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.