Dumbing Down Infinitely


Matt Taibbi gets it:

The thing that people should be concerned about isn't that the news networks are choosing to cover politics like a football game. It's the idea that both televised football games and televised politics might represent some idealized form of commercial television drama that both sports and politics evolved in the direction of organically, under the constant financial pressure brought to bear by TV advertisers. Both politics and sports turned into this shit because this format happens to sell the most Cheerios, regardless of what the content is. If you work backward from that premise, and start thinking about what the consequences of that phenomenon might actually be, your head can easily explode.

[checking to see if my head is still attached to my neck...ok, good]...

Yes. I've had the same thought myself...I suppose you could go back to JFK to find the first instances of deliberate media (sorry, I meant "television") "manipulation," if you want to call it that...or to "The New Dick" Nixon...but I think it was during the Reagan administration when there was sort of a rebound: Reagan, the consummate second-rate actor, was the perfect image for an office that had devolved into little more than the original "reality TV." Hell, what did it matter that he--or, his lineal descendent, Shrub W. Shrub--more often than not uttered more or less utterly incoherent gibberish when not reading a teleprompter? Reagan, Shrub, Abu Ghraib, the War in Iraq, etc., in terms of TV itself, is mere programming---filler between the ads.

Or at least that was the case when I did a bit of work for, ahem, public TV in Wisconsin: if we went off the air during the show, it was no big deal (at least when it wasn't during migraine headache time pledge drives). However, "grantor" spots, or the "non" ads that ran between shows (just like ads on commercial TV, because, well, they WERE ads) HAD to run, or at least be listed on discrepency reports so we could eventually add "make goods" at appropriate times.

But, I digress...my point is simply to reiterate Taibbi's--when something is reduced to the level of a TV show, then you can count on the aesthetics of television to become the defining element of whatever it was that's been so reduced. I guess that's kind of a roundabout way of saying that just as Hee Haw became at one point the most widely syndicated show on the idiot box, so too did a classic non-entity (albeit with superb connections...h/t Hullabaloo) become the "leader of the free world."

Unfortunately, though, reality ISN'T a TV show--and no, we can't change the channel, or even wait for the show to get cancelled (which, considering how low the approval ratings are, would've happened quite some time ago)...