“We live in a world of media fiction. Where talk radio and your business everything gets presented in black/white red state/blue state left/right terms. And I don’t think that’s the way the real world is. It’s not the way I carry about my life as exemplified by people I meet on a day to day basis. It only exists in the world in which you and I work. And I, frankly, have had enough of it. I frankly think that stirring the pot at the ends of the political spectrum as been terrible for the country and I want no more of it.”
“People in the middle need a voice. We’re underrepresented in the world of talk radio and on cable stations because the bookers they only look for those who they can introduce as a liberal or a conservative, a Republican or a Democrat. That’s not the bulk of America right now. What about the folks in the middle?”
Smerconish wrote about his decision to register as an Independent: “Collegiality is nonexistent today, and any outreach across an aisle is castigated as weakness by the talking heads who constantly stir a pot of discontent.”
“Everybody’s talking about the Tiger Woods scandal. And I would be shirking my responsibilities as a journalist if I didn’t also try to boost my ratings at his expense.” –Stephen Colbert
Beware of news on the Internet. It is a trackless swamp with a few islands. Find the islands and stay there. Anything else is a morass, and you have only yourself to blame if you sink into it. –Purple State of Mind
Soon we lay to rest Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America.”
Its no use trying to separate Cronkite’s history from America’s history, him being right there with so many of us during the moments we’ve marked our lives by. His chorus of eulogizers is deserved and they are far more equipped than I to capture the measure of the man. In their remembrances there’s a melancholy that says we think Cronkite’s journalism has forever died with him. Surely he will not be at peace with that epitaph.
It is odd that Cronkite is still unmatched in our esteem, because since his heyday, we’ve experienced technology’s jaw-dropping explosion that beams images across the globe near instantaneously – surely a leg up for today’s press corps. We now have 24-hour cable news, which (if nothing else) provides journalists with many, many hours of practicing their trade. Yet in our estimation this man working with near stone-age tools, relatively speaking, beats our current crop of journalists hands-down.
Suppose that says far more about us than it does about Cronkite or journalists? More specifically, maybe it speaks to who we were as a society when we tuned into Walter Cronkite. And boy do we ever miss the old us.
Cronkite’s America found us sitting around one television set, watching one of two newscasts, distinguished from each other more by personal preference than by ideology. Things didn’t change as fast in the days we spent our evenings with Cronkite, so I suppose there really wasn’t as much to disagree about. But back then we still made lots of room in our lives for people who differed from us politically because they were our neighbors, they were in our bowling league or in our garden club. Heck, we even married them.
Today the bowling league is gone and we’ve got little tolerance for just how wrong we think other people are. Our every information wish is our command as we flit around the dial finding our tribe, and then settle into our favorite armchairs with our favorite beverage to sing an alleluia chorus, free from pesky facts that might soften our views. We have so much comfort in our lives; the discomfort inherent in the disagreement of good citizenship that keeps democracy’s marketplace of ideas alive is just so been-there-done-that. It is just so Walter Cronkite.
There’s always been fighting in democracy. But now when we do it, we fight as if we’ll never need each other.
Even as we step inevitably into smaller and smaller hermetically sealed echo chambers of complete agreement, at some intuitive level we know it was our better selves who showed up to sit down in the living room to watch Cronkite together.
Bill Bishop writes about this phenomenon in “The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart,” documenting demographic trends that have found us increasingly segregated by ideology since the mid-sixties. “As the nation grows more politically segregated,” writes Bishop, “the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogeneous groups.”
And we are nothing if not self-righteous. A hundred years of social science research confirms that like-minded groups grow more extreme in the direction of the majority.
Witness where we are.
If we’re honest enough with ourselves to realize the mucky stall we’ve found ourselves in, the remedy is oddly simple, requiring only the mildest of human effort to reach out and remember how much we still have in common. While we’re at it, America is plunk in the middle of a world that really needs us to lead in the kind of civil citizenship that is wonderfully and uniquely in our very DNA as a country. One wonders what can be achieved without a single shot fired if we only steadfastly live up to our very own ideals, the kind of ideals that by their nature quietly shine a light into the darkest corners of the globe saying, “this is democracy…this is what free people can do together.”
We will miss Walter Cronkite badly, almost as much as we miss ourselves. But then who knows? Maybe the most fitting eulogy to Cronkite might be to simply remember who it is we were when we were last with him.
As the buzz of media has circled (and circled and circled) the sad news of Michael Jackson’s untimely death, we’ve given some thought to what Village Square message there is in all of the hoopla.
Cue up today’s Sarah Palin announcement that she will resign the Alaska governorship to bring the Village Square message sliding into home plate. Bear with me for a moment, I’ll explain…
Did you know that Michael Jackson was sued over 1,000 times? Can you even begin to imagine that sort of circus as a part of your life? One lawsuit would do most of us in. Clearly his fortune played a roll in that fate as did his rumored misdeeds, but possibly more of a contributing factor was his fame – a la 24 hour cable and internet rumor reverberation. Not taking a side on Jackson’s alleged sexual deviancy, when we started our love/hate affair with Jackson he was an adorable boy singing “ABC”. Clearly his abusive dad had a hand in it, but don’t we also have a role in who that little boy has become?
News, cable, media… ultimately they give us want we want, and they know what we want (via polls out the wazoo) whether we admit it to ourselves or not. Jackson’s 1,000+ lawsuits were sort of sponsored by us. We have a mass media environment – brought to us by technology we won’t be putting back in Pandora’s box no matter how we might wish it so – that just warps things. I think they warped that beautiful and fantastically talented little boy.
Now, Sarah Palin. A little more than half of America thought she wasn’t ready to become our Vice President. Fair enough. But there is something once again warping about the experience she’s clearly had as she’s danced this dance with our mass culture. Her words: “I’ve been accused of all sorts of frivolous ethics violations such as holding a fish in a photograph or wearing a jacket with a logo on it.”
It used to be that the common sense connections we made in America kept this boat of ours floating high. But our connections are different today. They don’t feature plain common sense prominently, rather they highlight market share. They’re not playing to the best in us which we used to bring front and center to our rotary club, our PTA, our bowling league. Instead, they’ve found the worst in us, the TV we watch and the websites we visit when there’s no one there we have to fess up to.
Market share brings us boys who grow into men who get sued 1,000 times. It brings us decent strong women who say yes when someone asks them to run for office, but find their life is turned all upside down and inside out as a result. As so on and so on until we reconnect with each other enough to strongly tell them in unison that it’s not what we want anymore.
The media is like a laser that exponentially strengthens what WE are asking for. We need to understand and focus its power. Ultimately it is US who will tell them it’s time to stop. Two weeks of Michael Jackson death rubber-necking needs to be received by us with a big yawn in the Nielsen’s.
For now, like Sarah Palin or not, hit your knees tonight and thank her for knocking Michael Jackson’s death out of the media cycle.
Let him rest in peace.
And again – like Palin or not – you’re going to have to appreciate some of what she just said to us today: “We’re fishermen, we know that only dead fish go with the flow.”
The Los Angeles Times has a Beirut Bureau Chief. I just thought you should know that. Sure, this isn’t exactly big news, but maybe it should be.
I caught an interview on MSNBC of said Bureau Chief, Borzou Daragahi,
about the President Obama’s video message to Iranian citizens on the occasion of the Persian New Year. Obama wished them a happy new year in Farsi.
Mr. Daragahi was kind enough to translate the Farsi for us.
He went on to tell us that by Obama referring to Iran as the “Islamic Republic of Iran”, he was implying that he was not specifically pursuing regime change. The message, according to Daragahi, was more substantive than normal in addressing issues between the two countries – historically our leadership has employed messages like this as either ultimatums or gestures to peel the population off of leadership we disliked.
The interview I heard occurred at 9 p.m. Eastern, so it was the middle of the night in the Middle East for Daraghani.
How in the world would I, sitting as a type in my pj’s and slippers, know all this, were it not for Borzou Daragahi?
Like Obama’s approach or not, left of the aisle or right, we have to have journalists flung across the world to tell us this story and other stories. Otherwise, how would we know enough to have diverging opinions?
A dear friend of mine just turned 50. She has a big job at a major daily. I want you to think about the last time you said something snippy about the media, and I want you to consider it while I tell you about my friend.
First, she comes from a solidly conservative family, despite the fact that she has to regularly field many complaints about liberal bias and probably a few about conservative bias, and lets just say some of the complaints aren’t polite. She takes them very seriously though. Her vision in assessing the complaints has to be wide, not tunnel (as you and I have the luxury to have when we’ve got a bone to pick).
There wasn’t ever a time when I went to her house as a child when there weren’t ideas being flung back and forth at 100 miles an hour. I credit our friendship and my semi-child status with her parents for my interest in the public square, in the business of America. These people were real citizens of this country, and they had the rolled-up sleeves to prove it.
They were also real writers. They sometimes kept a manual typewriter (yes, this was a looong time ago) sitting with a sheet of paper in it with a couple of seed sentences to start a story. Someone else would come along and add a couple sentences of their own, and so on.
She is smart as a whip and somehow manages to put up with my trailing a few seconds (ok… sadly, minutes) behind her.
Please think of something you know about recent events. Did you learn it because of journalists like her? Some of them put themselves in harm’s way just so you can know.
This business of journalism annoys people. It kind of has to. This business of journalism has a lot to do with keeping us a free country, of keeping the powerful accountable to us little citizens. Sure, at times they do it imperfectly (a little thing we humans bring to everything we undertake). But look at where there isn’t an independent press to rankle and I’ll show you people who “yearn to breathe free.”
Journalists are the unsung heroes of democracy, in a business that’s tougher today than it was yesterday. And despite all that, they’ll get up again tomorrow and take your abuse and mine because they believe deeply in free speech, a free press and this little thing called democracy.
Thanks to my friend for spending her years doing something really really important. And Happy Birthday.
A provocative – sometimes brilliant, sometimes uncomfortable and sometimes potty-mouthed – screed by John Stewart delivered way back in 2006, targeting the partisan talking-head yapfest that has hurt our important national conversation. To be fair to the talking heads, isn’t it – in fact – the viewers who keep them employed (uh, that would be us)? If we actually watched the most in-depth, civil and factual programs on TV, wouldn’t the networks be clambering to bring more of them to us?
Do you remember when candidates used to appear in their own commercials? Many of them seemed a little stiff wearing a sober suit and white shirt framed by an American flag, a bust of Lincoln and family pictures as they made obvious, irreconcilable and insupportable promises.
“I will improve schools, hire more police, teachers and trash workers and lower taxes, create jobs, and get snow, guns and homeless people off the street by being tough, fair, generous and stingy to all of our citizens , regardless of race, creed or hair color, the number of toes they have or whether they were ever stupid enough to vote for my opponent. I welcome your support.”
I miss those ads. At least they gave you a glimpse of the candidate talking about issues, even in hilarious non sequiturs. These days candidates hire consultants to publicize the names of their opponents just so they can splash mud and slime on them. It’s as if Coca Cola bought ads just to show people taking a swig of Pepsi Cola and spitting it into a gutter.
The candidate used to at least risk rejection by asking, sometimes pleading “vote for me” in his commercials. Now they hide behind hired voices who ask “you aren’t really going to vote for that guy, are you?” Then have the candidate mutter at the end like some nine-year-old being forced to admit that he hit the baseball through the window “I approved this message.”
There’s an old Madison Avenue adage: “Sell the sizzle, not the steak.” Many current campaign commercials don’t even try to sell sizzle, they just hurl sleaze. People who create them are using the expensive power of articulation to produce messages that are just about as mature as kids razzing each other on the playground.
Look, I’m from Chicago, I love covering politics there and still follow it like a contact sport. I know, as the old Chicago columnist Findley Peter Dunn wrote in 1898, “politics ain’t beanbag.” It has always been rough because the stakes are high. I am not one of those people who says “I wish we had a high-minded political system like they have in Canada.”
The sad fact is that candidates and soft money groups run vicious ads because the evidence is, they work. We might be appalled but we often follow through.
When ads become so personal, intense and insulting it’s difficult for the candidate who survives, I won’t even say “wins,” to climb atop the ooze and act like a human being, much less a statesman. And difficult for voters to respect or trust who they’ve elected, in spite of what they’ve been told. These ads may help candidates win the game, but they also risk tearing up the field and burning down the stadium.
By the way, my name is Scott Simon and I approved this message.
