Panderlust

In yesterday’s Sunday Times, Frank Rich makes a point we were trying to make ourselves a few weeks ago.
In the aftermath of the election, USA Today had published a story that
suggested Big, Bad, Liberal Media was scratching its collective head,
wondering where it had gone so terribly wrong in understanding the
country–and more to the point, underestimating the electoral muscle of
the anti-intellectual, conservative, white male, NASCAR masses. In
fact, even Frank Rich’s boss, Bill Keller, the executive editor of The
Times, was described in that article as being somewhat flummoxed–so
flummoxed in fact, that the best idea he could come up with was to
reopen the Times shuttered Kansas City bureau.

Yesterday, Rich
looked at the problem as it applies to network TV news, what with the
recent retirements of Rather and Brokaw, and the ascendency of Brian
Williams. He suggests that network news is desperate to win the hearts
of red America, so desperate that they are making a point of decamping
to Toledo and Dubuque and Denver. NBC news is going to great lengths to
establish the bona fides of Williams–hey, he’s a part-owner of a
go-cart track! He drinks Budweiser! He showers AFTER work. (Well, no
maybe not that. But hey, he’s got a mitten loofa too, just like
O’Reilly! Wait, that’s kinda faggy and liberal, innit?) Why would they
do that? Is it because they seriously believe there is news happening
out there that they are ignoring because of their bi-coastal myopia?
What Rich said better than we could ever hope to say was this: They are
chasing an audience, not a news story. And that is a real sign of
declension, and a cause for worry.

Salient, fact-checking
moment: Why chase after Fox News viewers who are rabidly partisan and
reality-challenged, and in any case, are far outnumbered by network
viewers? The problem is perceptions and myths. As Louis Menand makes
very clear in his wonderful story in last week’s New Yorker, the
already unassailable “take-away” from election 2004 was the “values
fallout.” There was no values fallout. Menand points out that this was
strictly a misreading of exit poll numbers with no clear consensus on
why people voted in any particular way. (This is probably, like
everything else, the fault of Democrats. Republicans could care less
why they won–the less said about that the better, as far as they’re
concerned.)

The key to this little conundrum is the very real
frustration that great media organizations like the Times and the New
Yorker and almost any other thoughtful organ of print journalism are
feeling. You can print the facts, the truth, the most compelling sorts
of historiography–but you can’t make that horse drink the water.

We
had the same sinking feeling after reading Rich’s essay that we had
reading all those terrific pre-election presidential endorsements–that
there isn’t one person in the country who’d read it and have his mind
changed. In these fractious times, even the Times is preaching to a
choir. One can certainly forgive them for trying to either expand the
choir a bit, or take their show on the road. (Incidentally,interesting article today covering the same territory with NPR, but with a racial facet;
Tavis Smiley wonders how to get more blacks to listen to public radio.
How is this different from trying to get more conservatives to read the
New York Times? Discuss…)

To have a small but vocal crowd of
knownothings grow into a hateful GOP monopoly of government that has,
in no small way, been underwritten by a deliberate campaign of
falsifying reality and pre-emptive accusations of “liberal bias”– this
has diminished the power of the entire industry of journalism. Facts
are not partisan, but many people don’t seem to believe that anymore.
We guess you just feel the pinch more at the top, where you’re
accustomed to the respect afforded the “paper of record.” When it
develops that the news is not the news, but an exercise in servicing an
audience, you get– well, modern TV news.—The Editor in Cheese