"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." [attributed to Karl Rove]
I don't know that it was so interesting it required an hour, but Maddow's interview of Jon Stewart did focus on some issues that we've been discussing at ATF in the last several weeks. I'd like specifically to talk about the interview in the light of my posts last week, "Centrist Politics and Rhetorical Virtue" and "The Rhetorical Strategy of the Power Elites."
Maddow had a beef with Stewart insofar as he suggested during his sanity rally that there was an equivalency between what MSNBC does and what FOX does. Stewart defended that position using a weather/climate metaphor. The weather of specific stories might be fine, but the basic MSNBC climate was as partisan liberal as FOX is partisan conservative. As such, MSNBC is a part of the problem as much as FOX is. For Stewart, Left vs. Right, blue vs. red is the wrong argument. The real argument is corruption vs. non-corruption, extremists vs. normal people.
There's a place for that. Many Americans have become seriously concerned to see how successful right-wing strategists have been in creating this alternative reality--not just through FOX, but through talk radio and propaganda vehicles like Dick Armey's Freedomworks. There are very skilled propagandists working here, they've got a ton of money, and they have no effective, organized opposition. Insofar as there has been any mainstream attempt to counterbalance this right wing machine, MSNBC's has been the most prominent. I think it's good they do it, but it is limited in its effectiveness because it is fundamentally reactive. It's only playing defense, because the Left has no plausible offensive game plan.
Maddow sees herself as doing solid journalism insofar as she is trying to shine a light on the political and financial infrastructure behind this many of these movement conservative projects. I see real value in that, but the problem lies in that it doesn't persuade anybody in the middle because the rhetoric is not targeted toward them, but toward people who don't need to be persuaded.
The extremists are beyond persuasion, but the most important battle now is for the hearts and minds of people in the middle, and the cultural Left doesn't seem to get that. The Left thinks it's enough simply to state the facts. Facts don't matter; story does.The Right gets that; the Left doesn't. The Right has a compelling narrative that plays well on Main Street; the Left does not.
I don't think Stewart objects to Maddow's work exposing the inner workings of the right-wing propaganda machine, but he asked her if she really believes that there's nothing more to the anger expressed by the people attracted to the Tea Party. Can it be explained away as just a contrived astro-turf phenomenon, or is there more to it? She never answered that question directly, but I think it's a question that people on the cultural Left need to take more seriously if they are really concerned about money and power aggregation. The Left media and blogosphere have made it pretty clear that there is no dealing with the Tea Party because it comprises only religious crazies, homophobes, and bigots, and the message has been pretty clear that anybody who would have anything to do with it is tacitly supporting fanaticism and bigotry.
Some of the most visible Teaparty people, of course, are fanatics and bigots, but Stewart's point, and one I've made here repeatedly, is that there is more going on there, and culturally left media types like Maddow, in their eagerness to explain it away as manipulation by the Dick Armeys and Koch brothers, too easily dismiss why they are having such an easy time of it. The Left's refusal to understand why lots of sane people in the middle are attracted to the Tea Party is myopic and suicidal. The Left should be bending over backwards to capture and channel that anger; instead it's just pushing it into the arms of the far Right.
If Stewart is trying to say that the tribal blue vs. red, liberal vs. conservative, us vs. them is a distraction that keeps us from uniting and focusing on the real issues, I agree. He could have been clearer, though, about what he thought the cable news should be focusing on instead.
At the end of the interview, Stewart said, without explaining why, that he thought news people like Maddow were in the game, but he, in contrast, was just the class clown throwing spitballs from the sidelines. Maddow had a hard time seeing why what he and she did was so different. Maddow doesn't see herself "in the game", I guess, but as a less humorous commentator as she sees Stewart to be. I think Stewart's point was that it's OK for him as a satirist to be unbalanced and even unfair, but it's not OK for Maddow to be, because she's "in the game". It's not OK for serious news to be doing what Stewart is doing. Journalism has another and more important role to play, which is to dig for the truth, not just comment on it.
If someone were to ask me what it meant for journalists to be "in the game", I would answer that they need to stop paying so much attention to propaganda--political, corporate, left, right, wherever it comes from. Political statements can be reported, but not analyzed to death when it's obvious propaganda. The media is getting played by the communications strategists, and it's ridiculous and demeaning that they should allow it. When statements are made by "important" people, it's fine to report them in a respectful, neutral tone, but 90% of what we get on a day-in and day-out basis on cable is spin and pundits spinning the spin. Everybody knows it. Move on and talk about what's really happening, talk about what you or your colleagues doing the hard work of journalism have uncovered. Don't just regurgitate what some pol wants us to think.
Too much cable, print, or corporate news now is spin stenography. NPR's news shows do it too. Even if it's more neutral in it's tone, it's the same predictable b.s. Until the MSM stops allowing itself to get played the way it is now, I for one cannot listen to them anymore. It is so tediously predictable. It lacks authority and credibility. They, including the mainstay PBS and NPR news shows, lost me in 2003, and they haven't done anything since to win me back.
Journalists do perform a significant service for us when they dig deeper to follow the money and to uncover how power in this country works. Maddow, to her credit, does some of that, but she should turn her spotlight on DLC or Blue Dog shennanigans as well as on what Dick Armey is doing with Freedomworks or what conservative lawmakers are doing in the C-Street House. The Blue Dogs, the DLC, and local Dem machine politics is as much a part of the overall problem as FOX news is. These Dems might be more like a benign tumor in the body politic than the more aggressive cancer that FOX and right-wing propagandists are, but they are a part of the illness and have no part in the cure.
So it's not just about going after individuals or one party or the other; it's about showing how the system is fundamentally diseased. Main Street is receptive to this information, but it needs it from a news authority that has an ethos it can trust. Unless you're already a committed partisan, you cannot trust even truthful reporting when it is delivered by a partisan brand. It has no rhetorical virtue on Main Street. This is a fundamental law of classical rhetoric, and the Left will fail so long as it refuses to obey it.
The Left has a choice: it can imitate the Right and create its own tribalistic reality bubble, or it can reach out. The Right will win the middle if the only choices come in cultural-right or cultural-left tribal packaging. The Right has the advantage because old school values are default values in confusing times. People when they are anxious and confused will go to the time-tested, traditional narratives for comfort, if nothing else, even if it means associating with fanatics and bigots.
The cultural Left cannot win the cultural-values battle in the short run, but it will likely win it in the long run. People adapt generation by generation. The Left, therefore, has to think more strategically and less reactively. It has to focus on what is more important in the short run, and to me it couldn't be clearer: it has to win the hearts and minds of Main Street the way Roosevelt and the New Deal won it in the 1930s. I know: that was then, and this is now. But the main difference between then and now is that cultural values are keeping us divided and conquered. And so the real challenge for the Left is to transcend its tribal thinking and reach out to Main Street. That means bracketing the divisive cultural-values issues, and focusing on where everybody is hurting in the economic sphere.
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How power and money work in this country is the real issue--they corrupt both the establishment parties. Nothing changes substantively until a plausible alternative to this big-money-driven politics is presented as an issue for Americans to organize around. There are plenty of Americans from across the cultural-values spectrum that would respond to the kind of journalism that shines a light on how diseased the present system is, and it might actually contribute to getting something done. If that's what Stewart means by being in the game, then I agree. But that was not the message I heard him conveying at his rally.