When The War on Fox News broke out, I was quick to point out my skepticism that it would amount to anything; the refusal to do interviews with Fox folks, the criticisms from Robert Gibbs and Anita Dunn, White House Communications Director, seemed restatements of the obvious, and not designed to change anything. As I said then:
I find myself less than thrilled with the Obama folks, not because I
think they're tilting at a losing windmill... but because they don't,
really, have any interest in trying to change the status quo. Making
Fox News the enemy suits their political agenda; "exposing" Fox as
conservative (really? can you expose something so nakedly obvious?) is
easy headlines... but no real payoff. Fox gets to be just what it is,
the Obama folks get an easy scapegoat... and we get less and less
served by good news outlets.
... And, well, the war is over. Anita Dunn "resigned" her post as Communications Director, and the next day, President Obama was announced to be having a sit down interview with Major Garrett. The War is Over. Let 1000 flowers bloom.
Or something. Garrett's not going to be the issue - he's another example of what passes for reporting at Fox (and a good illustration, really, that most TV news reporters are neither that memorable nor exceptionally great at reporting), and he's really only a symptom of the larger problem where hard news takes a backseat to what is mostly the televised version of talk radio; he'll get the tape that's eventually played over and over on O'Reilly and Hannity while they cherry pick some non-issue to make hay over... and the cycle continues.
Like I said, you'd need a clearer definition of what you're fighting for, and what you's like to see change, in order to make a "War on Fox" amount to something; and that was never there. And the snort of derision I have over throwing Dunn out to win favor with Murdoch and Co isnot one of surprise or anger. It's just the familiar, cynical feeling that this was what we were bound to get all along. And the thing I want - better, more informative news - is just a pipe dream, never to be seen again.
As much as I find the Obama Administration's kerfuffle with Fox News to be reasonably diverting, I'm not sure there's a lot to see here: I've said before (and long ago) what I think of Fox, and it's basically the same complaint of dressing up opinion and commentary as news. But knowing that - and even as the Administration has, deciding to challenge it - I'm not sure anyone's answered the "what now" question.
Because it's not, really, that Fox is dominated by opinion journalism; it's that they've succeeded with it, and that success is warping the entire field of 24 hour news. Say what (nice things, I suppose) you will about Rachel Maddow... that's not news, either. And generally, Keith Olbermann isn't much more. MSNBC, which has been the favorite "what about them" excuse of conservatives trying to defend Fox, has been playing catch up for years with the more successful operations at CNN and Fox, and they've decided, clearly, when you can't beat it... join them. Let the shouting commence.
And it seems fair to observe, too, at least no one is pretending that Fox is brilliantly objective as a news organization. It's a measure of the playing field we now work on that no one, no one sane anyway, can essentially deny that Fox is where conservatives get information, because, clearly, it tells the stories in ways that reflect conservative views and ideals. As I always try to remind people at times like this, Fox has nt shown an ability to break hard news; it's reporting coverage is generally thin, and its reporters rarely reflect great skills at getting the substance of a story... but they're great for finding opinions about the news of the day.
I think the problem here is much the problem we're dealing with in talking about healthcare: if the profit motive is going to be our bottom line, if you have to have good ratings and better ad sales to be viable... then Fox is right; you do the things that get ratings. And you get ratings with controversy, drama, and a sense of conflict. You do not get ratings armed with facts, figures, and often depressing information about conditions in places that may not, really, have a good outcome anywhere in the near future. Look! A silver balloon! If we can't let news be unprofitable, if we can't be less concerned with ad sales and more concerned with information... then, no, we're not going to get good news coverage. We will get shouting, and name calling, and Chris Matthews and Sean Hannity. And blaming Fox, or calling them the "worst example" doesn't change the bigger problem - what they exemplify... is what's working.
And so, yet again, I find myself less than thrilled with the Obama folks, not because I think they're tilting at a losing windmill... but because they don't, really, have any interest in trying to change the status quo. Making Fox News the enemy suits their political agenda; "exposing" Fox as conservative (really? can you expose something so nakedly obvious?) is easy headlines... but no real payoff. Fox gets to be just what it is, the Obama folks get an easy scapegoat... and we get less and less served by good news outlets. Who's losing here? And who, really, is being outfoxed?
One of my favorite things in the New Yorkers I read as a child growing up in Maryland were the little squibs at the end of long articles. They would feature misprints, examples of interesting malapropisms, typos that made a sentence completely unitintentiionally hilarious, things that newspapers miss in the rush to get the paper out the door.
That doesn't happen so much now - I blame Tina Brown - but my own sense of subversive humor gets re-kindled, now and again, while perusing the paper and tripping over an unintentionally hilarious or revealing moment. Like, for instance, yesterday's bizarre editorial on 3-D movies in the New York Times, which ends:
The actual world doesn’t have to create the illusion of its
three-dimensionality. Its depth is so pervasive that we forget to
notice it. We register it with a kind of 3-D equanimity, taking in
everything as part of the natural field of view. There’s an unexpected
serenity, a calmness, in how we see.
That was the pleasure of
walking up Broadway from the theater. When a man looking for spare
change said “Hey, bub!” his face didn’t leap into the foreground, nor
did we suddenly see ourselves walking toward him from his point of
view. The light mist that was falling didn’t hang like the northern
lights between us.
It was a pleasure to take 3-D for granted
and marvel, for a few blocks at least, at the subtlety of the special
effects inherent in ordinary perception.
... missing from that last sentence? "Then we told the bum to stop bothering us, got in a cab, and headed back to the Upper East Side." Isn't New York glorious?
Since I offered a take on Glenn Beck, I feel like I should keep charting his comet-like flight across the news celebrity sky. The clip below - via Ezra Klein - is from an interview Beck did with Katie Couric (sorry about the sound), and Couric, as she does, manages to flummox Beck with the obvious... when he said "Obama hates 'white culture'"... what did he mean by "white culture"?
You can go at this in a number of ways, especially given that Beck, for all his bluster, can't seem to muster the nerve to speak his mind (which, I think, goes back to just how his "mad as hell" number is a bit of a put-on). But I think there's two key points: a) what Beck won't say, which would likely be catnip to the "race" discussion we're currently mostly not having, and b) that Beck succumbs, as many conservatives do, to a kind of cold disdain when questioned by the perceived "MSM" keyholders of the"liberal media."
The first point goes to the meaning of "white culture" which is really very meaningless but is meant to reach disaffected, mostly working class whites as some kind of sop about "Middle America" that's really very condescending: it's meant to denigrate Obama for not just being black, but being part of the educated elite (Ta-Nehisi has done some great work explaining the fear of the black middle class)... but at the same time it's "they're making fun of you for liking Nascar and shopping at Wal-Mart"... whereas Beck just thinks they can be easily exploited for ratings and commercial success. Cynicism abounds.
But the second point is what I find really striking in this clip: it's not that Beck succeeds at - what I'm pretty sure he thinks is meant to come off as "I treat you with the respect I never get from people like you" but can't really hide the thinly veiled contempt. He talks to Couric as if she were a child, as if "this should be obvious" but she won't hand him any sense of her thinking. Sarah Palin did this - somewhat more effectively - as well, though her own chipper demeanor saved her from seeming cold. Michelle Malkin or Ann Coulter, by contrast, never can hide their disdain or their disrespect. And being contemptuous, while displaying a convenient faux politesse, is the current vogue in conservative media when dealing with their supposed enemy; I suppose there's no real alternative... but the prim "I'd give you the what-for, but I'm too classy for that" shtick is getting old... and it helps if you can get that across, better, without sneering at the same time.
I have my issues with Couric, though I think, overall, she's turned out to actually be better than one would have feared as anchor... partly because she's developed into knowing her actual strengths - like her solid ability to interview and follow up - and not her supposed ones that werer never entirely real (like the forced cheeriness and let's all be gals together bonhomie that was never as good as her Today backers would gush). Couric prepares, she's serious, and she's respectful without being mean. That conservatives can't sense the difference, I think, is why the media/PR sell they attempt tends to backfire so badly: until you either treat Couric, and her cohorts, with actuial respect as an equal - or simply let rip with the undiluted vitriol you save for blogs and Fox news appearances - you're lying. As Back is doing here... and oh, the lies...
It's fun to talk about now nutty the Glenn Beck show is.
It's less funny - indeed, it's almost painful - to watch it.
If you're home at 5 - a time slot, one might recall, where Fox parked nearly as nutty John Gibson - you can try watching Beck; honestly, I get through about 7 minutes, tops before I just have to stop. People complain about Rush Limbaugh being toxic... but listening to Limbaugh's show is annoying mainly for the long and trying commercial breaks. Limbaugh himself? Disagreeable... but not nuts.
Beck's been bouncing around cable and radio for years, taken semi-seriously, largely dismissed as frings, but that changed when Fox made the decision to put him into the evening lead in slot (in a world where we accept that Neil Cavuto's lamer effort at 4 is ostensibly meant to be a Wall Street, business style wrap up of financial news). Since his arrival live at 5, Beck's sucked the oxygen out of taking much of cable news - and certainly most of Fox now - as a serious, respectable medium.
And to think, all he needed to do it was to make the fantasy of Network into reality.
I always thought there were two Dominick Dunnes - one was a really heroic, principled, angry defender of the voiceless, especially women, killed in acts of brutality and violence. Martha Moxley. Nicole Brown Simpson. His daughter, Dominique. When he wrote about their cases, the injustices done to them, the protections afforded to men, especially men of wealth and power and celebrity, it was bracing.
The other Dominick Dunne seemed to be a starfucker of the worst order.
To read "Dominick Dunne's Diary" in Vanity Affair was to be awash in drivel. The name dropping was sycophantic, compulsive and bordered on tasteless. The insights were minor, the gossip, on nearly every level, banal. Even the sort of breathless wonder of "who will he mention next? Porfirio Rubirosa? Catherine Deneuve?" became rather a dull exercise of recitation of the Palm Beach/Monte Carlo/Bel Air circuit he seemed so overly impressed with, and so eager to please, if also to tease.
Dunne's story was a fascinating story of reverse accomplishments - his real celebrity prominence, the real culmination of his career, came very late. He took to writing late, made a success of it late. He is not a bad suggestion of the possibility of ultimate reinvention - you could, really, figure out how to make something of your life even at 60, or later.
Aside from eventually abandoning reading his column - the rewards of the occasional insight, or some private moment about Elizabeth Taylor, came at the price of too many of my brain cells - I was always struck by his novels, not necessariuly in a good way. When I was in college, getting home was a long enough slog that I tended to buy diverting trash to read along the way. That's how I wound up devouring The Two Mrs. Grenvilles. And because I loved trashy books adapted into trashy minseries, I watched far more of An Inconvenient Woman (starring Rebecca DeMornay and Jill Eikenberry) than one should ever have.
In both cases, I was struck again, by Dunne's relentless crusade against injustice, and his derivative attention to gossipy drivel. That's especially true of The Grenvilles, because it is basically an attempt to do, in a downmarket way, what Truman Capote always seemed to intend with Answered Prayers. And he did it by exploiting the story of Ann Woodward, who killed herself when a thinly veiled version of how she might have murdered her husband became part of La Cote Basque 1965. In one sense, it's a brilliant conceit: Woodward's story was never fully examined, and using a Capote-esque approach was a genius touch. But the result is grim: Dunne doesn't so much blow old WASP class notions as revel in them, and he paints his Ann Woodward - Ann Grenville - as a grasping embarrassment, whose ostracization by high society was entirely deserved.
Dunne's upper class instincts never really wavered; and really, his takedowns of the powerful - like OJ Simpson, and Michael Skakel - were of a piece with his overall attention to class; his contempt was often laced with judgment for them not meeting the class expectations of wealth and taste of which he seemed so enamored. His dissections of those old preppy notions of class were initially revelatory because few in his set really open up publicly about them. Inherent in those class conventions though is the kind of society that evaporated in the sixties and seventies - rigid notions of the "right people" (who, it should be noted, also rejected Dunne in middle age) which exclude minorities, disdain strivers, and relegate women to roles as decorative objects.
Out of that decidedly mixed bag of the two Dunnes, perhaps it's perfect irony that Dunne in death (he died yesterday) will be overshadowed by the family he disdained so much. I'm sure Dunne could have gotten a novel out of it. Or at least a column. And, you know... I'd have liked to read it.
Thanks to Twitter, I am getting more exposure to the Media Matters blog, and its rolling criticism of right wing media outlets. Maybe it's going to my head... but it at least got me re-started on blogging about healthcare issues.
I haven't said much, lately, because there's not much to say; we are all waiting for actual details of an actual plan that Congress may or may not be able to see through to a vote, and many discussions, which seem to be about parts of such a proposal... are really mostly speculative, based on conjecture, rumors, and extrapolations. I'd rather we admit we don't know what we don't know.
Or better, I wish we were using this moment to better educate the public on health care issues. I've been trying, in my limited way, to do some of this, guest posting over at Red's Poverty blog at Change.org on issues around Medicaid. It's a small contribution, but I'm amazed about how little else there (still) is - outside of a recent piece by Karen Tumulty in Time on her brother's medical insurance issues (which was also somewhat problematic in terms of clearly expressing what "cost shifting" means in a way people can understand), few pieces of real journalism on healthcare tend to show up.
Into that breach steps... Sean Hannity, joining a chorus of conservative media types railing against a plan for "socialized" medicine which doesn't exist. Media Matters clipped an exchange between Hannity and a British expert (though who he is and why he's expert... I'm not clear), making the point that Hannity is attacking a straw man: whatever system we plan to enact this year... it can't remotely be like the British system of National Health.
Hannity, however, raises another issue that deserves some explaining, scaring people yet again with the idea of "government beaurocrats" who will determine which drugs and procedures you, ordinary consumer, will have access to. This bogeyman has been a running theme of right wing opposition, fueled in part by a provision in the Stimulus Bill to establish a Federal Advisory Board on healthcare that would help to evaluate good practice and idnetify areas for savings and reducing costs. This, as I mentioned a while back, was part of Tom Dachle's ideas about trying to institute some federal pressure on insurers to control costs of healhcare. I also have said, repeatedly, that I think the idea is problematic... not for Hannity's reasoning, but because the problems we have with controlling costs aren't solved by a panel, however well meaning; and that a panel composed primarily of doctors will probably pick practice enhancements that are helpful to their colleagues, and not really challenge the status quo in healthcare.
But that's not why Hannity's so wrong about these "faceless beaurocrats"; what Hannity, and other conservatives, seem to either not know or simply igore is that these decisions - about who gets a procedure, or a drug, or other service - are being made now, every day, by insurance companies and hospitals. That, ironically, is one thing Michael Moore got right in Sicko - that Managed Care is deciding, often painfully and to the detriment of individuals, whether to pay for certain types of care. This is, though, a necessary function - it's called "rationing," and it is the practical outgrowth of supply and demand. We can't do everything we'd like, help everyone who needs help... we have to make decisions; we have to draw lines.
Rationing of care, which is how healthcare operates, means we don't do an experimental cancer treatment with only single digit percentages of success on a terminal patient with metastastizing tumors. We don't, sometimes, do a hip replacement on an elderly patient who is unlikely to leave the hospital ever again. These are the hard choices. They involve things like facing death, or disability or a life less comfortable. We don't like them; and Hannity benefits from our discomfort by suggesting that it's shocking that somehow, someday, we might have to make these "horrible choices"... when, in fact, we already do.
The reason you want healthcare reform, when it comes to rationing, is that we ration care now, in the US, in the worst way imaginable: we don't deny services in a way that has to do with best care for the right people... too often we do it based on economics, based on who can pay, and who can afford it. This means, yes, we deny necessary care to people who need it but can't pay for it... but it also means we allow wasteful, needless services to people who can. Both contribute to the problem of our out of control healthcare costs. Hannity may be concerned about a system like NICE in the UK, and certainly, it has flaws... all systems of rationing do. And probably, yes, what we want is an independent board of review that makes science and research a priority, not dollars and cents (or at least, not dollars over science, caring, and good sense); but we need to ask these questions. We need to try. And we need to do more to explain these choices to people... or we are surely letting a scaremonger/puppetmaster like Hannity pull the strings without any opposite pull.
MIDDAY UPDATE: one that I missed over my birthday week is this interesting discussion about the claims and actual measurement of the audience for Rush Limbaugh. It's one of those "the closer you look, the fuzzier it gets," but it's a good pointed reminder to take notions of the "power of right wing radio" with some serious grains of salt. (PS, this is also a nice moment to plug the twitter feed from Media Matters, which helped lead me to the first article.)
And then (via one of my new Twitter feeds, Karl in Austin, TX) there's the headsmacking shock - and seriously screwed up implications - of the (Republican) member of the Texas House (and on the Health Committee!) saying... "What's Medicaid?"
A less screaming - but just as pointed - wake up call comes (via Ezra) from the Washington Monthly in this interesting article: when conservatives get cultural criticism wrong, how can they expect anyone to listen to them criticize the culture?
And in the Hollywood minute - you do realize that "Right Round" is about getting head, right? And that "If You Seek Amy" is really dirty too... right?
For a liberal, it's safe to say that the usual Rush Limbaugh post kind of writes itself.
(However, this post has taken a lot of hours... and I have to rush out the door; it's going to be a good 8-10 hours before this includes links. My apologies... Please check back if you want to see links, late this evening or tomorrow.)
I've been trying to think of a way to write a something other than traditional post on Rush, in part because I think the easy target he makes misses a lot of things lefties need to face: not the least of which is that for many, Rush Limbaugh is meant to be taken seriously for what he says, and the views he espouses.
And I think we should. Take it seriously, I mean.
Last Friday, Rush appeared as the final speaker at CPAC - the annual convention of conservatives which is meant to harness "political action", but mostly amounts to this or that conservative firebrand making waves by saying something meant to stir up liberal apostasy. Limbaugh's speech was noteworthy partly because it generated a lot of audience energy, which few speakers had been able to do all week; but also because it clocked in at about 4 times its originally intended length (scheduled for 20 minutes, Limbaugh spoke for over an hour).
Call me crazy, but a man who speaks publicly for a living somehow ought to be better able to keep a 20 minute speech tighter and more focused.
Limbaugh's rambling diatribe, though, ought to be taken seriously. In laying out his "conservative agenda," Limbaugh made it clear that he has no intention of backing down from a fight, be it a fight within the Republican circles, or the fight he has historically stoked with the group he defines as "the Left." Both fights are interesting and relevant; but it's the fighting spirit that in itself is most revealing of why Limbaugh has the power he has... and why it probably doesn't matter much, ultimately.
One momentous occasion this week passed with only a mild flutter... Bill Kristol was formally removed from the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. The Times, in it's traditional (though not so common lately) understated way made a one line note of it: "This is William Kristol's last column."
That, of course, set up cries of joy on the lefty blogs, which had been gunning for Kristol since his hiring. Indeed, in recent weeks, many had speculated that Kristol was getting dropped, as there had been no inidcation that his one year contract was renewed. Some of the mutterings suggested that Kristol's hiring was basically a sop to the Bush Administration and others on the right to seem "fair and balanced" in the contentous election season. But now, with the election settled and the, er, forces of all that is right and good in control... who needs a conservative columnist?
Well, in the face of what will surely be howls, let me say: I think the Times needs a conservative columnist. And they need to get a replacement soon.
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