Television's Anti-politics
Gitlin, Todd
Democratic politics in the world's oldest democracy is losing popular appeal. Public cynicism about what government, or politics, can accomplish is rampant. American voting turnout has been...
...This idea has been promoted by the political scientist James Fishkin, and was on the brink of adoption by American public television during the 1992 campaign...
...One sign of how thoroughly television has been assimilated, even among the more literate, is that it has become a sign of inverse snobbery to proclaim affection for a pet series...
...All in all, the sensibilities that television cultivates are inimical to people's engagement in the activities of a political life...
...The claim is that by bringing quasipublic links into the private space of the home and the office, the ensemble of these relations—what the writer Howard Rheingold has called "virtual community"—enables people to move their concerns into public life with an unprecedented vigor and intensity...
...Critics of various persuasions accused the news media— especially television—first, in the Reagan years, of permitting the White House's smooth-running public relations apparatus to command the national agenda...
...it is no surprise that this fascination with entertainment values has drawn the once more austere news operation in its wake...
...It is argued that the "deliberative opinion poll" and other links between polls and the media can make politicians more responsive to public sentiment...
...They invite one to think of oneself as a consumer—or, if one is poor or estranged, an enrage—but not as a citizen...
...Indeed, electronic linkages have lubricated the operations of many grass-roots groups...
...Limbaugh's rightwing populism focuses anger on government bureaucrats, intellectuals, feminists, and liberals...
...Studio audiences are joined by phone callers...
...The background is, of course, the widespread feeling that social problems are intractable unless, perhaps, extreme measures are taken...
...This mechanism is therefore not free of demagogy...
...First, station owners tend to be Republicans...
...In other words, five percent of Americans can get onto the computer "superhighway...
...Most of the talk show talk is unfocused anger, but some has a practical import...
...At this writing, the substitute show is left-of-center...
...A story begins with credits...
...Perot's purchase of tremendous blocks of network time for long lectures conveying his views is obviously incapable of emulation by anyone but the super-wealthy...
...A few minutes of story take place...
...It is somewhat like calling a family a system of communication...
...The main exceptions: international reports...
...A public sphere or separate public sphericules...
...graduate students who wish to chat, or procrastinate, with like-minded specialists...
...Style will frequently be fantastic, incorrect, overburdened, and loose, almost always vehement and bold...
...Without doubt, this five percent includes scholars who wish to collaborate across the oceans...
...Yet this conclusion seems to fly in the face of predictions that television's homogenizing days are waning...
...Consider the cancellation by ABC of Jim Hightower's show, syndicated to some 150 stations, although not in the largest markets, after Hightower started ragging on Disney's purchase of the network—"I work for a rodent...
...By bridging the physical gulf between nations, they contribute to the growth of cosmopolitanism— the understanding that one lives in a globally interconnected world...
...At present, about one-quarter of American homes have personal computers...
...Having admitted any transgression, he or she seems guilty of bad character...
...The equivalent process operates in our thinking (and feeling) about politics...
...The story is interrupted for commercials—probably more than one per commercial break...
...occasional investigative reports...
...Since the segments and their sounds are juxtaposed, not simultaneous, what results may be experienced as an extended "horizontal" cacophony...
...The mass media are charged with casting such discredit upon elected officials as to raise public cynicism to the boiling point and to make it difficult for any government to govern...
...Glibness, in fact, is the tribute formula pays to sophistication...
...What isn't clear is that the proliferation of publics contributes to the creation of a public—an active democratic encounter of citizens who reach across their differences to establish a common agenda of concern and to debate rival approaches...
...Since 1992, some news organizations have attempted to intervene directly in the agenda-setting process during campaigns...
...The established media quickly became obsessed with these charges on the ground that once they had been made public, even by disreputable media, the charges were "in the public domain" and therefore deserved to be taken seriously...
...And so on...
...Routine CNN broadcasts have the standard 80 • DISSENT Television's Anti-Politics forms to which the older networks have accustomed us—the parachuting reporter, the shallow reportorial stand-up, the posture of balance, the truncated debate, the presentation of the world in snippets, the clutter of sound bites...
...But television not only flows, its flow is both rapid and interrupted...
...These are far from the only criticisms to be leveled at news coverage of political life...
...Experts are called in to bid for the allegiance of the group...
...The television talk show is also available as a non-party conduit for political mobilization...
...What is accentuated by Court TV, and related crime obsessions, is theAmerican tendency to treat reality as a soap opera...
...The impact of each one may be negligible, but not the impact of the totality...
...Most of these are local, many have fundamentalist Protestant affiliations, and some have been at work for decades, but one of the new developments is that several now have national hookups, of which the main one in public appeal is Rush Limbaugh's, available for three hours every day (with an additional half-hour television program in much of the country...
...The American right accuses the news (and entertainment) media of disrespect for "family values" and an excess of sympathy for multiculturalism...
...Women are concentrated in the audience for television talk...
...C-SPAN, CNN, Court TV...
...The Republicans developed the "Contract With America" in the same manner...
...C-SPAN, financed by the commercial cable companies, presents the daily deliberations of the two houses of Congress, along with campaign events, academic conferences, book interviews, and so on...
...extensive coverage of press conferences and congressional hearings...
...Commercials don't simply announce the wonders of goods and the lives they promise, they also bring energy and novelty—news of what passes for fun, freedom, and security these days...
...The ideals and sins it depicts are those of America's formulaic modernity...
...Soon CBS's prestige news "magazine" 60 Minutes was airing the Clintons' response to the charges, and CNN was carrying Gennifer Flowers's press conference WINTER • 1996 • 77 Television's Anti-Politics live...
...In one commercial of the late 1980s, a man in a white coat looks you in the eye and says, "I'm not an doctor, but I play one on TV...
...Now, obviously, rapidity and interruption are not brand-new features of Western civilization...
...This is even true in the San Francisco Bay Area, the most liberal metropolitan area in the country...
...The audience is expected to recognize him as a soap opera actor...
...None of these styles contribute to the reflectiveness or the passions of political life, Instead, they contribute to a corrosive cynicism...
...Most people watch swathes of television—they watch television, not discrete narrative units...
...Such symbolic crusades against government privilege are of little material consequence, and display a Republican bias—they are the perfect issues for talk show hosts and their constituencies...
...There are more commercials, more announcements...
...But the point I argued above with respect to the coverage of political activity also holds for the culture as a whole...
...These are not all on the left by any means: a Rush Limbaugh fan places a summary of the daily Limbaugh conversation on the Internet, and racist groups recruit members there as well...
...It is true that there are now thousands of worldwide linkages among citizen groups organized by political affinity...
...Without doubt, radio talk shows provide outlets—principally for the angry and prejudiced, whose vulgarity they legitimize...
...What is his influence...
...It is argued that telephone technology permits the financing of new political campaigns...
...The abdication of news judgment to the "low-end" press is one more development in the general elevation of celebrity chatter, with the concomitant expectation that politics shall be another branch of the unending entertainment spectacle...
...The entire process is publicly televised, giving the designated citizens a chance to affect each others' views, in the spirit of full-blooded democratic discourse, and giving the rest of the electorate a chance to observe...
...But such a method is most compelling when the candidate is a billionaire to start with...
...Previewed the sales pitch...
...Certainly, popular disgust at the news media's obsession with scandal has pushed the media to an unusual search for self-reform...
...According to one survey, 70 percent of the hosts, and the callers they attract, occupy positions considerably to the right of American public opinion...
...As Mark Crispin Miller has memorably observed, the knowing attitude is so widespread and automatic, it deserves to be called "the hipness unto death...
...A Cornucopian Culture...
...To some degree, the new communication forms expedite the development of what Charles Nathanson has called, perhaps too optimistically, an international civil society...
...We saw this cycle at work with respect to the reporting of the Clintons' "Whitewater" and other scandalous investments, along with the charge that President Clinton was guilty of sexual harassment...
...Citizens were polled for their sense of the important questions that the candidates should address in the party primaries...
...Pride in the national cornucopia will become a cornerstone of orthodox American identity in the next century...
...Television is so thoroughly accepted that, however difficult it may be to assess its effects, the effort must still be made...
...He has come to sell the right one...
...It can be argued that it is only as soap opera that Americans are willing to consider issues like sexual harassment (the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings) and marital violence (the Simpson case...
...The high-mindedness of the LincolnDouglas debates of 1860 was exceptional...
...Its common currency consists of slogans and mockery...
...Competition leads not to variety but to uniformity...
...The same is largely true of the coverage of politicians in office...
...and whether venality or politics was WINTER • 1996 • 79 Television's Anti-Politics the prime cause is known only to the network's bookkeepers...
...For one thing, its forms of news coverage are largely conventional...
...His new employer proceeded to fire him six weeks later for calling gays "sick" and "pathetic...
...The media themselves have amplified the observation, first made by academics, that the "discourse" of politics has been crippled by the compression of speeches into ten-second "sound bites," rendering serious debate of public issues impossible...
...The one continuity is discontinuity...
...But knowingness is not simply access to knowledge...
...gay figures pass across the evening news without scandal...
...Subsequently it has been used in England...
...In a few cases, talk show hosts have even coordinated their efforts and had direct political impact—the first successful case was a campaign to keep members of Congress from voting themselves a pay increase...
...Surely the new age looming before us is an age of wondrous variety—or so promoters of new channels have been assuring us since the early 1980s...
...Family therapists do so, but their descriptive power is not Tolstoy's...
...There are the faxes and electronic mail networks that linked dissident Chinese students with their opposite numbers in the United States during the democracy movement of 1989...
...They heighten a global ecological awareness just as, put to different uses, they expedite global flows of capital, finance, resources, and merchandise...
...The answers appeared in the newspaper and over the radio...
...It is argued that computer-telephone hookups— the Internet—nurture political community...
...At the same time, Americans are overwhelmed with imagery and information...
...Each segment, moreover, comes attended by a distinct bundle of sounds...
...The media's attempts at self-rectification may be attributed to good will...
...Thus "Coke is it...
...As in the early nineteenth century, when scurrilous charges against politicians were also the order of the day, the eruption of petty scandals has left candidates—and officials—with few good choices...
...That the Star and later, the syndicated television "magazine" sensation show A Current Affair paid for Gennifer Flowers's story (dollars in the estimated six figures) went barely noted...
...One consequence is popular crime panic and the lust for instant solutions—longer sentences, cancellation of parole for repeat offenders ("three strikes and you're out"), and so on...
...But one of the striking things about radio talk shows in general is how predictably they tilt toward the right...
...Agenda-setting through poll feedback...
...There are "Rush Rooms" at restaurants and bars around the country, where the faithful gather to listen to their hero in the company of co-believers...
...It overflows with emotion, particularly spleen and rancor...
...Among the many things Americans can feel knowing about will be the sheer array of channels available and the routine surrealism, the normal strangeness, of America's culture of artless juxtapositions—the standard national mall/ strip sequence of Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, Fish 'n' Chips, Burger King...
...The dramatic case in point was Ross Perot's use of the Larry King talk show on CNN to declare his candidacy...
...It is declared that radio and television talk shows have made it possible for citizens to widen the range of opinion publicly expressed...
...it is the demonstration that one hasn't been left behind, that one is hip, with it, cool...
...Thanks to the wonders of editing, no one on television is ever at a loss for words...
...or Nike's equally meaningless invitation to associate its shoes, which you can buy, with achievements of the athlete's body: "Just do it...
...The same technologies that have given capital unparalleled mobility also further movements that seek to limit the prerogatives of capital...
...Television talk shows...
...If they stand silent, they are accused of "stonewalling...
...Whether one endorses this view or a darker one, it is clear that television has filled a space left vacant by the demise of traditional authority...
...Therefore the latter starts with an advantage...
...He goes on to say that other people also think they can "play doctor" and as a result may take the wrong medicine...
...African-American stars have their talk-show billings...
...By far the more important reaction to the recent waves of media criticism comes, however, from outside the established media...
...Because the stories of television exist in sequence, their significance bleeds from one story into another...
...Responding to the charge that the press has given credence to deceptive political advertising, newspapers now routinely evaluate the truthfulness of political candidates' television commercials...
...The questions were put to the principal gubernatorial candidates...
...Situation comedies and morning shows are obsessed with this form of speech: the jokey comeback...
...In one sense, what is going on is democratic unmasking: let the politicians remember that they are hired hands...
...Some of the hosts invite their listeners to lobby their representatives or flood the president with mail and faxes...
...One of the most successful of radio talk hosts, Larry King, is a centrist of no discernible political passion...
...There are several causes...
...To put the question crudely: are we headed toward a public square or toward a series of segregated secessionist movements...
...Fourth, the counterpart melodrama that Democrats could, in principle, muster would be directed against the rich and the corporations, but they are reluctant to mobilize a populist fury— partly because of their own dependence on corporate funds, partly because their leading figures are comfortable, partly because the union base is so weak...
...In 1994, the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED public radio, and KRON commercial television cooperated in what they called a "Voice of the People" project...
...Not a week passes without popular articles claiming that computer-telephone linkages— fax, computer electronic mail, the Internet, and so on—make possible such a rapid torrent of information that they create vital community, expedite the organization of social protest, popular lobbying, and so on...
...Technological improvements heighten uniformity more than they challenge it...
...protracted coverage of breaking stories—wars, crimes, natural disasters...
...Does democracy require a public or publics...
...For more than a decade, American news media have been roundly and loudly criticized for degrading politics...
...In the aftermath of each widely reported scandal, the major media have indulged in massive and public self-scrutiny, in which influential figures in the news media confess to excesses, express doubt about whether they are discharging their debt to democracy, and promise to be more judicious the next time...
...The real-time coverage of campaigns has the virtue of eliminating the interpretive middleman, though following this coverage requires a considerable investment of time...
...But the answers were brief and frequently evasive...
...One San Francisco AM station, after trying out several liberal hosts, abandoned them for right-wingers, one of whom, according to Howard Kurtz's forthcoming book, Hot Air: All Talk, All the Time, had been fired by another station for denouncing "the stinking Japanese...
...and activists in search of affinity groups...
...They are considerable instruments of demagoguery, and a power base for future politicians in the Republican party, especially on its right fringe...
...There are linkups for groups like Amnesty International, PeaceNet, and the Rainforest Action Network...
...From the early nineteenth century onward, blatant charges of sexual, financial and other forms of personal malfeasance were the conventional stuff ofAmerican political life as recorded in the press...
...To 82 • DISSENT Television's Anti-Politics use Joshua Meyrowitz's terms, themselves borrowed from Erving Goffman, the "frontstage" world of formal American life is more tolerant— there is a growing degree of gender and racial integration at many professional levels...
...The established news media have been busily trying to'rectify their conduct since 1988...
...But there is one problem the new means of communication do not address and may even worsen: the existence of a two-tier society...
...Disgust at the spectacle of the mass media is a popular sentiment...
...But at the same time, the gulf deepens between the information-saturated and the information-deprived...
...suburban white teens thrill to AfricanAmerican rappers...
...The free-floating nastiness of sitcom existence may well be cultivating an equivalent show of popular sentiment, so that the endless put-downs of popular comedy penetrate into the rest of everyday life in the form of bumper stickers and T-shirt slogans, which then recycle into the popular domain...
...For the past ten years, dedicated followers of American politics have been able to feed their appetites by watching two public affairs channels available twentyfour hours a day on cable...
...Responding to the charge that they have permitted irresponsible candidates to set a distracting agenda by exchanging reckless and misleading charges, several local newspaper, television, and radio enterprises have taken some initiative, asking the public to say what they think the issues should be, attempting to keep political campaigns focused on the most significant questions...
...At the hourly or half-hourly station break, there may be scenes from the following week's episode, scenes from shows later that night, announcements of coming events...
...Without doubt, television has served as an instrument for the nationalization of American culture...
...it has been supplanted by the new standard supermarket shelf with seventy-two different loaves, each bland in its different way...
...But to speak of television as if it were nothing but a sequence of images is to miss a cmcial feature, namely how much of it there is and how easily it enters the house...
...A standard of fair-mindedness and sweet reasonableness has jelled, and it is this that seems to many people to have been transgressed in recent years—especially by the tabloid press and related television "reality shows...
...There may be previews of WINTER • 1996 • 83 Television's Anti-Politics news bulletins, promotions, previews of other shows...
...The diffusion of interactive technology surely enriches the possibilities for a plurality of publics— for the development of distinct groups organized around affinity and interest...
...A free-floating hostility mirrors, and also inspires, the equivalent conversational style among the young...
...President Clinton's denunciation of the radio demagogues after the Oklahoma City bombing was long overdue—and of course was counter-denounced in turn—but did nothing to reduce their significance...
...The contrast with the BBC World Service, with its extended analytical reports, is stark...
...Television purveys identities, especially for the young, in a fluid, unsettled society where neither work, religion, nor family is stable or compelling enough to do the traditional job...
...Technology, in other words, aggravates a certain class division—the division between the political class and the rest...
...Over the course of the decades when a three-network oligopoly dominated television, certain uniformities penetrated deeply into contemporary culture—so much so that they are unlikely to be flooded out by the possibly hundreds more channels soon to pour into the cabled home...
...There is warrant for both views...
...and in the case of the hapless Bill Clinton, of failing to manipulate television adroitly enough...
...The story resumes...
...There is so much novelty, one conventionally hears that America has entered a "new media age...
...In the eyes of most of the news media— I notice that this is true in France and Britain as well—the market certifies what is worth attention...
...The average American watches (or inhabits a room with) television more than four hours a day, most of it entertainment...
...In this setting, where people are members of many clubs at once, people increasingly look to popular culture--especially to television—for a vocabulary they can use to identify themselves...
...Since 1980, many painstaking empirical studies have established that the principal subject covered during political campaigns is the so-called "horse race"—the question of who is leading, who is behind, who is gaining...
...about the death of a child is seen to hesitate...
...Similarly enthralled by the machinery by which images are manufactured, the press—not only television and radio—treats politics as a game, giving only limited coverage to the positions and records of the candidates...
...One thing leads to another...
...It is all of these, but one of its principal impacts is as a school for manners, mores, and styles for repertories of speech and feeling, even for the gestures and experiences of self-presentation that we call personality...
...First, it is argued that reforms in the traditional media may eliminate, or at least temper, the abuses of recent years...
...Salvation by New Media...
...There is incessant talk about the democratic potential of"new news...
...As Raymond Williams pointed out, one remarkable thing about television is the sheer profusion of stories it delivers...
...There are two wings to this hope...
...He may well have helped kill health insurance legislation in 1994...
...At a time when public confidence in American institutions is almost uniformly low, the press is scarcely exempt from popular dissatisfaction...
...I am struck, in particular, by the growth of "knowingness" to which I referred at the beginning of this paper: a quality of self-conscious savvy that often goes by the name "sophistication...
...A considerable portion of the public is plainly angry at what it feels to be the media's trivialization of political life...
...The viewer has been brought into the know...
...Neither of Reagan's successors 76 • DISSENT Television's Anti-Politics has proved nearly as adept as he in coaxing the media into his embrace, and so the recent emphasis in media criticism has been on the degradation of media coverage into a scurrilous obsession with scandals...
...The pattern reached something of its high— or low—point during the 1992 presidential campaign, when presumably legitimate media picked up from scandal-mongering weeklies Gennifer Flowers's charge that she had had a long-term affair with then-governor Bill Clinton...
...Watching is second only to work as the primary activity, or inactivity, that Americans undertake during their waking hours...
...The put-down is the universal linkage among television's cast of live and recorded characters...
...Phil Donahue's talk show, which pioneered the format, has at times lent itself to explicit political discussion, and indeed, Bill Clinton, under fire from mainstream media, turned to Donahue's program for relief during the 1992 campaign...
...One of the major uses of AM radio in the United States today is the circulation of angry political talk...
...Perot proceeded to use another technological novelty to convey the impression that his crusade was a public campaign—he collected funds through an 800 number in a method previously used by Jerry Brown...
...Relentless if superficial selfdisclosure is one of the conventions of television today...
...Liberals, who at least superficially value tolerance and reconciliation, do not compete well, for entertainment purposes, with the party of rancor and unreason...
...Never before, at least not in the twentieth century, has the American press been so vociferously attacked, and so defensive about the attacks...
...In 1992, this anger was so thunderous as to arouse media coverage itself...
...ABC said its concern was strictly low ratings...
...Most of what is circulated through the new cornucopia is old television entertainment recycled—television episodes from earlier years, and old movies...
...q WINTER • 1996 • 85...
...Second, the audience during commuting hours, when talk radio has its largest audience, is disproportionately male...
...But during the last half-century, the ideal of press objectivity drowned out the memory of the old conventions...
...Television is more than an amusement bank, a national bulletin board, a repertory of images, an engine for ideas, a classification index, a faithful pet and a tranquilizer...
...And it serves as a template for political advertising...
...Thus do the quality media have great difficulty resisting market pressures...
...Speech is stripped down, designed to move...
...During the Gulf War, thanks to the courage of PeterArnett, CNN did offer useful though obviously restricted coverage of Baghdad, but otherwise was no more independent of military surveillance and a Washington-centered worldview than the rest of American television...
...It was no small blow against white supremacy, in the 1950s and 1960s, to bring into the living rooms of white America images of the brutal treatment of blacks—or, for that matter, in the 1980s, to convey to a white audience that professional-class blacks like Bill Cosby were effectively identical to their white counterparts...
...The picture may be sepia but the frame glitters...
...knowingness is a state of mind in which any particular knowledge is less important than the feeling that one knows and the pleasure taken in the display of this feeling...
...A strong motive is, not surprisingly, economic...
...Not even the bereaved parent asked "How do you feel...
...In the last two decades, the three major television networks have lost roughly one-third of their audience to cable-satellite networks and independent stations, which, in turn, have succeeded in recruiting audiences to "real-life crime" programs and scandalous talk shows among other offerings...
...Thanks to slick visuals ("high production values") and crisp movement, glibness rules...
...Whole generations of popular-cultural scholars now unashamedly rhapsodize on the stellar qualities of their favored habits...
...Indeed, to call television a medium of communication seems to miss a good deal of the point...
...What is the relation, if any, between the scandalous obsessions of American news media and the glut of entertainment, on the one hand, and the declining participation and rising demagoguery in American politics...
...It is the conviction that it is possible to be "in the know...
...and as work, family, and religion lose their capacity to teach us how we are expected to behave, television takes up much of the slack...
...The "upscale" newspapers now regularly report television ratings and movie boxoffice receipts, and fawn over movie stars...
...Insofar as this is so, it is a terrible judgment on the state of democratic discourse...
...This process recognizes that the candidates frequently have a vested interest in evading important questions, but instead of requiring journalists to take independent positions on the important issues, turns the job over to public opinion polls...
...The content of television is not simply one story after another...
...Its political debates compress opinion into the range running from the deeply conservative to the mildly liberal...
...As the remotecontrolequipped viewer zaps or grazes through dozens of cable channels—to the delight of postmodernist theorists celebrating the juxtaposition as a freedom—cacophony is in the nature of the pastiche...
...The audience is simultaneously alerted to the contrivance, transported behind the scenes, and pleased by both—and by the possibility of enjoying both...
...About onefifth of these have modems that enable them to enter the "cyberspace" of computer networks...
...We are invited to understand Hollywood not only as a machine for dreams but as a game through which we, the spectators, are dreamed of...
...The audience is flattered that it is superior to the corruption, dishonesty, and hypocrisy of public servants...
...Moreover, in general, the local stations and major networks have felt pressed to compete with the purveyors of lurid crime stories...
...The idea is that randomly selected persons are brought together for debate over a period of several days...
...In the wonderful world of television, anything is compatible with anything else...
...Moreover, many of the issues designated as "important" by the public—for example, crime and immigration—were the products of a positive feedback loop, in which the public embraces those issues defined by the media to be the burning questions of the moment...
...The display of curiosity and judgment provides an audience of millions certain assurances of their own normality by giving them a safe, brief, vicarious acquaintanceship with deviance...
...oreover, for the most part, the style of speech that cuts across commercial (and most public) television is predictable...
...It is hard to know exactly...
...Again, this is not simply because television is powerful, but because other institutions are less so...
...The guests are frequently victims of some sort of abuse—crime in the family, sexual molestation, and so on...
...Advances in interactive technology will probably not divert from the main tendencies...
...In my view, the democratizing potential of the new media has been drastically exaggerated...
...To this obsession with polls and competitive strategies has been added a strategic obsession— intense, half-cynical, half-admiring coverage of the maneuvers of the politicians and campaign strategists as they attempt to "position" themselves and manage their images...
...The left, such as it is, finds in the media signs of racism, sexism, and homophobia...
...There are global contacts of a more informal sort, including news from Bosnia and other republics of the former Yugoslavia, electronic exchanges among readers of magazine articles (one can converse with the author) and listeners to radio WINTER • 1996 • 81 Television's Anti-Politics talk (one can converse with other listeners...
...White bread has already ceased to be the symbol of national unity...
...Thus the agenda for the "quality press"—the New York Times and Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles limes and Philadelphia Inquirer, the three major television networks, public television and radio—was set by the quantity press...
...Second, it is argued that new media are emerging, and that they may rectify the situation...
...CNN carries considerable coverage of breaking stories, supplemented by occasional talk, daily debates, Washington gossip...
...that they even permit the organization of an independent presidential campaign like that of Ross Perot in 1992...
...Daily talk shows are available at all hours of the day and much of the night...
...It is difficult to resist the conclusions that America's culture of distraction and convenience, of the quick fix and fast relief, of massmanufactured labels of individuality, has acquired in television a useful technology to reduce the spectrum of life to a pale center glittering with multicolored sequins...
...Yet ideologically minded critics of the right (the Wall Street Journal, for example) or the left (Noam Chomsky, for example), obsessed with the power of ideas over benighted citizens, have perhaps distracted us from recognizing the deepest workings of television because their own rationalist bias impoverishes their social imagination— they cannot imagine that there might be any other reason for wrongheaded policies than the misinformation of influential publics...
...The onceoverlightly glibness of American culture prevails not only on television but in the movies and magazines, among sports announcers and talk show hosts, in politics and psychotherapy alike...
...The one-liner, developed by advertising, is television's stock element...
...Basic cable service now enters 62 percent of American homes, bringing an average of thirty-two channels The profusion of new cable networks and independent stations has eroded the three-network share of the total audience from its high of 91 percent in 1975 to some 60 percent today...
...Had Perot not been a man of enormous wealth, neither his views nor his intentions would have been of interest to Larry King in the first place, nor would his use of the 800 number have carried him to the degree of success he eventually attained, with almost one-fifth of the votes in the general election...
...Is the American media system self-remedying...
...Third, right-wing talk is more theatrical than leftwing talk...
...In this ideological enterprise he is not unprecedented: in the 1930s, Father Charles Coughlin, the Catholic "radio priest," offered a potent stream of populist rhetoric, with an undercurrent of anti-Semitism--though as his antiSemitism grew more ferocious, Coughlin lost a good deal of his following...
...Fabricated Identities The significance—even the political impact— of the contemporary media extends far beyond their treatment of formal politics, for American society is saturated by television...
...If the candidate at first tries evasion and later decides to answer the charges, he or she gets accused of "flip-flopping...
...it is a mastery of techniques by which to reveal that one has left the sideshow and made it into the big tent...
...Television creates a certain texture of experience...
...The uniformities in present-day American style are not simply the creatures of television or of corporate culture more generally...
...This tendency is not strictly American, of course...
...They claim as a warrant for ten-second sound bites the declining attention span of the American public— a declining attention span to which, of course, they contribute...
...The slickness of television, and of popular culture more generally, carries a sense of the tumult and velocity of a commercial version of urban life, the cornucopia of desire, the lure of consumable things and "lifestyles...
...But the cynicism that has become so widespread in 84 • DISSENT Television's Anti-Politics politics is more likely to generate withdrawal than political engagement...
...The C-SPAN and CNN audiences are normally small, less than a million a day, though these numbers spike upward in the case of extraordinary events...
...The press treatment of politics emulates the "postmodern" fascination with backstage tactics in sports and entertainment...
...Here, for example, is the lead to a New York limes article of July 1994: "Speaking at a heavily scripted community forum here, Hillary Rodham Clinton today previewed the sales pitch she will take on the road this fall to make her case for extensive changes in the nation's health care system...
...This genre, popular in the afternoon with women at home, has been a strong presence inAmerican life since the early 1980s...
...Political news coverage has become at times an accomplice of demagoguery, at times a branch of the sports and entertainment industries, and at times an exercise in cynicism, keeping Americans diverted, perhaps, but failing to help them govern themselves...
...Corporate pursuit of new niches ends up exaggerating tendencies already present in the previous system...
...Former governor and quixotic presidential candidate Jerry Brown, who did a talk show based in Sacramento, was unable to acquire an outlet in the Bay Area...
...On the surfaces of culture, distinctions do multiply...
...In the years of maximum network dominance, when Americans tended to be watching the same programs, television furthered tolerance while eroding ethnocentrism and other forms of parochialism...
...It comes in the form of new media organizations, new formats, and new technologies, often with new audiences...
...The president is the Celebrity-in-Chief, fair game for adulation when he plays the part as smoothly as Ronald Reagan, fair game for contempt when he is as young and perplexing as Bill Clinton...
...Meyrowitz has argued, in No Sense of Place, that television has brought to public view the "backstage" of social life, educating the public to see through appearances, cultivating a knowledgeable skepticism, contributing to the spread of egalitarian sentiments...
...But even short of remote-control zapping, the paradox is that each particular segment comes immersed in a context that, while multiform, is also reliable...
...The story resumes...
...No previous generation of human beings has been exposed to the multitude of narratives we have come to take for granted in everyday life...
...It has a more compelling dramatic structure...
...Limbaugh has become enormously successful serving up a mixture of fierce right-wing views, self-promotional bombast, and nasty humor...
...Television is blamed for bringing bad news, but the blame is frequently cast by precisely the same people who rely on television news for their everyday social bearings...
...In summary, then: television has nationalized American culture and made it both knowing and thin...
...I am suggesting that the glibness, relentless pace, sloganeering and shrinking attention spans of private life filter into television, via the selective antennae of the television-industrial complexes of Hollywood and New York, only to be reinforced there...
...Again and again, what begins as a sensational accusation quickly becomes mainstream...
...Radio talk shows...
...But the howls of outrage are scarcely limited to partisan and academic circles...
...This point bears on a theoretical problem...
...And so, in February of 1992, the same issue of the supermarket weekly called Star, whose front page offered "FOUND...
...But he has certainly impressed the strong Republican opposition that he speaks for them and for the alienated multitude they aspire to represent...
...The in-studio audience format was adopted for one of the candidate debates during that campaign, at Clinton's behest, and he used it to great effect, while George Bush demonstrated only that he was out of touch with popular concerns...
...The rise of demagogic pseudo-solutionssevere jail sentences, an end to immigration, not to mention the lunatic terrorism of the ultraright— is fueled by the pervasive sense that business as usual has not worked...
...His devotees pride themselves on being "dittoheads...
...There are the huge data-bases that enable journalists and private citizens to conduct rapid research...
...For good reason did Edward R. Murrow choose to inaugurate the first coast-tocoast broadcast, on November 18, 1951, with a split screen showing the Statue of Liberty and the Golden Gate Bridge simultaneously—for simultaneity is the enemy of cultural heterogeneity...
...journalists wishing to expedite their research...
...Television is a medium of cultural power...
...Growing numbers of families are recombinant, so that one (or one's sub-self) belongs to more than one family at a time...
...American voting turnout has been declining for decades, though with occasional upticks...
...Let me add a word about the proposed deliberative opinion poll...
...that they permit citizens 78 • DISSENT Television's Anti-Politics to mobilize on issues of deep concern, and thus make politicians more responsive...
...they will be used primarily to render more efficient services that people already use—whether banking, video games, gambling, or quiz shows...
...They build on cultural uniformities observed in 183132 by Alexis de Tocqueville, who pointed out, long before Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Roseanne Arnold, or MTV, that America's cultural products "substitute the representation of motion and sensation for that of sentiment and thought...
...Most of the hopes laid on new electronic developments belong in the American tradition of looking to the technological fix for political, spiritual, economic, and social troubles...
...Distinctions that were formerly sacrosanct—urban/ suburban, Northern/Southern, public/private, national/local, naughty/nice—have blurred...
...The odds are that the rule of the slick, the glib, and the cute will prevail...
...Comparable fascinations and criticisms could be seen in the recent French presidential campaign—a glut of polls coexisting with a skeptical attitude toward them, as expressed in the headline of one critical feuilleton piece: "Do you think there are too many, just enough, or not enough polls...
...then, in the case of George Bush, of inflaming racial suspicions through demagogic appeals...
...He or she is treated as an "inside-dopester," savvy to spin-doctors, speech writers, electoratepleasing "positioning," and all manner of practical calculations...
...But CNN is not nearly so novel as its devotees have claimed...
...To those who are information-rich shall more information be given...
...Let me address these potentials in the course of a review of recent and impending developments in the news media...
...They keep in circulation a rage targeted against immigrants, minorities, welfare programs, feminists, and so on...
...That television is popular does not make it less demagogic, but rather more so...
...Cultural identity has become modeled accordingly on peers and celebrities...
...Television may not compel, but it compels attention—this, after all, is its raison d'être...
...Public sphericules: the Internet and other linkages...
...As I mentioned above, coverage is dominated by inside analysis of the stratagems of campaigns and governance...
...Television, Williams wrote, has "flow...
...The tilt to the right bears some reflection...
...For the last several years, Court TV has offered continuing coverage of trials, most famously— or notoriously—the 0. J. Simpson saga...
...Television is a caricature of what, before television, was already a way of life...
...With readership and viewership in seemingly irreversible decline, especially among the young, the major media have a strong interest in appearing to be responsive...
...Ted Danson's forgotten first wife" and "I was Stevie Wonder's secret lover for 24 years," commandedAmerica's respectable outlets with "MY 12-YEARAFFAIR WITH BILL CLINTON...
...Contrary to the assumptions of contemporary nostalgia, the media obsession with scandalous accusations is nothing new in the history ofAmerican democracy...
...Postoligopoly "niche" novelties like popular music, home shopping, evangelical Christianity, African-American music, and Spanish language soap operas have in common that they thrive on undiminished enthusiasm for slick entertainment...
...The point of much entertainment coverage is to make the audience privy to Hollywood marketing calculations, casting tactics, career moves, and box office figures...
...they should also be attributed to self-interest, since television networks and newspapers alike are aware that the audience for news is declining steadily...
Vol. 43 • January 1996 • No. 1
