Bottom Lines and Bottom Feeders

I've been away from the keyboard for a couple of weeks, and I'm not going to pretend I didn't enjoy it. I don't clearly remember what led up to the unscheduled hiatus, except that it was election day, and the big choice here in the Lone Star State were between our career Governor, Mr. "True Men Do So Kill Coyotes", whose victory lap included a visit to the set of "The Daily Show" so that he could assure Jon Stewart that he doesn't really want his state to secede from the union, and his opponent, whose campaign was dominated by a series of hysterical, lying TV commercials about how the incumbent used to hold little girls down while Dr. Frankenstein forcibly injected them with untested mutant viruses while Igor held their weeping, pleading parents at gunpoint. I just remember looking at that ballot and the room beginning to spin. Everything that's happened since then is a little hazy, but the nurses tell me that today was the first day they've put the laptop in front of me without my starting to scream, so I might as well take advantage of it. Under the circumstances, I beg your indulgence as I touch upon what by now is some pretty old news. It's not much, but it's really all I have since I ended up blowing off National Novel Writing Month again.



The best thing about living with an accelerated news cycle is that, it turns out, we've managed to speed up the rate at which questions of journalistic ethics can now be chewed over and put to bed. I refer to the matter of Keith Olbermann, who, at the end of the week of the midterm elections, was suspended, without pay, from his MSNBC show for an "indefinite" period of time for having made campaign contributions to three politicians who had professed views that ay regular viewer of his show might have guessed would be to his liking. After the entire world expressed dismay and ridicule over this, the network announced that the indefinite period of time would amount to Olbermann's missing two days of work. The big upshot of all this was that when it came a little later that Joe Scarborough, MSNBC's "conservative" voice, had also made campaign contributions, he automatically got two days off and nobody pretended to give a shit. (After the news first broke, MSNBC was quick to clarify its position: Olbermann, unlike David Weigel, was penalized not for having opinions but because he had broken a company rule that required him to inform his corporate masters before making any campaign contributions. This resulted in a new wave of ridicule and vituperation from those who, they said, couldn't think of any reason why a news organization that claimed to have no problem with one of its on-air employees making campaign contributions would get bent out of shape about not being apprised, in advance, of the employees' plans to do just that. (I can. If I'm going to put, say, Pat Buchanan on the air as one of my official commentators, and then Pat Buchanan decides to send a portion of his paycheck to a candidate whose platform calls for the establishment of White History Month and a federally funded pension for all accused Nazi war criminals, I'd just as soon not learn about it from Politico.)

Most everybody, from liberal bloggers to Fox News, and with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow and Olbermann himself prominent among those weighing in, saw this as a good excuse to give MSNBC a whack upside the head for the company's failure to recognize how silly it is to penalize journalists for exercising their rights as Americans to participate in the democratic process, in order to maintain some fraudulent pretense of total "objectivity". Or maybe it was for the company's failure to understand that things had changed, and that the "objective" reporter who never existed has been displaced by partisan blowhards whose whole appeal, if not their proof of integrity, lies in their having already made up their mind about everything and everyone. If it's the former, the debate is a long way from being new. In All the President's Men, the 1974 book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward about their work ferreting out the Watergate conspiracy, there's an odd moment towards the end when the authors, who wrote about themselves, and each other, in the third person, report that on election day, 1972, "Woodward" stayed home because he felt that it would be wrong for a reporter to sully his objectivity by casting a ballot, a view that, we're told, "Bernstain" regarded as "silly." Of course, "Woodward" would go on to become a man capable of publishing, within a space of four years, a book celebrating the great wisdom of the Bush White House and its war plans and another book denouncing the rash idiocy of the Bush White House and its war plans, with another book that could be read either way published in between. By that time, he had fulfilled his destiny by becoming the personification of the unreflective parroting of the conventional wisdom of the moment, which is all a journalist specializing in "objectivity" can ever hope to become.

What's really interesting about the whole Olbermann train wreck is the context in which it occurred: a moment that really began the morning after the elections, when conservative websites began attacking MSNBC for having had the most nakedly "partisan" coverage of the night, by virtue of their having allowed the likes of Olbermann and Maddow on the air at all during the election returns. Or maybe it began in the wake of the Jon Stewart-Stephen Colbert rally, which seems to have freaked out the MSNBC liberal talking heads pretty badly, so much so that Maddow complained on the air about any suggestion of moral equivalence between what she does and what, say, Sean Hannity does, while Olbermann, after doing some complaining of his own about how Jon Stewart just doesn't get him, was overcome with remorse at the very thought that he might be ratcheting up the polarization level and dropped his "World's Worst Persons" segment. (After democratically taking the measure of his own audience's feelings on the subject, he reinstated it, kind of--it's now the "(Not Really) Worst Persons in the World", which I take to be Olbermann's way of trying to make Stewart feel bad by awkwardly killing his own joke.) The reason that Fox News and other conservatives came to Olbermann's defense on this one is that they see the acknowledgement that nobody should be surprised to learn that Olbermann supported liberal candidates as a victory for them. It proves that he, like the rest of the liberal media, takes sides--which is supposed to discredit him and everybody else in the broadcast media except for Fox News, where everybody is fair and balanced.

There is indeed a difference between MSNBC and Fox News. MSNBC is a news channel that, after enjoying its greatest breakout success with Olbermann as he grew more openly partisan a commentator, has consciously shifted towards an opinion-news network for people who prefer to hear opinions that are left of center, a decision that was born of commercial calculation, if not commercial desperation. Fox News is a political operation devoted to promulgating a view of the world--a "narrative", as Jon Stewart likes to put it--that's beneficial to Republican candidates, many of whom it keeps on the air and on its payroll between elections. These are not the same thing, though in the past year or so it's become ever clearer that, while Fox News and its stars are at peace with their role in the life, the MSNBC stars are self-conscious and conflicted about theirs. While someone like Roger Ailes or Antonin Scalia, who between the two of them have a combined 144 years of deciding who among us is worthy of their respect according to who treats them with the greatest deference, think nothing of talking about someone as smart as Jon Stewart as if he were the village idiot and drill sergeant for the local chapter of Hitler youth, but the MSNBC gang want him to like them, and so are torn between snarling at any criticism he offers of them and wanting to make an insincere show of meeting him halfway. Olbermann even slammed Campbell Brown for having dared to suggest that her departure from the airwaves, leaving nothing but opinion news shows in a time slot where she had managed to do some very sharp "conventional" broadcast journalism, would deny the world something that it might have deemed useful. Olbermann, who responded to White House press secretary Robert Gibbs's saying that the Obama administration had been hampered by the complaints and demands of the "professional left" by having Michael Moore on his show to share his bewilderment about what this "professional left" could be--sort of like having David Vitter and Mark Sanford on to roll their eyes at the idea that family values Republicans have sometimes been guilty of moral hypocrisy--must feel that his brand of opinion news has to be seen as intrinsically superior to conventional news to justify its existence at all. Not only is he wrong, but his touchiness on the subject, like his and Maddow's overreaction to anything that they can possibly take as likening what they do to what Fox News does, just makes them seem insecure and invites attacks from enemies who can see all too well where their soft places lie.

Once upon a time, Fran Lebowitz can be seen lamenting on HBO, news readers gave you information; now you turn on the TV and all you see is a lineup of people blustering their opinions at you. A certain amount of "objective journalism" has always been pap; but there were also a number of reporters, such as the late Andy Klein, who covered New York's City Hall for The New Yorker for twenty-five years and who once explained the elegant viciousness of her style by saying, "The worst thing you can do to politicians is to quote them verbatim", who knew how to make it exactly clear to readers what they thought about what they were reporting without shouting insults through a megaphone. This is actually a lot closer to hard work than figuring out who you were going to call a werewolf your next time at bat, and even Hunter Thompson relied on a base of actual reporting to do his job. But nowadays, anyone with access to the right blogroll can figure out who he hates without any information at all. The downside of this sort of rigidity is apparently that it turns you into a predictable stiff while your self-righteousness eats your sense of humor alive; at least, that's what happened to Olbermann. Rachel Maddow, God bless her, is still a lot of fun to watch and can be actually informative, though she needs to pull back on that shtick of hers where she grins like the Joker and flails her arms while assuring her that she thinks it is so! hilarious! that black-souled people of evil intent are destroying the country. Based on how long it took Olbermann to go from essential to insufferable, she may have another five or six good years on TV ahead of her--unless that process has been accelerated, too.

Fox News is indeed a whole other story, and one that should be covered as a story: real news organizations ought to report on its activities and what it's telling its idiot viewers the same way that they report on the doings of the RNC. We got a taste of what that looks like when, for reasons not clear to me and probably baffling to Roger Ailes, news organizations got it in their heads to report on the Fox News meme lying about the cost of the President's trip to India. When actual news organizations deign to treat this sort of thing as news, they go that extra mile of trying to run down how it got started, which is sweet of them--it involves the presumption that Fox News cares about whether what it "reports" has any basis in fact--but puts the network in a funny place, since it requires them to pretend as if, yes, they really did believe it at the time, which, if true, would mean they were very stupid indeed. For genuine, heartbreaking stupidity, one need check out the blogs written by people who see this shit on the air on the Internet, take it on faith that it must be true, and are then left wondering how to handle it when Fox News itself decides to just let this one go. Typical enough is the case of this simpleton, who bought into the one about the $200 million price tag, the 34 warships, and even the "special air conditioned tunnel" built by the U.S. military "so Obama can visit the Gandhi museum"--things that no one with more than four of five living brain cells could have ever believed, and that certainly none of the Fox newsreaders or Republican congressmen who passed it along could have conceivably believed might be true--and then sheepishly wrote that "we may have been punked by the Indian media", only to add that, of course, "we still don’t know what this is costing us." Just because the information wasn't true doesn't mean that it might not really be true, right? Fight the future!

This is a cretin's version of what has become the media's favorite explanation for the President's political reversals: it's his fault that nobody knows better. Supposedly rational, thoughtful conservatives--the kind who know that Obama isn't a Muslim and was born in America--have argued that you can't blame people who think that Obama is a foreign-born Muslim, because he's done such a bad job of seeming Christian and American. It might seem strange, given that Obama lowered taxes on most Americans, that the Republicans managed to ride back to glory thanks to a grass roots movement with a name inspired by a tax protest movement, but you have to understand that many of these people think that their taxes have stayed the same or gone up in the past two years, and it's Obama's fault that they can't count. It's the rare conservative these days who'll admit to seeing anything wrong with either maintaining the Bush-era tax policy that cratered the economy (after intensifying the income gap that's been warping American society for three decades) or the open, unapologetic racism and terror of whites losing their majority hold on the culture that's become more and more a part of acceptable Republican discourse, two years after the polite ladies and gentlemen of the media assured us all that Obama's election would end even subtle appeals to racism as a part of our politics, forever. The same people who, starting with the 2006 midterms and picking up steam with the 2008 financial collapse, began crooning about the need to remake the Republican party for a new technological age, with more sophisticated and fairer ideas aimed at attracting a more culturally mixed audience, are now so thrilled to be part of what they see as a winning team again that they're busy using their university degrees to cook up explanations for why William F. Buckley would be all chuffed to know that his conservative movement is safely in the hands of Lonesome Rhodes.

By a funny coincidence, Obama's predecessor, former President Gussie W. Fink-Nottle, Jr., has been out there since the midterms, promoting his memoir, and reminding us all what it looks like when someone isn't too shy to tell us exactly what he's done for us and how much we should love him for it. The coincidence was almost even funnier: Gussie's book, which was published the week after the elections, was originally scheduled to come out the week before, before the party faithful pointed out to him that it might be nicer if he waited until after everyone had cast their votes before reminding us all how much we'd missed him. Say what you like, this is a guy who understands the importance of marketing, even if he doesn't know how to communicate this understanding to us without making you long to see him bleeding underneath a totaled eighteen-wheeler. You've probably heard that the Dauphin who crashed the economy and gave us two wars because he wanted, as he writes, to "kick the ass" of the people who planned 9/11--something he never managed to do, partly because he chose to tie up his military with two wars, one of which was against a despot who wouldn't have crossed the street to spit on those people whose asses he wanted to kick--believes that the low point of his presidency came when he was dissed by Kanye West, and that his biggest regret about the handling of Katrina is that he allowed his picture to be taken aboard Air Force One while flying over the destroyed city, an image that he thinks sent the wrong, "uncaring" message. This near-sociopathic focus on the surface of things, and his belief that the most important thing about his presidency is how events affected his optimistic mood rather than how his jackassery affected the lives of people all over the world, goes hand in hand with his having spent his first year and change as an ex-president hurriedly throwing together a book about how right he was about everything, so that he could go on talk shows and assure us all that he has no fear of history's verdict, which he knows will be in his favor but probably won't come until after all of us are dead. The spectacle made me realize that his father, former President Gussie H. W. Fink-Nottle, Sr., is the first man since before World War I to leave the U.S. presidency alive and in good health who hasn't written or participated in the writing of a book, or many books, meant to explain what the hell he thought he was doing. I'm no fan of Gussie the Elder, but he does give a better job than his son of convincing you that he isn't sitting up nights worrying about what people are going to say about him when he's no longer around to spit back, "Who cares what you think?"

None of this is surprising; Gussie, Jr.'s opinions about his accomplishments were as predictable at the time as his actions were predictable even before he was awarded the brass ring by the Social Darwinist-Surrealist wing of the Supreme Court, and he understands that whatever appeal he has for anyone is tied up in his always remaining the same, having not changed as a human being in any way since he made the fateful decision to become a dry drunk when he was forty. It's too bad that he'll never become the kind of phony statesman that Richard Nixon became in retirement, as a consequence of his continuing to present himself to interviewers who were too bashful and polite to ask him about his past and so had to ask him questions about the larger world. I'd have loved to have heard Junior answer questions about how he feels when he sees the Republican party that he hoped to open up to Hispanic voters antagonize people with its baiting of illegal immigrants, and how, given his insistence, in the wake of 9/11, that we were not fighting Islam, he feels about his party being taken over by rhetoric to the effect that Muslims are monsters and that Islam is exactly what we're fighting. I'd like to know how he feels about Karen Hughes, his old enabler and onetime envoy to the Muslim world, turning on Feisal Abdul Rauf. once her and Bush's man in the Middle East but now a Republican whipping boy for his connection to what the gang at Fox News calls "the 9/11 mosque." Since Junior left office, things have shifted so that, if he wanted to use whatever standing he still has with Republican voters, he call out for a colorblind party and religious tolerance and denounce race-baiting and bigotry. He could actually serve a purpose for his country, and pay it back for a lifetime spent profiting on his name and connections. But I guess why start now, right?

A Republican resurgence built on frustration, and worse, over Obama's leadership wasn't exactly hard to see coming. Two years ago, all the smart people were predicting that Obama and his party would pay a price in the midterms if the economy wasn't all better by this past fall, and I don't know who really thought that the mess that Junior left behind could be fully repaired in two years. There's good reason to suspect that the recovery, such as it is, hasn't been all that it might have been if Obama had been bolder and more willing to consult economists who had less to do with signing off on the credit-drenched, anti-regularity culture that led us to hell in the first place. Still, the anger people have been directing at Obama directly seems too over-scaled and irrational for much of it to be on point, and the thoughtful-conservative types who keep congratulating the Tea Party voters and candidates for their frothing, misdirected rage, or at least absolving them of any responsibility to think clearly when they're panicked and afraid, seem willfully blind to how much they sound like narrators of History Channel documentaries describing conditions in pre-Hitler Germany. I'm not saying that der Fuhrer is heading into D.C. on the next train, but the latest elections have brought a staggering number of mischievous wackos to new prominence, the discredited loons of fifty years ago are being touted by Glenn Beck and sold to a larger audience than they ever hoped to reach in the bad old days, and people are kicking around ideas for disenfranchising working-income people and states'-rights schemes that would have brightened Bull Connors's heart, and not even being tarred and feathered for it. Much of the blame for this has to be put at Obama's feet, if only for his misguided commitment to seeming to want to reach out and compromise with people who will never give him any credit for attempted acts of bipartisanship, because they consider his very existence an affront to their way of life and his election to high office an illegal and tyrannical act. What's needed, in both government and those who cover it, is people who can act grown-up without being wimps.