I watched Meet the Press on Sunday. It was a painful experience. I can see I need to minimize the amount I watch election coverage on TV. Bob Somerby at the Howler is right. These TV pundits don't care about the issues. They run a clown show.
Host Tim Russert in the second half held a panel discussion that included Tom Brokaw, David Broder, Gloria Borger and Ron Brownstein. Brownstein does some good reporting in the Los Angeles Times. But this was a joke. These are affluent, comfortable pundits creating entertainment for an affluent, comfortable target audiences that advertisers want.
The political reporters long ago settled on a story line on Howard Dean of "the angry Dean." Finally, with Dean's Iowa speech last Monday where he rolled up his sleeves and said, "Yee-haw," they apparently got a story that was widely interpreted to fit their story line. And they all chatted about The Angry Dean, telling their comfortable target audience that the comfortable story line that the comfortable pundits having been pushing is correct. With minor, meaningless variation to create the pleasant sensation of thought without actually engaging in any.
At one point, David Broder - called the "dean" of political pundits - said, without the slightest hint of irony or self-criticism, "The odd thing is that there was very little in Governor Dean's history, in all those years that he was running the state of Vermont, that would have suggested that he was kind of an emotionally volatile person." Gosh, isn't that a fascinating thing? There's no actual evidence for the story line we settled on! What a puzzling phenomenon!
The punditocracy also has decided that the General's (Wesley Clark's) unwillingness to openly disavow his supporter Michael Moore's description of Bush as a "deserter" is a case of fumbling the answer. Whether it's a good strategy or not, Clark made clear in his interview with Russert in the first part of the show that he's doing that deliberately. But because the affluent, comfortable pundits were too lazy to pursue the story of Bush's Air Guard service during the 2000 race, they define it as a mistake for anyone else to do so.
Bob Somerby is right. These pundits are clowns.
5 comments:
Issues? What place do issues have in political reporting? It's all about image, attitude, polls, trends -- anything but issues!
And if they're so concerned about Bush's desertion/AWOL problem, they should be talking to Bush about releasing his military records or (gasp!) actually investigate the story themselves.
Just to be fair to the millionaire pundits - they did spend about five minutes at the end of their 30 minute segment talking about issues. With the amount of depth and sophistication of, oh, bored 10th graders or so. One of them said that most people don't have the feeling that we're at war. I guess those daily headlines about Americans dying in Iraq don't make much on an impression on Big Pundits. - Bruce
y'know, i think it may be true that most folk don't feel that we're "at war." think of the difference between the way the VN war was present at all times in our living rooms, and the disengaged detached vague "violence continues in Baghdad" kinds of crawls across the bottom of stories on M.Jackson, the Golden Globes, Jlo & Ben, etc. you only know what's going on if you read alt press, crawl the net, read Iraq blogs.
i live not far from Dover AFB and frequently pass the base going to Dover for errands. i always wonder how many of the planes i see coming in are carrying coffins from Iraq. but i'll never see the answer on the "news." not even right here in the neighborhood. the other thing that brought the VN war home was the coverage of antiwar protest. we don't see THAT covered now either. in fact, as we all know, it's hidden away in the free speech zones, where TV cameras don't bother to go.
I also just read an account of Abraham Lincoln's famous visit to Gettysburg. He saw coffins stacked on the train platform when he first arrived. He could see the bones of people and animals on the battlefield. He could speak first-hand to people who had just lost family members in the battle a few days before. George W. has a very different approach. He won't even go to a soldier's funeral. - Bruce
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