Battle of the Network Stars

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/7456

Battle of the Network Stars
by Allan Uthman | May 14 2007

There’s a semantic problem with the word “politics.” It has two major meanings, which are connected but distinct. Politics is the art of governing nations, but it can also mean the tactics employed to attain or retain governmental control. This creates an obstacle for the person who reads the “politics” section of his favorite newspaper or website, or who watches shows which purport to cover politics, with the intent of learning about what his government is doing. Often, there’s really nothing at all about running the government; it’s all about running for government. Check out the last four stories that plopped out of the Associated Press “Politics” feed as I write this:

• Sharpton denies disputing Romney's faith
• Obama overstates Kansas tornado deaths
• Edwards discusses time at hedge fund
• Spitzer, O'Malley to endorse Clinton

See? There’s nothing in there about what’s happening in the outside world, nor any coverage of actual governmental activities. It’s just gossip about celebrities. The fact that those celebrities happen to be members of our government is incidental. These stories aren’t about policy, or politics, really. They’re about the candidates’ chances to be the last one on the island, nothing more.

This is not a new phenomenon of course, but it does seem to get a worse every time, and in vast increments. Election coverage is not only deplorably shallow; its non-stop, news-cycle-dominating prominence is obscuring larger reality. It’s stealth entertainment news in the guise of legitimate national affairs journalism. There’s nothing significantly different in the tone of coverage of the Obama/Clinton rivalry from that of Paris and Nicole. Romney’s Mormonism is handled no differently than Tom Cruise’s Scientology.

That would be bad enough in itself, but the worse problem is that while we’re torturing ourselves with a harrowing, incessant two-year pageant of inauthenticity, real stuff is still happening all over the world. And we’re hearing even less than usual about it, because it’s just so much easier for commentators to talk about what has essentially become the Olympics of bullshit than to address the actual government or what it actually does. By comparing stats and rumors about presidential hopefuls, columnists and talking heads are able to give the impression of covering the government without actually doing anything of the sort. Watch Joe Scarborough segue easily from a segment about the latest presidential gaffe to a schadenfreude session over Paris Hilton’s jail sentence, and you’ll see. He doesn’t even have to switch gears; it’s the same damn thing. This type of presidential infotainment is not even taking up half of the space allotted for political coverage; it’s taking up nearly all of it, the remainder of which is mainly filled by “White House says this, critics say that.” And we’re a year and a half off from what will surely be too brief a reprieve. For all this time, the presidential one-note symphony will drown out what little serious news our already atrophic press might otherwise present.

snip//

This vote was one of the clearest, most indisputable recent examples of the single biggest problem America faces today: Our government is one massive integrity auction. All 49 senators who voted against importing these cheaper drugs, a notion which by the way enjoys widespread public support, should be called out by name and aggressively pursued on the issue. But no. Al Sharpton says Obama’s not black enough, so the big story—a story about what government really does, when it isn’t trying to sell itself to you—just falls away. And you probably don’t even notice, because you’re busy watching, reading, thinking and arguing about plainly scripted trivia regarding bullshit artists of various skill who want your vote—in a year and a god damned half.