Mainstream Media - Merchants of Trivia?

[modeski]

First, a repost of an excellent article from Rolling Stone:

December 28th, a beastly-cold afternoon in Story City, Iowa. Another school gym full of polite, placard-bearing Iowans herded in to support yet another pomp-and-ceremony-promising presidential candidate, in this case Hillary Clinton.
Hillary's late, however, so the campaign decides to pass the time by sending a pair of central-casting Adorable Local Children onstage to chuck HILLARY '08 T-shirts into the crowd. A young Hillary volunteer in a standard-issue Pale Blue Button-Down Shirt (the mandatory uniform of all campaign volunteers) takes the mike to introduce the kids.

"There's something you should know about these two," Pale Blue Shirt shouts. "They only respond to NOISE!!! Whoever makes the most noise gets a T-shirt!"

Robotic cheers as the kids hurl shirts in every direction. Last time I saw this act, it was New Jersey Nets mascot Sly the Silver Fox shooting tees with a slingshot to "Who Let the Dogs Out" during halftime at the Meadowlands. This time, the soundtrack is Tom Petty's nauseatingly Hillary-specific "American Girl." Some reporters are rolling their eyes, but every camera is dutifully following each flying T-shirt.

"Make sure you get that," a TV guy to my left whispers to his cameraman.

"Got it, got it," the camera guy says.

There must be a hundred reporters here, and every last one has lined up to capture this event in all its stage-managed glory. There are two camera risers, both packed to the gills with network shooters. Hillary's lectern is planted squarely between two enormous American flags; this way, every shot is sure to make her look like George C. Scott in Patton, with every curve of her ample jowls bathed in the iconic stripes of Old Glory. Campaigns pay top dollar for such images in commercials, but the free press literally fights for space on the risers, for the right to transmit those juicy images for free.

And when Hillary finally arrives, her speech turns out to be the same maddeningly nonspecific, platitude-filled verbal oatmeal that every candidate has spent the last year slinging in all directions — complete with the same vague promises for "change" we've heard from every last coached-up dog in this presidential hunt, from Barack Obama to Mitt Romney.

"Some people think you get change by demanding it," says the former first lady. "Some people think you get change by hoping for it. I think you get change by working hard for it every single day."

I see reporters frantically writing in their notebooks and laptops. The line was the money shot of this whole presentation, tomorrow's headline.

In a vacuum, of course, this is the most meaningless kind of computer-generated horseshit, the type of thing you would expect to hear coming out of the mouth of a $200-an-hour inspirational speaker at a suburban sales conference. But in this tightest of presidential races, Hillary attacking "hope" amounts to a major rhetorical offensive. "Hope," after all, is Barack Obama's own personal spoonful of oatmeal, and by disparaging it, Hillary has given this gym full of political hacks tomorrow's sports headline.

And the hacks deliver, right on cue. AN OBAMA-CLINTON TEMPEST BREWS roars The Los Angeles Times, noting that Hillary's shot at "hoping for change " is directed at Obama, while "demanding change" is code for John Edwards.

The next stage in this asinine process is the obligatory retorts. Obama responds by crowing, "I don't need lectures about how to bring about change." The "change-demander," Edwards, stakes out his own platitudinal turf, insisting that change isn't about work or hope at all, but about "toughness" and "courage."

Reading all of this crap the next day, I'm amazed. Here we are, the world's lone superpower, holding elections at a time when we're engaged in a catastrophic war in Iraq, facing a burgeoning nuclear crisis in Pakistan, dealing with all sorts of horrible stuff. And at the crucial moment, the presidential race turns into something from the cutting-room floor of Truly Tasteless Jokes #50: "Three change-promisers walk into a bar. . . ."

I mean, is this a joke, or what? What the hell is the difference between "working for change" and "demanding change"? And why can't we hope for change and work for it? Are these presidential candidates or six-year-olds?

go on the offensive?" wondered Politico.com, a weirdly aggressive torch-waving newcomer to the media witch-hunt game. "That's the question facing the surging Mike Huckabee. . . ."

That's the question. . . . The passive structure of the Politico lede is the standard method that campaign trail journalists use when disguising value judgments as statements of fact. There's no data backing up the notion that this really is the question facing Huckabee; the press is simply making sure Huckabee can be counted on to jump through any hoops they might decide to hold up for him, no matter how asinine these tests might be.

And jump he does. In Indianola, Huckabee not only mentions Romney by name, he unleashes a torrent of anti-Romney abuse. Previously smiling and Muppet-like in most of his stump addresses, Huckabee today is positively monomaniacal in his fixation on Romney — he sounds like a late-stage Lenny Bruce ranting about cops and Francis Cardinal Spellman. "I did not grow up privileged," he croaks. "I did not grow up with a last name that opened the door. In fact, my last name probably closed a few. Never in my life did I ever remember somebody asking my dad would he be willing to come out and endorse a candidate."

To me it's Huckabee's worst performance, but the press reviews the next day are exultant. NICE-GUY HUCKABEE FIRES BACK IN IOWA shouts the Baltimore Sun. HUCKABEE DROPS 'R-BOMBS' IN IOWA seconds a satisfied Politico.

This scene is a perfect example of the dynamic that dominates virtually all campaign coverage. No matter which issues or grass-roots support elevate a candidate to the limelight, in order to stay there he ends up having to play this game, a sort of political version of Fear Factor in which candidates must eat bowl after bowl of metaphorical worms to prove their worthiness.

The Huckabee episode is significant because Obama went through the same thing in the months leading up to Iowa. His refusal to "mix it up" with Clinton infuriated reporters. "Obama continued to shy away from a real fight with his Democratic rivals," complained Newsweek, wondering if he knew how to pursue politics "as a game, played to win."

When Obama responded with a series of parries at Hillary, the press applauded. OBAMA: BYE-BYE MR. NICE GUY? gushed the Chicago Tribune. OBAMA IN IOWA: GLOVES OFF! roared ABC.com. Shit, even Rollingstone.com got into the act (OBAMA TAKES THE GLOVES OFF).

The hilarious thing is that while Obama and Huckabee were blasted for not providing the press with enough boxing-metaphor material, Clinton was getting the business for being too feisty. IS SEN. CLINTON WARM ENOUGH TO WIN? wondered Slate. Just like the others, Hillary quickly proved her willingness to eat as many worms as we could dish out, hilariously releasing a whole Web site where Friends of Hillary lined up to swear on a stack of Bibles, that despite what you might think, the candidate isn't a crabby old battle-ax in private.

This relentless fragging from the media led to the current state of affairs in Iowa, in which all of the candidates are enjoined in a seemingly endless piss-fight over the most mind-numbing minutiae imaginable. Clinton and Obama spent days haggling bitterly over, of all things, tea. When Obama insisted that his foreign experience went beyond who "I had tea with," the Hillary camp actually went through the trouble of releasing a statement from Madeleine Albright insisting that Hillary, in fact, drank many different beverages in her travels.

On the Republican side, the Romney-Huckabee war turned increasingly bitter, with "Nice Guy" Huck calling Romney "dishonest" on the Monday before the vote. Romney responded by obliquely comparing the Huckabee record on pardons to that of another Arkansas governor, leading to amusing headlines like ROMNEY ALMOST COMPARES HUCKABEE TO BILL CLINTON.

How did one of the most genuinely interesting primary contests in American history devolve into a Grade-D smack-down that even Vince McMahon would be ashamed to promote? The real story of the campaign has been its unprecedented unpredictability — and therein lies the problem. On both tickets, the abject failure of media-anointed front-runners to hold their ground was due at least in part to voters having grown weary of being told by the press who was "electable" and who wasn't. Both the Huckabee and Ron Paul candidacies represent angry grass-roots challenges to the entrenched Republican party apparatus, while the Edwards candidacy is a frank and open attack on his own party's too-cozy relationship with corporate America. These developments signaled a meaningful political phenomenon — widespread voter disgust, not only with the two ruling parties, but with a national political press that smugly enforced the party insiders' stranglehold on the process with its incessant bullying of dissident candidates.

But there was no way this genuinely interesting theme was going to make it into mainstream coverage of the campaign heading into the primary season. It was inevitable that different, far stupider story lines would be found to dominate the headlines once the real bullets started flying in Iowa and New Hampshire. And find them we did.

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 that they all die in a fire somehow. And something tells me that most of America would hope that my colleagues and I burn up with them.



I think we can all agree that the media coverage of this election is among the worst we've ever seen (if you think otherwise, do tell). I've been following the news with great interest, but it's only when I step back that I realise the talking heads are essentially rabbiting on about bugger all. It perhaps would be facile to say that it boils down to 'women vs black guy', but that does seem to be the case a lof of the time.

Can anyone actually tell me what the candidate's policies are? All I know is that Obama wants to end the Iraq invasion, reform healthcare (somehow) and end America's dependence on oil (somehow). Hillary I can tell you even less about. Edwards, Ron Paul, Romney, Huckabee...I have no idea where they stand on many issues in anything more than the most general sense.

What has happened in society where we allow this kind of trivial bullshit to dominate the news? How can we stop this 'mass orgy of sports clichés and celebrity catfighting'?

I predict that the answer is that nothing will change for a long, long time. There seems to be very few sources of what I would call 'serious' news anymore. The media landscape is dominated by celebrities, sports stars and fashion. If anyone has any ideas how to remedy the situation I would be glad to hear them.

[HStorm]

To be fair to the media, the candidates themselves are largely rabbiting on about bugger-all too.

But then to be fair to the politicians, every time they say anything, the media pounces on it and twists it out of context or tries to use it to prove they're some kind of raging commie. (I get tired of saying that I don't think it's much of a condemnation to say someone's a Communist, but there are some phrases that Western society is just reflexively allergic to.)

For me, it's surely going to be either Obama or Clinton in the White House next year. Of the two, I think I'd prefer Clinton, because at least she has given voice to a few policies, one or two of which would actually benefit the underclasses somewhat, rather than just talking over and over in vague, generalised, corporate-friendly terms about 'change' and 'hope'. It's been about five months since Obama's campaign began in earnest, and if you closely study what he's said during that time, you'll find that he still hasn't articulated a single coherent idea of what he plans to do on any issue should he get into office.

As I said above, I do sympathise with his caution to a certain extent, because you just know that many in the corporate media will turn on him if he commits to any leftist policies, and the black/working vote will turn on him if he sounds too pro-business. But at the same time, he has to find the courage to start talking substance eventually, as otherwise there's a real danger that both wings will stop trusting him.

That may already have happened in New Hampshire in fact.