I tend not to watch most American TV news, because to do so is to be constantly bombarded with the propagandistic and the trivial. When we're not reading online news, we tend to stick with either the BBC (Robin) or EuroNews (me) to keep our perspective. And we've been faithfully watching Keith Olbermann for at least a year, deeming him about the closest we're going to get in this country, in this age, to the late great Edward R. Murrow.
But I think we may be taking a break from Keith for awhile. As I inferred in this post back in September, we need to remember that all these people ostensibly on our side (whether satirists, politicians or media pundits) are millionaires, and have far more in common with each other than they'll ever have with us. Watching them air out their populist veneers is a constant exercise in self-delusion that they give any sort of crap about the lifestyles of their viewers or constituents. And every so often the surface cracks and one can see them for what they truly are.
Keith Olbermann is an apparently intelligent man who, like just about every other cable and network political pundit, seems to be in love with his own ideas and formats and circle of guests. He, like just about everyone else on MSNBC, has an inexplicable admiration for Tim Russert, one of the more useless agenda-setters entrenched in the halls of power of the Beltway elitists. As Tom Tomorrow notes, "Tim Russert's entire shtick consists of 'gotcha!' He seemed to spend the entire evening [at yesterday's Democratic debate] trying to trip the candidates up in one minor inconsistency or another. 'In old photographs, you appear to be younger — but now you are clearly older! Explain THAT!'" He's really into the trivial horse-race aspect of this year's Presidential campaign, even as he tries to have his cake and eat it too by talking about how awful The Media is to concentrate on the trivial.
But I think the last straw was the nasty turnaround that NBC foisted upon legitimate long-shot Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, deciding unilaterally (and getting the government to back them up) that it would be good for democracy to have fewer voices participating in yesterday's debate. Olbermann reported this, to his credit, but didn't question it at all. He seemed to think this perversion of the press' responsibility was not only a good thing, but so inconsequential it wasn't worth examining. Well, of course not -- it's like what Peter Stone had Ben Franklin say in 1776 about a rebellion only being illegal when it's in the third person. Stifling alternate viewpoints (i.e., the actual left-wing of the Democratic Party) is perfectly legal when it's in the first person!
There was one point in last night's Countdown where Keith and David Gregory were discussing an actual issue, the economy. But they weren't really talking about the issue itself. They were doing the same thing I've seen pundits do about Iraq. They were talking about talking about it, kind of looking up their own assets to see what pronouncements The Media had on how the candidates were going to react to economically-based questions. They never actually got around to phrasing any of those questions, talking about hard stats, interviewing people who weren't in their tax bracket, all the things that might have afforded Countdown viewers context and information.
Has Olbermann truly gotten "wrapped up in the horse race" as the picket-line-crossing Matt Taibbi opines (via http://susiemadrak.com/2008/01/16/12/43/merchants-of-trivia/) is the case for so many media mavens? Or was he always this way and we just didn't want to see it because his Special Comments and frequent insights into just how screwed up the current radical reactionaries in power have made this country were like manna to a starved liberal, thinking citizenry? Is it in the end our own fault for hoping Olbermann would somehow be different, when he's just another millionaire on TV, and we're not and will never be? Will this income divide, which has already played such a major role in how our leaders are pretty much chosen for us by the very people with whom they often party, completely obliterated any hope for an adversarial press, i.e., a press that does its ostensible job?
So no, poll-taker, I don't watch the evening news. Not even, I'm heartbroken to say, Olbermann any more. Wake me up when Rachel Maddow gets her own MSNBC show. She strikes me as one of the few political commentators with their heads screwed on right who doesn't necessarily make seven figures; if she does, I'm not sure I want to know yet.
But I think we may be taking a break from Keith for awhile. As I inferred in this post back in September, we need to remember that all these people ostensibly on our side (whether satirists, politicians or media pundits) are millionaires, and have far more in common with each other than they'll ever have with us. Watching them air out their populist veneers is a constant exercise in self-delusion that they give any sort of crap about the lifestyles of their viewers or constituents. And every so often the surface cracks and one can see them for what they truly are.
Keith Olbermann is an apparently intelligent man who, like just about every other cable and network political pundit, seems to be in love with his own ideas and formats and circle of guests. He, like just about everyone else on MSNBC, has an inexplicable admiration for Tim Russert, one of the more useless agenda-setters entrenched in the halls of power of the Beltway elitists. As Tom Tomorrow notes, "Tim Russert's entire shtick consists of 'gotcha!' He seemed to spend the entire evening [at yesterday's Democratic debate] trying to trip the candidates up in one minor inconsistency or another. 'In old photographs, you appear to be younger — but now you are clearly older! Explain THAT!'" He's really into the trivial horse-race aspect of this year's Presidential campaign, even as he tries to have his cake and eat it too by talking about how awful The Media is to concentrate on the trivial.
But I think the last straw was the nasty turnaround that NBC foisted upon legitimate long-shot Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, deciding unilaterally (and getting the government to back them up) that it would be good for democracy to have fewer voices participating in yesterday's debate. Olbermann reported this, to his credit, but didn't question it at all. He seemed to think this perversion of the press' responsibility was not only a good thing, but so inconsequential it wasn't worth examining. Well, of course not -- it's like what Peter Stone had Ben Franklin say in 1776 about a rebellion only being illegal when it's in the third person. Stifling alternate viewpoints (i.e., the actual left-wing of the Democratic Party) is perfectly legal when it's in the first person!
There was one point in last night's Countdown where Keith and David Gregory were discussing an actual issue, the economy. But they weren't really talking about the issue itself. They were doing the same thing I've seen pundits do about Iraq. They were talking about talking about it, kind of looking up their own assets to see what pronouncements The Media had on how the candidates were going to react to economically-based questions. They never actually got around to phrasing any of those questions, talking about hard stats, interviewing people who weren't in their tax bracket, all the things that might have afforded Countdown viewers context and information.
Has Olbermann truly gotten "wrapped up in the horse race" as the picket-line-crossing Matt Taibbi opines (via http://susiemadrak.com/2008/01/16/12/43/merchants-of-trivia/) is the case for so many media mavens? Or was he always this way and we just didn't want to see it because his Special Comments and frequent insights into just how screwed up the current radical reactionaries in power have made this country were like manna to a starved liberal, thinking citizenry? Is it in the end our own fault for hoping Olbermann would somehow be different, when he's just another millionaire on TV, and we're not and will never be? Will this income divide, which has already played such a major role in how our leaders are pretty much chosen for us by the very people with whom they often party, completely obliterated any hope for an adversarial press, i.e., a press that does its ostensible job?
So no, poll-taker, I don't watch the evening news. Not even, I'm heartbroken to say, Olbermann any more. Wake me up when Rachel Maddow gets her own MSNBC show. She strikes me as one of the few political commentators with their heads screwed on right who doesn't necessarily make seven figures; if she does, I'm not sure I want to know yet.
0 comments:
Post a Comment