When I turned on the TV to watch the results of the South Carolina primary last night on MSNBC, I saw a commercial for what at first I took to be a rock concert, boxing match, or monster truck rally. With graphics of lightening and flames flashing across the screen and a pounding heavy metal soundtrack, the scene was set for everyone's favorite gruff-voiced announcer to say his bit about "one time only!," and "only one will leave the ring!" (Incidentally, that guy gets a lot of work.) Sure enough, the hyper-masculine voice proceeded with the voice-over: "Powerplay in Florida! Will Rudy Giuliani pull it off...?"
What? Was I hearing this right? Yes, sadly, this was an ad for MSNBC's coverage of the Florida primaries. Moving on in the same ad, they mentioned Feb.5, when almost half of the states cast their votes, by labeling it "Monster Tuesday" and putting the words in a chunky green font quite in fitting with typographical representations of the Incredible Hulk. All the while, the screaming guitars wailed in the background.
In bemused disgust I switched over to CNN, where a similar advertisement played out: their big slogan for the election cycle is "Ballot Bowl '08." Indeed, watch any of the cable news networks' political coverage and prepare to be dazzled by incendiary graphics, loud rocking music, tough-sounding voice-overs, and quick and disjointed camera shots. The guys making these political ads are probably the same people advertising for the next pay-per-view rumble in Vegas.
As Glenn Greenwald has pointed out in his great blog and Chops has brought up in conversation, the media love to use sports analogies when discussing politics. The most common analogies are pugilistic: "will candidate X score a knock-out in the debate tonight?"; "is candidate Y down on the mats for good after the bruising loss?" Another sport that political pundits draw from is football, as indicated by CNN's "Ballot Bowl" line. "Will candidate Z score a touchdown in Florida?" We can only hope that our candidates aren't pumping steroids before the debates to get juiced before the brawl.
Not only is this sort of coverage silly and trivial, it is deeply insulting to the intelligence of the American people. How can we expect our democracy to function healthily when this is the sort of political reporting we're fed? Perhaps it is just because I am more sensitive to it now, but it appears that the dialog this time around is lower than ever in an election year that matters more than ever. "Who is going to get the knockout punch?" just doesn't cut it.
Market fundamentalists will tell you that the media are simply providing what the masses want: if people didn't love this sort of sensationalized coverage, they wouldn't watch and the cable new programs would go out of business. This is the "lowest common denominator" argument - there are a lot of people who love this sort of thing, so the networks provide it at the expense of the "highest denominator." Indeed, the invisible hand is supposed to respond to desires in the marketplace, right? This line of reasoning holds a lot of truth in a lot of situations, but not this one.
It's a lot like the reality show craze of a few years back. It wasn't that audiences all of a sudden had the passionate desire to see which husband would be the first to cheat on his wife in "Temptation Island;" networks created the desire through advertising dollars - not to mention the fact that there was nothing else to watch - then ameliorated that desire. Networks realized that reality TV was much cheaper to produce than scripted programming, and came up with a winning strategy for selling the new product.
Of course, political discourse, the lifeblood of our democracy, is a different beast than primetime TV. The problem is that it is not treated as such; indeed, the news is just another revenue stream for these media behemoths, and they've discovered that the lowest common denominator sells enough to make this model profitable.
The only problem with this rosy theory (besides what it does for the quality of our democracy, of course) is that it isn't supported by the facts. A recent survey found the following:
- 2/3 of all respondents do not trust the media
- 88% think "the mainstream media focuses too much on trivial issues."
- 77% want more serious, substantive discussions of the issues at stake in the election, not just the horse race.
There is clearly a strong desire for better political coverage out there, which makes me wonder why the infallible market isn't rushing it to fill the void. There are all sorts of explanations for this that I will certainly explore in further "Mirth and Matter" entries; suffice it to say for now that not only does this comprise a failure of the market, it amounts to a failure of imagination. The majors have their tried-and-true strategy and any unconventional thinking is looked down upon. The mainstream system of political coverage is broken, regardless of all the YouTube debates and other young, with-it formats they roll out. The bar is low enough to crawl over.
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A potential parallel stream to this idea is the American formula of destroying something and building it back up. This is the formula the armed forces use on cadets. Tire them out, weaken them, berate them into the fetal position, tear them to nothing, then rebuild them in your perfect image of the perfect soldier, complete with patriotic rhetoric and the lust to kill foreigners. This is the same formula we're attempting with the Middle East. It's not entirely a land game anymore in the sense that we're not necessarily aiming to redefine states and alter boundaries, but rather we're trying to restructure societies. And finally this is the same culture where we go out for sports only to get yelled at, ran to exhaustion, reflexes honed, fully cooridinated, and now developed into a winning machine. And the hyper-masculine rhetoric you mentioned is one of the psychological devices that do just this. That is my opinion on why they do it.
This is a very good point, Ruxtomikron. They could be approaching it from the reasoning that a little "creative destruction" will make the candidates more tough-skinned. The problem is, though, I think this sort of thing makes it a lot easier for the candidates in many ways. They can get by with sound-bites instead of substance. Of course, for all the people who really are issue-driven (I'm thinking of John Edwards's campaign in this regard) the sensationalized, personality-worshipping, hyper-masculine coverage serves to cover them up in a blanket of white noise. It breaks them down, I agree, but it does it not through actively engaging the issues but through pretending like they don't exist.
Then again there could be a correlation between republican ownership of mainstream media and the one candidate that's using the most chauvinistic jargon: John McCain.
American society is addicted to strong stimulation of the senses. We are awash in vivid visual images, bombarded with constant noise from machinery and electronic media, and inundated with advertising that urges us on to the extreme (Google it—there’s 13,900,000 entries under the heading “extreme products”. I’m particularly interested in the XTREME DRINKING CHOCOLATE!!!!!). Mainstream news reporting apparently feels it necessary to ramp up the sensory stimulation in order to compete with all the other shouting going on out there. I wouldn't read more into it than that. As a non-cable-subscribing, Lehrer News Hour-viewing, Newsweek and newspaper-reading consumer, the excellent descriptions of MSNBC and CNN reportage strikes me as somewhat amusing. I looked up antonyms for “extreme” online but was unsatisfied with the results. Words such as “insignificant”, “moderate”, and “safe” don’t quite capture the quality I seek. I’m going to coin a new word--a combination of balanced, thoughtful, and insightful—balthoin. Thank God for balthoin news sources!!
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