One of my later pieces at Mooreslore involved the utter Cluelessness of the media, circa 1967.
In questioning Dr. Martin Luther King, Meet the Press host Lawrence Spivack went into a riff about how King had risen from poverty, concluding “As someone who came up from poverty yourself, why can’t more do what you’ve done?”
Problem was, Dr. King didn’t come up from poverty. His upbringing was solidly middle class. By the standards of his time and race, he was wealthy. His wife was wealthy, by the standards of that time and place.
Spivack’s show represented the establishment press of the time, the print media. In the wake of their non-performance during the 1960s, the print media lost most of its credibility to television. There were exceptions, but most papers pointedly ignored the reality of what was going on, and never recovered.
I think Cable TV is going through a similar period now.
In the last few months cable TV news has moved en masse from
cheerleading for the Bush Administration’s failed policies to actively
ignoring reality. When Ken Lay was convicted last week, the story ran
for just a few hours. When the Capitol was evacuated due to a mistake
on Friday, there was wall-to-wall coverage all day.
It’s not just Fox anymore. CNN has become a haven for racism. CNN
Headline News has now hired political hater Glenn Beck to run alongside
Gulag-lover Nancy Grace. There are exceptions (Keith Olbermann) but
they are just that, exceptions, and if Olbermann were not the most
talented writer on TV today bar none, his exception could never exist. (This is obvious any time he takes a day off. The best guest-host is actor-comedian Brian Unger.)
How is it that polls can show people are 2-1 against this Adminstration
yet press coverage runs 2-1 the other way, with reporters actively
going after an ex-President’s sex life while ignoring active threats of
imprisonment from the Attorney General?
The answer: excess.
A time of excess means that nearly everyone in Washington is steeped in
the ways of the dying Thesis. In this case, it’s the Nixon thesis, with
Reagan’s face on it, pushed by President Bush. The exact same thing
happened 40 years ago, when the Roosevelt thesis (with Truman’s face on
it), was collapsing under Lyndon Johnson.
Back then the print media refused to take delivery of reality and was
replaced by TV as America’s medium of choice. This time TV
is being replaced by the Internet.
There is no other explanation. Every single survey shows this
Administration and its party is being rejected by growing numbers of
people, by the overwhelming majority. Yet everyone on TV acts as though this political Thesis is as
solid as a rock, needing only a tweak or a shout or another romp
through Clinton’s underwear drawer to put things "right."
But they won’t be put right. And at this point it’s not just the
Republican Party that is under threat, but TV news. It’s losing its credibility. It’s drowning. Yet it doesn’t even know it.
