“Wanted; Less Terrible Political Coverage On TV”: An Increasingly Tiresome Model Of Political And Current Events Coverage
Jon Stewart is nothing if not America’s foremost cable news critic. On Sunday, he couldn’t help telling CNN what he thinks of them—and he did it on their network. “I want more of good CNN,” Stewart said. “CNN is very similar to the doll Chucky. Sometimes it’s good Chucky, but you really got to watch out for bad Chucky.”
It’s not just CNN. Much of what passes for political coverage these days is (to borrow a phrase) “bad Chucky.” What Stewart admires are the “brave correspondents” who cover things like the Arab Spring. What he doesn’t like, though—the breathless and feigned “BREAKING NEWS” time fillers and pearl clutching—is what cable news relies on the majority of the time spent between revolutions and natural disasters. It’s an increasingly tiresome model of political and current events coverage.
Aside from Fox News (as evidenced by the ratings), MSNBC’s Morning Joe (as evidenced by its status as a tastemaker), and comedy shows like the Daily Show and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and HBO’s Real Time (by virtue of their place in the cultural zeitgeist), politics on TV doesn’t seem to be as good anymore. Maybe it’s just me. Then again, cable news ratings are down more or less across the board, and Americans find much of the media untrustworthy.
There are other exceptions, no doubt. But whether it’s cable news or the Sunday morning talk shows, something just doesn’t seem right. One gets the sense that they’re flailing, that the world has changed, but they haven’t. That they’re trying to figure out how to make it work, but so far it’s not coming together.
And I think it’s worth noting that among the shows that I believe to be “working” include several examples that are, ostensibly, comedy. And that makes me wonder if maybe the networks and shows might not want to look to them for guidance? And, of course, they already are: Jon Stewart was seriously considered as host for Meet The Press, a move that would have either changed the whole damn paradigm—or failed spectacularly. But the larger question lingers: Why do these shows work, while much of what passes for straight political commentary and analysis (not to be confused with straight news) seem so stale?
A theory: As our political system—not to mention our coverage of it—becomes more absurd, there’s a natural yearning to point out that absurdity in a way a show like Meet the Press is not equipped to handle. MTP and shows like it are all about how serious this is. These are senators, don’t ya know—statesmen. It’s like the whole format is left over from the Washington that existed in an Allen Drury novel, a time before the message was controlled and you rose in the ranks on your ability to avoid gaffes and raise cash.
Our politics—our culture at large, really—now disincentivizes loose informality when it comes to political coverage. It’s really quite schizophrenic: we urge you to be loose and fun and interesting, but we’ll crucify you if you trip up. ‘It’s all absurd, yes, but don’t take it lightly!’ seems to be the mantra, and there’s a million tripwires to look out for if you’re a senator talking on a set. So we settle on this arrangement that has this sort of bloodless/uber-serious political coverage on the one hand, and Jon Stewart absurdity on the other. A politician or pundit screws up on one, and is made fun of on the other.
But there’s a missing middle ground here—a warm wit, a little mischievous but not cynical—that Sunday shows kind of miss now.
I’m not advocating that we dumb down political analysis and chase the lowest common denominator. Quite the opposite. The irony is that shows that are meant to be funny are often also the smarter shows. There is a long tradition of Swiftian satire, and in this regard, the comedy shows are selling themselves short when they cast themselves as mere “entertainment.” One could argue that they are providing a service—and a service that could be replicated by other outlets and media.
But as faking sincerity is difficult, replicating insouciance is a challenge. It helps to have fun, smart hosts who don’t have an ideological ax to grind. That’s not to say Stewart and Oliver and Maher (just to mention three) don’t have a point of view; they tend to universally lean leftward. But they are probably more intellectually honest—more willing to call their own team for BS—than most political commentators.
They’re also funny. For them, the rule has to be to “be funny first.” You can have an agenda, but it’s always second fiddle to being funny. Or, if your show is about ideas, then I think it has to be intellectually stimulating first. My point here is that scoring political points probably can’t come first, at least if believe this is the model that works best.
Here, talent is important, too. There were a lot of things about that infamous Jon Stewart rant on Crossfire that I thought were unfair, but one thing he got completely right is that being funny is harder than doing political commentary. On the other hand, Stewart and Oliver and Maher have some huge advantages over their political interlocutors, such as a team of writers helping them come up with one-liners. They’re also held to a lower standard, partly at their own insistence, allowing them to quickly move back and forth between serious public-service style journalism and “we’re all just having fun” irreverence.
So I leave you with this: Could a cable network—tasked with providing content 24/7 replicate the quality of these shows, day in and day out? There’s probably no way that would happen. It’s so much easier and cheaper to book guests to gab about the news of the day. There’s little time or money for flying the perfect guest—maybe a smart author—across the country to have an elevated discussion. But it could work as a model for the Sunday shows which, let’s face it, would benefit from a little more levity.
Political commentary will slowly evolve, and what I think we’re witnessing right now is a kind of transitional period—an adolescence, if you will, and that’s rarely an attractive stage. The current formula for TV news isn’t working, and the networks know it, but they haven’t quite figured out what will replace it. Yes, there will always be a place for serious discussion about policy, but this much seems obvious: A decade from now, political punditry will look very different. And I’m betting on the funny guys.
By: Matt Lewis, The Daily Beast, November 19, 2014
“More Silliness And Hysteria”: Gripes About Excessive Regulations And Taxes Often Are Baseless
In the last couple of months we have seen the country whipped up into near hysteria over the virtually nonexistent threat of Ebola.
While the only people who contracted the disease in this country were those who treated a man who died of the disease, tens of millions of people became convinced they were in danger on airplanes and public buses and even routine visits to the supermarket.
Politicians have sought to exploit the same sort of fears with their rants about regulations and high taxes sinking the economy. These complaints have as much foundation in reality as the Ebola threat.
The regulation screed usually focuses on the number of pages in bills like the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. While lengthy bills are unfortunate from the standpoint of the trees cut down for the paper, the length bears no relationship to the amount of regulation.
To take one example, the Volcker Rule, which prohibits banks with government insured deposits from engaging in risky speculation, ended up more than three times its original length as the industry carved out an array of exceptions. The greater length was associated with less regulation, not more.
Dodd-Frank was about curbing the sorts of abuses that gave us the financial crisis. Is the argument that we need corrupt banks to foster growth?
The screams over the ACA are equally misguided. The rules have little impact on large firms, the vast majority of whom already offered insurance that met ACA requirements. It might have been expected to affect mid-sized firms that did not previously offer insurance, but none of the complainers has yet presented any evidence that these mid-sized firms have been especially hard hit in the last few years.
The tax complaints require some serious amnesia. Tax rates were higher for most people in the 1990s when we saw the strongest growth in almost three decades. We then lowered taxes in 2001 and saw a weak recovery followed by the collapse in 2008.
The explanation for the continuing weakness is not a surprise to those of us who warned of the housing bubble before the crisis. The bubble had been driving the economy both directly through its impact on construction and indirectly through the impact that $8 trillion of housing bubble wealth had on consumption. When the bubble burst, the economy lost its driving force.
The building boom of the bubble years lead to enormous overbuilding of housing. When the bubble burst, construction didn’t just fall back to normal. It fell to the lowest levels in 50 years, costing the economy more than four percentage points of GDP, amounting to $700 billion annually in lost demand. The loss of housing wealth meant that consumption fell back to more normal levels.
While both housing and construction are up from their low-points in the recession, they are not going to return to bubble peaks, at least not without another bubble. This means that the economy continues to have a huge shortfall in demand. Cutting taxes and reducing regulation will not magically fill this gap in demand.
There are essentially two ways to increase demand. One is directly through more government spending. This is currently taboo in Washington since we are all supposed to hate budget deficits.
The other is by reducing the trade deficit. The way to reduce the trade deficit is to make U.S. goods more competitive with a lower-valued dollar. Talk of a lower dollar is also taboo in political circles.
In short, it is not difficult to find ways to boost the economy; the problem is that politics prevents them from being discussed. Instead we get silliness about taxes and regulation.
By: Dean Baker, Co-Founder of the Center for Economic Policy and Research; The National Memo, November 20, 2014
“When Will They Ever Learn?”: Republicans Finally File Lawsuit Against Obama – And Stand To Gain Almost Nothing
Back in June, House Republicans announced, with deep regret yet great fanfare, that they were going to sue Barack Obama over his tyrannical usurpation of power. The suit was never actually filed; two lawyers the House had hired ended up quitting, and it looked as if it would fade away.
Then this week Republicans announced that they had found another lawyer to take the case, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who says he’s a liberal but has become an intense critic of the Obama administration. Just four days later, the lawsuit has finally been filed:
House Republicans filed a long-threatened lawsuit Friday against the Obama administration over unilateral actions on the health care law that they say are abuses of the president’s executive authority.
The lawsuit — filed against the secretaries of the Health and Human Services and Treasury Departments — focuses on two crucial aspects of the way the administration has put the Affordable Care Act into effect.
The suit accuses the Obama administration of unlawfully postponing a requirement that larger employers offer health coverage to their full-time employees or pay penalties. (Larger companies are defined as those with 50 or more employees.)
In July 2013, the administration deferred that requirement until 2015. Seven months later,the administration announced a further delay, until 2016, for employers with 50 to 99 employees.
The suit also challenges what it says is President Obama‘s unlawful giveaway of roughly $175 billion to insurance companies under the law. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the administration will pay that amount to the companies over the next 10 years, though the funds have not been appropriated by Congress. The lawsuit argues that it is an unlawful transfer of funds.
Call me cynical, but I can’t help but think that the newfound urgency to move ahead with the suit has something to do with President Obama’s immigration order. If conservative Republicans aren’t satisfied with whatever confrontation their leaders manage to create with Obama over immigration, John Boehner can say, “Don’t forget, we’re suing him!”
But what do Republicans get if they win this suit? Not much more than a symbolic victory. The actual complaints in the suit were always strange — they’re suing Obama for delaying the employer mandate, a provision they despise. If they won, he’d be forced to speed up implementation of the mandate, even as Republicans are pressing to eliminate it altogether. And by the time the suit winds its way through the courts, the issue will probably be moot. The mandate for employers with over 100 workers goes into effect in January (though they are only required to cover 70 percent of their employees, and almost all companies of that size already provided coverage even before the law was passed). And the mandate for the mid-size companies goes into effect in a year. By the time the case is heard by a high court, the remedy it’s seeking will probably have already taken place.
As for the other of the suit’s complaints, on cost-sharing subsidies, if Republicans are successful in killing them it would mean that poor people would have to pay more in copays and deductibles. But unlike the subsidies in three dozen states that are at issue in the King v. Burwell lawsuit, which the Supreme Court recently agreed to hear, this provision isn’t critical to the law’s basic functioning. So apart from the satisfaction some Republicans might receive from making life harder for the working poor, even if they win this lawsuit they won’t have dealt the ACA a serious blow.
Legal experts who have looked at this suit haven’t found much merit in it, particularly on the claim about the employer mandate. Federal agencies frequently delay the implementation of far-reaching regulations while practical problems are worked out. But even if they prevail, all Republicans stand to gain is the ability to say that they beat Barack Obama in court. Which may be more than nothing, but it isn’t much more than that.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, November 21, 2014
“Inflicting Terror”: In Ferguson, A Militarized Police Force Isn’t Necessary For Suppression
Nearly every night in Ferguson, a group of protesters gathers in front of the police department demanding justice for Michael Brown. The size of the demonstration has varied, depending on people’s availability and on the weather conditions, but the dedication to protesting has remained consistent since Brown’s death.
In these days leading up to the announcement of whether a grand jury has indicted Darren Wilson for killing Brown, everyone is on edge. The uncertainty of when the decision will be released to the public, coupled with Missouri Governor Jay Nixon’s declaration of a state of emergency, has left plans for action up in the air and the quest for justice without answers. But the people still show up to police departments.
The anxiety has only been exacerbated the last few nights in Ferguson, as those protests have been met by a show of force on the part of the Ferguson police department. The night I was there—Wednesday, November 19—there were no more than about forty protesters at any given moment, met with police presence of equal or greater number. Of course, the major difference was that the police stood armed, in riot gear, and the protesters had only their bullhorns, chants and emotion.
It remained relatively calm for a time. The police, lined up as if to block the passageway to the department doors, already unavailable to anyone because of the metal barricade, played a game of cat and mouse, advancing a few feet and backing protesters up, before retreating themselves. Things escalated when during one of their advances they arrested a young man who had shown up to livestream the event.
The police advanced further as the protesters took to the streets, directing traffic away from their action. Protestors ran to what they thought would be a safe space across the street, but a few weren’t lucky enough to make it. At least five people were arrested that night, mostly for unlawful assembly as well as resisting arrest.
Aside from the chanting, there was no provocation of the police on the part of the protesters. There was one instance of an object being thrown, a water bottle, but other protesters quickly handled it: the person responsible, dressed in all black from head-to-toe, including a black mask that obscured their face, was run off of the protest site and heckled as an agitator who was putting the lives of the protesters at risk.
“If the media wasn’t out here, they’d have arrested us all,” one protester remarked.
A similar scene played out on Thursday evening, with the lesson here being that a militarized police force isn’t necessary to inflict terror. The police have proved themselves violent even without the use of tanks and tear gas. The people’s right to assemble peacefully won’t be protected. The Ferguson police department hasn’t taken any of the national or international criticism they have received to heart. And as the announcement of the decision on whether to indict Wilson dangles in some unknown future, the anxiety builds and takes an unknowable psychic toll on the most dedicated protesters.
But their resolve to see this through is strong.
By: Mychal Denzel Smith, The Nation, November 21, 2014
“The Lessons Of November 1963”: People Come And Go, Strong Institutions Endure
Most of us who were alive 51 years ago remember exactly what we were doing the moment we heard that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. That day in Dallas significantly changed my perspective on the presidency and American institutions.
I had just returned to my desk at the then-U.S. Civil Service Commission when I noticed that Shirley, our office secretary, was crying. She told me why. Nothing could have prepared us for that weekend in November 1963.
How do you get your head around the news that the president of the United States has been assassinated? Killed in broad daylight on a Dallas street. A president we looked up to, the titular head of an almost mystical family who was leading us into a New Frontier. Gone. Without any warning, gone.
That afternoon, sitting in front of a TV screen and holding my firstborn, 18-month-old Rob, I joined the rest of the nation and cried. It was the first of many tear-filled moments that stretched over several days.
The scenes, the heart-wrenching scenes: the night arrival at Andrews Air Force Base, the funeral procession to St. Matthew’s Cathedral, the burial ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.
That period of mourning was interrupted by a shocking scene in the basement of the Dallas police station: the entire nation an eyewitness to Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder by Jack Ruby.
More had happened, however, than I realized at the time.
The assassination changed expectations.
The dynamism and beauty that had come to be called the New Frontier ended. John F. Kennedy died in Dallas. But the American presidency did not die with him. The president’s heart stopped, but the nation’s never missed a beat.
At 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time, the 35th president of the United States was assassinated. At 2:38 p.m. CST, Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as the 36th president of the United States, an oath of office administered by a federal judge under the authority of the Constitution.
U.S. armed forces worldwide continued their daily troop counts, assembled in units of varying sizes, policed their surroundings, cleaned weapons and trained. The Army’s day continued to end with “Taps.”
The lights stayed on at the Capitol.
Government carried on.
That was the lesson of five decades ago: People — revered and reviled, weak and powerful — come and go. Strong institutions endure.
America remained on course in the midst of that tragedy at Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas.
Nov. 22, 1963, teaches us that no political figure is indispensable in this country. No one person carries the nation. And it was no time for partisan politics.
That lesson needs to be borne in mind today.
What kept us on course in ’63 was respect for law and a reliance on a regular order that requires abiding by established rules and procedures, starting with the Constitution.
If ever there were a time when political encroachment or power grabs by the opposition could have developed, it was following the sudden death of a president. That did not happen.
In retrospect, we witnessed the fulfillment of George Washington’s wish for America during that sorrow-filled weekend 51 years ago. The country remained on a path which “gain[ed] time to our country to settle and mature its yet recent institutions, and to progress without interruption to that degree of strength and consistency which is necessary to give it, humanly speaking, the command of its own fortunes.”
And today? What of today’s capital? “Government shutdown,” “legacy of lawlessness,” “obstructionism,” “gridlock,” “impeachment”?
W.B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” comes to mind:
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; . . .
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
By: Colbert I. King, Opinion Pages, The Washington Post, November 22, 2014
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