catapult magazine

The democratic party is blaming Rush Limbaugh for its most recent political losses. Tom Daschle expressed concern a few days ago that Rush Limbaugh and “Rush Limbaugh wannabes” are setting dangerous trends in American political discourse. The former democratic majority leader urged democratic liberals to get involved in radio to turn the tide back in favor of the Democrats.

Daschle is concerned that politics and entertainment are getting confused. Limbaugh says that Daschle is trying to undermine his show by calling it merely entertainment. Entertainment, Rush says, has always been mixed up with politics and is a high calling. People need entertainment, that’s why we love Jay Leno and David Letterman’s political jokes. Rush also says that if Daschle had his own radio talk show, Daschle would certainly demonstrate just how unentertaining politics can be. What is the proper relationship between politics and entertainment?

It seems that now liberals are making the same complaints about media bias as conservatives made in the early nineties. Now, thanks to the popularity of Rush Limbaugh and The Fox News Channel, liberals are blaming the media for being conservatively biased. Limbaugh and Fox have been saying that they are only trying to balance the largely liberal media. But it appears from Daschle’s comments that conservatives have finally achieved this balance and have even tipped it heavily toward the right.

And I think liberals feel even more justified in thinking the media has tipped in the “right” direction based on the results of the recent elections. Unfortunately, I don’t know if the media’s tipped in the conservative direction. I really doubt it, though.

I guess the question to ask is if there is a left-wing Fox News alternative or a left-wing Rush alternative. The answer is no, aside from the odd Michael Moore book, movie and such. If “liberals” have a message for America, they don’t have a vehicle to deliver it to the people.

Personally, I think this whole idea of media bias, while interesting, is a bit misleading. There is no grand “media” conspiracy. There are portions of the media that have a strong liberal bias. There are portions that have a strong conservative bias. There are even specific issues where traditionally “liberal” media have a rather pronounced “conservative” bias (the issue of wellstone’s memorial being one — I’ll come back to that later).

just a second ago, you were essentially defending rush limbaugh for attempting to do just this. He was attempting to tarnish daschle’s reputation by accusing him of attempting to profit from the deaths of thousands of people, etc. etc.

You’re obviously aware that limbaugh has made many disparaging remarks about daschle in his career. He has only responded once that I know of, and that was presumably because of harrassment and threats received by him and his family. I don’t quite see how that constitutes “continuing to let rush limbaugh get under his skin”. He responded to actions which precipitated from the broadcast; he didn’t respond every time anything negative was said about him. If you think that makes him a weak, that’s fine. As for me, I’ll allow him (or anyone) the right to get slightly upset when his family is threatened or harrassed as a direct result of somebody else.

As for the wellstone memorial, it was definitely not a solemn memorial. It was not supposed to be a solemn memorial. It was supposed to be a celebration of Wellstone’s life. However, it turned into something a little more like a democratic rally in parts of the service, which is somewhat unfortunate, but IMO, not a huge crime. The media wanted a scandal, however, and they got it as soon as they heard a few scattered boos when the cameras were on trent lott. Read the minneapolis star tribune and almost every article will mention the phrase “scattered boos”, or something similar. If you had turned on CNN that week, however, you would have heard countless talking heads exclaiming outrage about trent lott being “shouted down” or “drowned out with booing” or something of the sort. As I said before, I saw the whole thing and I never heard any booing with my own ears, though I’m sure there was probably some. They also made it sound as if the entire service was more or less just a huge rally, which was really not the case. The vast majority was simply remembrance, though not particularly solemnly. The only part of the service that I thought was in very poor taste was the speech by Rick Kahn, who was one of only about 15 speakers there that night. But again, if you had been listening to CNN, you would have thought that the entire service was nothing but a big blood-thirsty rally.

But I’m not about to get all enraged about the “conservative bias” of the press, despite the fact that I see ‘news’ like this mangled by the mainstream media more and more often. In my opinion the problem has never really been ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ bias. The root of the problem is that we expect our news to entertain us. We expect our politics to entertain us. We don’t want anything to do with anything that won’t entertain us. So, what do we do? We find a scandal and we run with it. It doesn’t matter if it serves the interests of the liberals or the conservatives. it doesn’t matter if it serves the interests of the people. If it gets people’s blood pumping, then that’s the angle that the news media will emphasize. And I think that’s a problem.

Jonner – I don’t expect Rush Limbaugh to say anything without an agenda. He gets paid to go off on people – that’s the nature of talk radio, just like editorials in newspapers differ in content from news stories (or should anyway). Rush editorializes. Talk radio editorializes. There’s nothing wholly accurate about it. I was referring instead to tv, newspaper and radio journalists and their responsibility to provide fair and accurate news coverage and how it often seems they go a little vigilante and editorialize in their stories. I apologize if I did not make clear the transition of my thoughts. Cripes.

I’m not going to get into semantics with you about whether Daschle only responded ONCE and doesn’t “continue” to respond and whether Limbaugh has made more than one disparaging remark, etc. My point is: why feel sorry for a public figure who knows how to play the game? You think Tom Daschle is seriously, seriously aggrieved because of Limbaugh’s statements? Heck, no. Any response (and that would be ONE response, if I stand corrected) Daschle made regarding Rush Limbaugh was for the benefit of his (Daschle’s) own supporters. It was for effect. It was politicking. Playing the game. Doing some smearing in the name of partisan politics. I’m finished with this particular Daschle vs. Rush debate, so if you continue to feel strongly about it, I suggest you write Daschle a note of support. You never know – he might quote from it in a campaign piece next time around.

By the by, when you say we expect politics and news to entertain us, what do we mean by “entertain?” Isn’t anything that one finds enjoyable entertaining? If so, should we not enjoy politics or the news?

mrsanniep, I sense a bit of hostility here, and I’m not quite sure why.

Sure, you may enjoy politics and news if you want to. There’s a problem, however when our desire for entertainment prevents us from an accurate view of the world that is required to be an informed member of a democracy. There’s certain things that need to be done and need to be learned in order for democracy to truly work as it should, and many of these things are not particularly exciting. If we try to make the news exciting and simply leave out the important stuff that doesn’t get our blood pumping (which is what I feel is happening), we’re doing a disservice to democracy.

Cleaning toilets isn’t particularly fun, but it has to be done in order for the house to stay in order. Same with washing dishes, balancing the checkbook, etc.

As far as whether or not we should expect editorials and talk radio hosts to be accurate when they start ranting, I guess we’ll have to disagree on that one as well. In my opinion, that’s one of the big problems — not just from conservatives but from everybody. Disinformation for the sake of entertainment is peddled as news and our democracy is weaker for it.

And I must admit that I’m a bit confused as to what you mean by

Nope, I’m not hostile.

I think we’re now talking about the sensational aspects of news coverage, right? “Man picks his nose in traffic.” When we talk about wanting our news to be exciting, we’re not defining what we mean by exciting. Bloody, sexy, funny, etc. I was just looking to get an accepted definition on the table. Goodness knows, you and I don’t agree very easily.

As for my previous closing comment, I was blithely suggesting you redirect your enthusiasm for Daschle by sending him an encouraging letter, implying that he might quote from your letter in a campaign piece next election. Because politicians do that. You write them a nice letter, they turn around and exploit it to get some votes. Every statement a politician makes to the press (including those made in umbrage about Rush Limbaugh); every baby they kiss; every vote they cast in session … every act is part of a strategic plan that ultimately ends at re-election. Politics is about re-election.

I agree that defining entertainment as something separate from politics is not easy, and very well near impossible. This is the biggest point of disagreement for me when it comes to Daschle’s comments. It seemed like he was nervous that Rush Limbaugh had so much power mostly because he considers Limbaugh’s radio show to be pure entertainment; Daschle sees this as evidence that pure entertainment is getting mixed up in pure politics—is even affecting politics. Limbaugh sees this line of argument as an attempt to undermine his own act of free speech by calling it something often considered meaningless and empty in our society: pure entertainment. Rush does not want to deny that he is involved in entertainment, yet he doesn’t want entertainment to be defined so narrowly either.

I’m glad we have finally come to realize as a society that the news can never be objective, that all story-telling is inherently biased. One of the biases of television/radio/newspapers/magazines, however, is toward entertainment. An educational program on television cannot just be a scientific, objective, cold study of sharks. It has to throw in some feeding frenzies and attacks on metal cages with human divers inside. We might be tempted to blame people for being entertained by such things. We might scold people for not being satisfied with a bunch of statistics about sharks or with long-winded interviews of shark experts who have written doctoral theses on the behavioral patterns of the “sharkus surraptatus” in their natural habitat.

I don’t think we can blame people for wanting things to be entertaining, though. Our desire for story, for drama, is as old as humanity itself. What we can blame people for, however, is WHAT they find entertaining. Television, radio, newspapers, magazines and politics will always be entertaining, never pure or objective. If it was pure and objective, cold and sterile, none of us humans would want to be involved in any of it.

Ok, we’re finally getting somewhere here (I apologize for derailing the main point a bit).

mrsanniep, i don’t disagree that much of what politicians do is motivated by their political survival, but I find your one-dimensional charicature of politicians to be somewhat facile, and even counter-productive. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Ever since the recent elections when I heard countless co-workers complaining about how it doesn’t make sense to vote because it doesn’t really matter who gets elected — it’s all just political bullshit. Well, what came first, the chicken or the egg? Is it the fact that our politicians are so disconnected from us that there’s so much political apathy? or is it the political apathy that allows politicians to become disconnected? I don’t know claim to know the answer, but i’d guess that it’s a combination of the two. And I think the entertainment culture plays a part here as well. Our culture likes entertainment partially because it demands nothing of us. We can sit back and simply be entertained by an inanimate TV screen, and the world of the TV screen and the world that we live every day never really intersect. (before Grant jumps on me, let me emphasize that TV and entertainment in general can demand things of us, I’m not attempting to indict the medium as a whole. I’m simply talking about the predominant forms of entertainment available to most people in our society). When we treat politics and politicians as entertainment, we expect this same disconnect from our personal lives. It’s ironic in a sense that Television has both brought news and politics into our living rooms while at the same time increasing the disconnect we feel with our politicians. It also allows us to feel justified in making unfounded disparaging comments about people (a la rush limbaugh) without any sense of responsibility, because after all, they’re just a famous person on the TV screen, they’re not real people.

As far as the pure entertainment vs. pure politics debate, I have no idea what Daschle’s opinion on this is (although i doubt it’s as simplistic as has been painted here), I realize that there’s overlap between the two, and I have no intention of maintaining the ‘purity’ of either. But I think there are potential problems when one is masquerading as the other. When we no longer expect our editorialists to be accurate and check their facts before using them to advance their viewpoint, I think we’ve crossed the line. Take a program like Crossfire on CNN, where people like tucker carlson or paul begala regularly fabricate facts in order to stir up emotional debates and then cut to commercials before any serious discussion can take place. Then after commercial it’s on to the next issue in order to satisfy our 30-second attention spans and not bore us. This is not unusual, it happens on almost any news program, it’s just more pronounced on a program like crossfire. This program does very little to inform, it just satisfies our desire to see partisan squabbling and bickering, and spreads nearly as much disinformation as information. But because it’s on CNN, it’s passed off as a news program. By contrast, I watched a fascinating debate moderated by David Gergen on PBS the other day in which there was a wide range of perspectives, actually got into some depth on issues, and they were respectful of eachother instead of constantly cutting eachother off or throwing partisan barbs at eachother. If we, say, replaced Tucker Carlson with David Brooks (and changed the format of the show), we would be a vastly more informed country, but perhaps people wouldn’t get their fix of petty squabbling.

I’m not so sure about that, though. It depends what the alternative is. Coming back to my last analogy, we clean the bathrooms in our houses because the alternative is a messy and smelly bathroom. Sure, we could attempt to make cleaning the bathroom more entertaining, but we must be careful about how we do it. If, in our neverending quest to avoid tedium, we overdo it and start splashing water all over the place while we’re frollicking in our bathroom-cleaning, we’re not necessarily much better off. In the end, things still need to be cleaned up or we’ll be left with a messy or slippery bathroom. In the same way, neglecting our political duties (or dressing them up as entertainment to the point where we create other problems) could have serious consequences for our democracy. And one of those problems is an almost complete disconnect with the people who are supposed to be our representatives in government. But that’s just the beginning of the problems it could cause.

Grant, I’d also like you to expand on this statement: " What we can blame people for, however, is WHAT they find entertaining." In your view, what should people find entertaining. I’m kind of fascinated, because I didn’t expect to hear something like this from you.