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what's important?
Mar. 11th, 2010 11:31 amYesterday in the House of Representatives, during a debate on a move to set a timetable for bringing US troops home from Afghanistan, Congressman Patrick Kennedy delivered a stinging rebuke to the supposed news media. Here's a part of it:
If anybody wants to know where cynicism is, cynicism is that there's one, two press people in this gallery! We’re talking about Eric Massa 24/7 on the TV. We’re talking about war and peace, $3 billion, 1,000 lives and no press? No press?!
Strangely, right wing propagandizers -- self-styled fiscal conservatives and supporters of the troops -- are making it plain that they disagree with Kennedy on the importance of "war and peace, $3 billion, 1,000 lives". For example, Media Research Center -- a sort of wingnut equivalent of Media Matters, but lacking the respect for facts -- dismissed Kennedy's outburst as a "rant" and Kennedy himself as an "unhinged liberal Democrat" before lambasting NBC's Nightly News for covering the incident.
To be true, there is something of the tired and emotional in Kennedy's delivery, but he was saying something important, something that shouldn't be judged on partisan or ideological grounds: by a factor of hundreds to one, our "news" media judge a juicy scandal to be more important to our understanding of the world than coverage of a debate involving "war and peace, $3 billion, 1,000 lives".
To the MRC, however, the actual content of what Kennedy was saying is irrelevant: they attack him solely because he's a Democrat -- because he's a member of the opposing football team. As I was reading their piece on the matter I was saddened yet again by the reflection that it is in large part because ideologues like the MRC are so busily emptying all the content out of this country's public discourse that the nation finds itself doing so many imbecilic and dangerous things, from invading other countries under false pretenses to denying the reality and danger of climate change.
And, yes, the airhead priorities of our "news" media are playing an important destructive role here too.
Somehow this seemed to tie in with a very perceptive article by Nicole Belle that I read an hour or two later at Crooks & Liars. As everyone knows, Glenn Beck made an especial fool of himself this week (difficult, I know, for the guy who recently described himself, without any seeming sense of absurdity, as a latterday Thomas Paine, but there y'are) when he invited the subject of the scandal mentioned above, Rep. Eric Massa, onto his show for a full hour, expecting Massa to spend that time dissing his fellow Democrats, the Obama Administration, etc. Unfortunately for Beck, Massa instead, despite increasingly unsubtle prompting from Beck, spent the hour saying the whole affair was his own silly fault and that he was the only culprit.
Belle reports this (more accurately, she quotes extensively from the Time account of the debacle) but then offers a conclusion that's I think worth quoting in extenso:
I can't tell you how tickled I was watching Beck get more and more deflated as the hour went on, finally resulting in apologizing to his audience for wasting their time. And it was laughable when he turned the interview into a chance to promote his own victimhood while never mentioning that Beck made 23 million dollars last year. [. . .]
The sad part is that Beck DID waste his viewers' time, but not in the way that he thought. He was so blinded by his hatred of the administration, so focused on his witch hunts that he completely missed that he had an exclusive interview with a former congressperson who resigned due to a litany of ever changing reasons and his inability to get past the all-encompassing need to raise money as a politician and his frustration with campaign financing. The rest of the media will focus on the salacious details of his ethics investigation and miss it too.
But Massa is 100% right. The best way to end corruption in DC is campaign finance reform, and that's an area that all of us, from the nuttiest tea-bagger to the dirtiest liberal hippie can support. But Beck didn't want to hear about real problems or real ways to make things better in this country.
I think Belle's right, and by extension Kennedy too: I think our "news" media will ignore the important point that's emerging from l'affaire Massa because it's a whole lot easier to focus on the fine details of contextually inapposite tickles or whatever other completely insignificant bullshit they use to pander to our appetite for salacity . . . rather in the same way that it's easier to make a porn flick than The Hurt Locker.The sad part is that Beck DID waste his viewers' time, but not in the way that he thought. He was so blinded by his hatred of the administration, so focused on his witch hunts that he completely missed that he had an exclusive interview with a former congressperson who resigned due to a litany of ever changing reasons and his inability to get past the all-encompassing need to raise money as a politician and his frustration with campaign financing. The rest of the media will focus on the salacious details of his ethics investigation and miss it too.
But Massa is 100% right. The best way to end corruption in DC is campaign finance reform, and that's an area that all of us, from the nuttiest tea-bagger to the dirtiest liberal hippie can support. But Beck didn't want to hear about real problems or real ways to make things better in this country.
So where are the priorities? This time next year, will anyone outside his immediate circle remember Eric Massa? But for the rest of their lives there are going to be parents remembering the children they've lost, and children lacking parents, and communities lacking schools and medical care, because of the results of debates about our occupation of Afghanistan -- debates of which we're all largely ignorant because our "news" media decline to cover them . . . except when Patrick Kennedy loses his rag.
