Posted by Aaron
From time to time, someone I respect will admit that they’ve stopped paying attention to the news. It’s not that they’re not interested, or that they don’t care; it’s just that the general tone of 24-hour news cycle is so goddamn dumb. It’s hard to disagree. The wonderfully irascible Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone writes:
A month ago, I was actually interested to see who won these first few races. But now that this whole affair has degenerated into a mass orgy of sports clichés and celebrity catfighting, I find myself more hoping they all die in a fire somehow.
The sentence of torture-by-snark is certainly earned by the Republican campaigns (“Hey, guys! Who hates foreigners more?” “Me! Me!”). As for the Democrats, it seems everyone involved with, competing within, or covering that field is speaking in a sort of code. Take Monday night’s debate coverage:
AFP: “Personal antipathy and pent-up anger boiled over as Democratic foes Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama accused each other of twisting the truth, in a fiery 2008 campaign debate Monday.”
Okay, yeah, it got a little tense at times. But we are invited to believe that Democratic candidates’ differences over the details of their proposals or legislative records are actually thrusts and ripostes in a sort of gore-besmirched gladiatorial contest, or that off-center remarks by the front-runners’ respective campaigns are likely to start a sort of race/gender war that will spill into the streets, maiming babies and small furry animals in the pitched crossfire of who loves Martin Luther King, Jr., and hates Ronald Reagan more.
(sidenote: I bet I hate Reagan more than any of them.)
Some perspective: Clinton wags her finger and accuses Obama of Liking Reagan (gasp! You mean like like?). Obama: No I don’t. I never did. Also, your husband’s a pain in the ass. Some yes you did no I didn’t on some fairly arcane Illinois state senate votes. A three-way exchange on what constitutes lobbyist money. A fake debate (sorry, Paul Krugman) about who cares more about health care.
Later, all three agree it’s a damned strong Democratic field that they’re proud to a part of. (And they should be—collectively, they offer the most progressive platform in forty years). But you won’t find much coverage on that. There’s no snap in a headline reading: “Dems largely on the same page, want to heal seven years of incompetence.”
Or is there? (More on that later.)
What seems clear is that everyone, despite all the charged rhetoric about change, feels stuck. Candidates are forced to dance the masochism tango because their playground antics keep them on the news. Their handlers understand that branding is order of the day, and that the key to successful branding is ubiquity. After all, is Coca-Cola so widely consumed because, gosh darn it, it’s just the tastiest and most effervescent beverage ever devised in the history of human imbibing? Or rather, has it not, through sheer market saturation, become the drink of reflex, rather than choice (and please, let’s not dither over Coke vs. Pepsi)? A product like that wins the moment its brand becomes synonymous with its larger category; i.e., once people in large regions use the word “Coke” to refer to soft drinks in general. Likewise, once the electorate is on a first-name basis with a candidate (or, often, a first name with an exclamation point), that candidate’s opponents will be hard pressed to overcome the branding advantage. The fake name-calling and finger-pointing seems pointless and dumb, but the reality is that candidates who don’t do it don’t just lose—they are deemed irrelevant and excluded from the process altogether.
Put simply, the Story is the god of the news, as always. And, as usual, the shape and character of that story is aimed at what it is presumed the public will want to consume. The mainstream media is no more “left” or “right” than a Happy Meal. The news is a product meant to be consumed, and like any other commercial item, it is designed to satisfy the appetites of a particular group of consumers—and also to manufacture desire. This, of course, is the problem with the drug-dealer rationale offered by media corporations for the quality of their content: how can one claim to be merely “giving the people what they want” when one’s job is, to a very great extent, to tell people what they want?
What I saw in the Democratic debate was a series of attempts to trap the candidates with some spectacularly lame-ass questions (“Why do you think Martin Luther King, Jr., would have endorsed you?”) that were largely deflected by some surprisingly substantive answers concerning legitimate problems that need to be addressed. While Clinton and Obama are both playing the expected game (“Hey, look at us brawl! Intense drama!”), I think on some level all three of these candidates would much rather talk about the sorts of policies they’d like to see pursued, and I think they’d agree on principle, if not on specifics, on nearly everything. Clinton actually scored the most moving moment of the night, expressing her intense pride at sharing the stage with her two opponents.
But for the most part, this doesn’t seem to be what the MSM wants to hear at all. Chris Cizzilla of the Washington Post political blog complains of the Nevada debate: “The last time Clinton, Obama and Edwards got together in Las Vegas the results was an attempt to ‘nice these people to death.’” And because they don’t want to hear it, they won’t cover it.
I get the sense that many political reporters long for these choreographed brawls because they’re afraid there won’t be anything to write about on a slow news days. I offer my own version of a news flash: there are no slow news days. Especially not after forty years of decline in progressive policy making in this country. There is something astonishing and/or appalling happening every day, and somewhere there are people desperately trying to make things better. The real stories are out there, and if they’re told well, people will want to hear them.
To be continued…
