, ratings might pick up. (At least Jerry is honest with us; we’re clear about what he provides.) The viewers have chosen, and here we are.
If this were an isolated problem with a restricted audience fueling this market, I wouldn’t worry. But the advertising blitz I saw (at home in Ohio, the mother of all swing states) when I didn’t channel up away from the commercials fast enough convinced me that this is not the case. The DNC, the RNC, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and MoveOn.org all labor under the assumption that it is the infotainment slush war that sways the majority of voters. If they are right, come November, the nation will choose a President based on which caricatures they find more appealing. And that “This land is my land” short on the internet begins to seem accurate in an overwhelmingly depressing way.
It is a bit sickening to feel so powerless against this rising tide of burlesque styled as my country’s political debate. I urge you to keep it out of my school, which surprisingly has been an apolitical haven since my return, at least for me. Don’t speak about the issues unless you know the facts. And, if you are sympathetic to what I’ve said, do what you can: Watch the coming debates on PBS and ignore the legion of pundits. If you watch Fox News or even the Schneider/Greenfield/Carlson gang at CNN, at least be honest with yourself about what a venomous draft you imbibe.
Leave a Reply