Your Humble Blogger is, you know, and old left-winger and news junkie, and back in the day, I used to watch The McLaughlin Group. When I was 22 or so, it seemed like I was finding stuff out by watching; it became clear after a few years that the contestants had (or at least revealed) almost nothing that I didn’t already know. So I stopped watching. That was 1992 or 1993, I guess; the argument-clinic format had just started to get widespread. The show and its regulars have quite a bit to answer for, when you think about it, and my favorite of the regulars, Jack W. Germond, is answering for it in Fat Man Fed Up: Now American Politics Went Bad and other books. Not that he really accepts much of the blame, but then I’m afraid he kept up his self-image as a newspaperman who was on TV every now and then, rather than as a hugely influential contributor to modern TV news analysis.
Mr. Germond, of course, was the house liberal, sitting across from Morton Kondracke, the crazy Zionist demo-hawk, next to Freddy “The Beetle” Barnes, and carry-corner from Eleanor from Newsweek whose last name I’ve forgotten and whose job was to accept the abuse of Mssrs Barnes, Kondracke and McLaughlin. Mr. Germond’s specialty was to sit quietly for much of the conversation, eventually forcing Mr. McLaughlin to address him directly, at which point he would make a wry and cynical comment about the absurdity of the entire conversation. I am biased, since his politics were clearly the closest to my own of the gang, but I must say it’s hard to imagine anybody watching who wouldn’t have thought that the three guests and the host were horrifically ignorant of the actual world compared to the fat man laughing at them.
His latest book is good, but frustrating. Any book about what went wrong in American politics is bound to be frustrating at this point. He identifies, more or less, the cycle into which we have spun. Television news trivializes politics to the point where people stop paying attention to the substance, which makes it easier for politicians to be bad and without substance, which makes television trivialize the whole thing, which turns off the electorate, which gives us worse politicians, worse news, worse voters, worse politicians, etc., etc. I think he is right, but that’s not terribly helpful. He knows it isn’t helpful, but it’s what he sees.
The thing about Madisonian representative democracy is that politicians are held accountable to the electorate. If the electorate doesn’t choose to hold them accountable, and, oh, for instance, demonstrates a willingness to reelect a corrupt and incompetent administration, well, then, there is nothing stopping the politicians from being as bad as they want to be. If the electorate becomes convinced that there isn’t any different between candidates with radically different worldviews, policy programs, priorities and advisors, then the system collapses. How would a voter find out those differences? Well, it isn’t actually terribly difficult, but then one would have to be motivated. If the press is implying that the candidates are all corrupt and incompetent, or even just telling you that it is terribly hard to distinguish differences between the candidates, then why would you bother? And if you aren’t going to bother, why should the candidates? And if neither the voters nor the candidates are going to bother, why should the press?
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
the problem is the same if the press is deferent – how in the world did people get the impression that dubya was concerned about global warming, for instance, if not from a combination of blatant misrepresentation alongside press deference about being true to his beliefs?