THEYYYYYYY'RRRRE OFFFFFF!!!

Years ago there was an announcer at New York area horse tracks named Fred Cappasella. Fred has this wonderful, slightly nasal, slightly high pitched New York sound to his race calls I hope someone has them posted somewhere in cyberspace. Fred became so well know that the comedian Robert Klein did a take off of Fred arriving home and being greeted by his wife:

WIFE: Hello , Fred, what would you like for dinner?

Fred: (still in race announcer mode) MARTINI FIRST , SHRIMP SALAD SECOND,, VEGETABLE SOUP THIRD, COMING AROUND TO THE ENTREE , MEDIUM STEAK, THEN STRING BEANS AND POTATOS,AT THE FINISH, IT’S CHEESECAKE FOLLOWED BY COFFEE!!!

Fred would have been right at home in the current political season. With a year and a half to go before election 2008, the press has reduced the process to a horserace: who is ahead in the polls, who beats whom in a theoretical race, who has the most money. It’s been said by others that the media has reduced the election process to the equivalent of a junior high school class president’s race. I think that’s insulting to junior high schools, where adults can rein things in if they get out of hand. There is no one left to do that on the national level

We have Obama and Clinton throwing mud at each other, Giuliani waffling on every position, Mitt Romney trying to become a chameleon for the right wing of the Republican Party in trying to explain how he could have been elected governor of liberal Massachusetts, my goodness! And on, and on. The only thing we have not yet had was a candidate thumbing his (or her ) nose and going “Nyah, Nyah!” but I wouldn’t take bets against that happening in the next 18 months

For the press , it has become all process, all the time. And why not, it’s simple for us simple minded folks! We eat it up. It distills out complexity, nuance and meaning, and puts it all into a frame we can all understand-winning and losing. It would be a lot easier to put the political standings on the sports pages. Or maybe on the television schedule pages as a half hour sit-com (23 minutes less commercials). That just about fits our attention span.

NYTIMES columnist Paul Krugman talks about this issue in his Monday (2/26) column. He actually poses questions to the democratic candidates about health care and taxes. Don’t hold your breath waiting for a candidate to answer, and certainly don’t wait for some of the beat reporters to pick up on this idea of “content”. But don’t blame the reporters either. They are part of a system that has an insatiable demand for product to broadcast or to print. As a result, reporters, editors, in fact all of the cogs in the system take whatever they can get and push it through the media processor. What happens is that reporters wind out sounding less like Ed Murrow and more like Mr. Ed.

Please don’t get the idea that I’m placing all the blame on the press. I’m not. As someone who once worked in that field long ago, I learned that that you must take a very cynical approach to the media because they simply reflect who we are. They give us simplicity and platitudes because we buy it. It makes them money. Do not think for a second that “the media” are interested in informing you. They are not. The sole purpose of programming, be it news, sports, weather, Oprah, whatever, is to provide a means for you to glue your eyeballs to the commercials or print ads.

If we cannot deal with political analysis beyond 2 minutes, or three paragraphs, that kind of material gets exiled to public broadcasting or specialized publications.

Newspapers are losing money hand over fist. Television news is subsumed by the entertainment divisions. (one of my all-time favorite movies is “NETWORK”. This 1976 spoof(?) of the communications business was written by award-winner Paddy Chayefsky. Well, it was written as a spoof, but it turned out to be prophecy. RENT IT!). everything is dumbed down. Well almost everything. For some excellent reporting, try this fine piece from Seymour Hersh in the March 5^th edition of The New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/070305fa_fact_hersh

So the enemy is not what some in the blogosphere call “mainstream media “ or “MSM”.

“We have met the enemy, and he is us.”