The Spectacle of Campaign 2008

[Orwellian_Ghost]

Tomgram: The Spectacle of Campaign 2008

Exit Poll
Your Enthusiasm and the Media's
By Tom Engelhardt

"Drawing from the best resources on national and local platforms, Fox will bring together America's two greatest passions -- politics and football." So said Marty Ryan, Fox News executive producer of political programming, describing that network's addition of a three-hour "Super Tuesday political preview" to the usual day-long football festivities. In that way did Fox News manage to catch the zeitgeist of the moment, creating a 24/7 spectacle of super-entertainment by merging the number-one top-draw extravaganza, Super Bowl Sunday, with the mid-week surprise of a writer-starved TV season, Super Tuesday.

Each was guaranteed to be a dawn-to-midnight entertainment spectacular. Each was to be a talkathon of experts and pundits (including the Las Vegas odds-maker Fox interviewed Sunday who was "handicapping" both events in more or less the same breath), interspersed with mega-ads and mega-ad stories, as well as some thrilling action, leading toward results that, in each super-case, we, the viewers, would sooner or later have known, even if no one had said a word. Don't be surprised, if, on this Super Tuesday, you see Troy Aikman, Terry Bradshaw, and Jimmy Johnson calling the shots alongside the Fox News crew. After all, the "showdown" under the dome of the University of Phoenix Stadium was to be followed two days later by what ABC News termed a "showdown coast to coast." (Normally, O.K. Corral-style "showdown" logos have been reserved for cruise missile shoot-outs on Main Street with global perps like Saddam Hussein.)

By the time you read this, you'll probably already know more about the immediate American political scene than I do. You may know whether Barack Obama, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, or Mitt Romney was the Eli Manning (or Tom Brady) of politics. Maybe you'll have stayed up as network news and cable outfits analyzed the election into the morning hours as if this were November 4th.

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http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174890/the_spectacle_of_campaign_2008