Letters to the Editor
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When do you sleep?!
How did you find time to write this book while generating at least 5 columns a week for Salon?!!!
Guess I'm off to my local independent bookstore (Shakespeare and Company) to get a copy for myself.
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Bought my copy yesterday
Will start it as soon as I finish the current books on my plate.
And, I look forward to passing it on to friends and family that could use a little eye opening.
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They're not really the jocks
Dick Cheney was as nerdish as could be. George W. Bush isn't a jock, at best he was a class clown. His father is one of the most standoffish individuals you could ever meet; if he was pouring a beer in the same anecdote to the same people, it would have been Belgian and required a bottle opener. Richard Nixon was pure jock wanna be. Reagan wasn't the ballplayer, he was the announcer--that's sort of AV Club. Jerry Ford (like Bush) played college ball, but he never won a national election so we'll forget, him, just like Dole (whose losing running mate was a real jock).
It's amazing how these myths just grow up when they don't have any substance to them. I've seen John McCain, shared an elevator ride with him. He seemed all right.
For a hobbit.
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look upstream
More of a question than a comment, really. I also feel we are victims of a ruling class of media "elites" who's whoring worship of power uber alles betrays their shallow understanding of history, of economics, of science. The media aren't alone, however. It's the same sort of "to the winner go the spoils" laizzes faire worldview which also plagues the world of finance. Listen to some of Condi's geopolitical rationalizations sometime. Nietzsche is not dead, I'm afraid: he lives on in the vapid comic book hero fantasy world of wannabe cowboys (and girls) who virtually define what we call the "professional class".
Where do they come from? Anyone who's spent any amount of time in higher education can attest that a huge number of our ostensible mentors (with some exceptional exceptions, of course) are terribly status conscious overachievers who's lack of real accomplishment causes them to cling to fads and trendy flotsam in desperate hope that this will keep them from drowning. Are the problems we see - with the media, with Wall Street, with Washington, with Corporate America - indicative of a deeper problem: a sad and sorry system of higher education? Particularly those so-called "elite" institutions who churn out our so called "leaders"? Our MBA mills? We have Masters of this and Masters of that who know how to pick out a nice suit and little else.
How do we know who to trust? How do we know what to read? How do we know which opinions matter, and which are pure bullshit? We live in an age where curating, of rating, of sifting through vast amounts of information and rating it have all received unprecedented attention. This is a world formerly ruled by academia. This is, in a very real sense, why they exist. Where are they now? Has the bright light of academia been extinguished by lawyers and bean counters? Why are these institutions polluting our media and our boardrooms with vapid pretenders? Aren't they supposed to filter the wheat from the chaff?
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Great blog, Glenn
You got me laughing right at the start with "the media's unrestrained id, Chris Matthews."
The rest of the blog wasn't very funny, though. Thank you for a great job of pointing out the mythology embraced by the MSM. I don't know much about it personally, because I never watch TV news, and only read the local paper for local news. I get most of my news from NPR and online. I've been avidly reading your posts on the MSM, and all the letters in response, even the catfight while you were away.
I hope your book does really well. And I hope some people who've never noticed the media's bias will read your book and learn something from it.
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Glenn, I love you...
..and I feel your outrage, and you're on target as always, but isn't it a little uncomfortable to call down fire upon the same vapid media that hosts your column? Salon's political reporting seems as waist-deep in shallow personality gossip as any MSM outlet these days.
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Unfortunately...
... It has been my own observation, from conversations with my family, co-workers, and even friends, that people DO tend to vote based not on the public policy platform politicians run on but, rather, on whether they "seem presidential" or if they're the type they "want to have a beer with." Granted, there is something to be said for the feedback loop coverage that panders to this mindset can create - personality based political reporting doesn't help the problem of personality based voting at all. But, on the other hand, try being the first major news network to say 'we're not going to give people what they expect - instead, we're going to elevate the public discourse and eventually bring the audience out of this ridiculous habit of not liking a politician because they eat arugula instead of iceberg lettuce' The problem is, this model, for better or for worse, is profitable. And it's become a Mexican standoff for all the actors involved - no one wants to be the first to lower their guns.
But, seriously - do you really think people don't vote almost entirely on nebulous qualities like personality? Ideally, every voter would be a policy wonk and every journalist would be an analyst, but we're a long, long way from that happening.
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The goal is to increase cynicism.
Tonight's debate was a vivid demonstration of the dynamics that you are talking about.
For me it was also clear what the intention is - to drive "high-information" voters crazy and push them out of the process. It is difficult to watch such inanity without becoming cynical about the process and that is precisely what the media in-crowd wants us to do. Then the insiders are left standing as the deciders along with the rapidly vanishing creature known as the “swing voter”. The media loves its “swing voter”, Joe Sixpack, who really doesn’t follow politics much but he wants a beefy President to have a beer with. Joe is a hard working “low-information” voter who depends upon those hard working media hacks to tell him who to trust and who to like.
Joe actually existed when the networks and a few cable channels dominated news but even then he wasn’t as dumb as the talking heads wanted to think he was. They just knew that the lower they aimed the more folks they drove out of the process and the more they could control it. And Lee Atwater and Karl Rove also understood that the secret to winning elections wasn’t just getting more votes, it was driving as many intelligent discerning people out of the process as possible and the media insiders would help them do that. That is elitism.
I do not know if that is a conscious process on the part of our talking heads but Charlie Gibson made it clear tonight that his portfolio depends upon it.
They will succeed again if politicians cooperate and we give up in disgust. But they have played this game too many times and the Web has informed too many people for them to get away with it one more time.
The next President will be the one who calls them out explicitly but with humor and wit. Obama understands the game and is going over the heads of the media but hasn’t confronted it head on yet. I am hoping this debate will push him to attack the media with grace and style. If he does he will get a huge boost from everyone who is disgusted with the circus.
McCain also understands the game but he thinks that Joe Sixpack still exists. Clinton is stuck in Roveland, she is content to appeal to 51% of a beaten down electorate.
I don't agree with Obama on quite a few issues but it is obvious to me that his success so far stems from his understanding of a growing disgust and yes, bitterness over the quality of our political discourse.