Clinton’s Announcement Video

In case you missed it, Hillary Clinton is running for president. On Sunday, April 12, Clinton announced via YouTube video that she would be making a second run for the Oval Office after being narrowly defeated for the Democratic nomination for president in 2008 by Barack Obama. Clinton’s announcement had been anticipated for a few days, once Clinton’s team signed a lease to rent office space for its campaign headquarters in Brooklyn, but on another level, her intentions to run again had been expected for years, a fact that essentially meant that a number of media outlets and political activists already had pre-existing narratives in which Clinton’s candidacy could be framed. In fact, Clinton’s decision to announce on Sunday via social media was so widely anticipated that Saturday Night Live actually managed to parody Clinton’s web video outreach during their cold open even before her video went online.

These narratives reflect what Lance Bennett has identified as a tendency to impose reality television frameworks onto election coverage. Specifically Bennett seems to be talking about the so-called “gamedocs” or competition reality shows, such as Survivor, Fear Factor, or Big Brother, in which contestants are forced to undergo challenges in order to demonstrate their worthiness of winning the competition. For Bennett, such “candidate challenges” actually obscure substantive policy considerations, instead focusing on more superficial storylines. Bennett’s framework, I’d argue, helps us to understand how Clinton can be depicted, from both the right and the left, through similar, but strikingly contradictory narratives as someone who is at once a “celebrity” and also, simultaneously, disdainful of the news media that seemingly create her celebrity status through fawning profiles, and also as someone who is simultaneously too controlling of her messaging and incapable of crafting an effective message about herself. Finally, critics made coded reference to her age, turning her experience as a Senator and Secretary of State into a liability. Thus, for Hillary Clinton, the “candidate challenge” created by different media outlets, is to assume a contradictory set of performances that will meet all of these goals.

It should come as no surprise that the most overt attacks on Clinton’s announcement video came from Fox News. It is no longer controversial to suggest that Fox News has crafted an explicitly conservative approach to narrating the news. Fox has successfully cultivated a large conservative audience in the era of what Natalie Jomani Stroud has called “niche news.” But what is significant about Fox News is what Jeffrey Jones refers to as the news channel’s use of performative language that actually produces a reality in the guise of reflecting on or analyzing it.

Media Buzz on Clinton’s Announcement

This type of performativity functions powerfully in shows such as Howard Kurtz’s Media Buzz, which purports to analyze the media frames that are shaping politics. However, Kurtz’s segment openly reinforces several of the existing narratives used to shape Clinton’s persona independently of any political views she might have. The segment opens with Fox News contributor Mary Katharine Ham gleefully dismissing the announcement as a “snoozefest,” promoting the perception that Clinton is too boring to win the presidency. Similarly, Washington Examiner columnist Susan Ferrechio pushed the idea that the video was an example of Clinton “controlling the message” because she made the announcement via social media rather than during a live speech—despite the fact that most Republicans announced in a similar fashion. Further, by focusing on perceptions of Clinton’s personality, Ferrechio was able to deflect attention away from the actual content of the video, which emphasized (however vaguely) Clinton’s desire to fight for working families. Meanwhile Kurtz himself trotted out the frame (also imposed on Barack Obama) that Clinton might be “covered as a celebrity” even while suggesting, almost in the same breath that she had been “disdainful” of the media. Later that day, Brit Hume, again with little evidence to back up his argument, asserted that Americans were tired of the Clintons’ “weird marriage” and that their story was “old news” and therefore uninteresting to reporters seeking out the next bright, shiny object that  could distract them.

Notably, both Kurtz and Bill O’Reilly used the SNL sketch, in which Kate McKinnon, as a simultaneously naïve and controlling Hillary Clinton, attempts to make a selfie video announcement, to attach her to these existing media frames. A clip of Darryl Hammond as Bill Clinton joking about his sex life stands in as evidence of their “weird marriage.” Hillary stumbling repeatedly to be sympathetic reinforces the idea that she is controlling and out of touch. While I did find the SNL clip funny—and think it’s more subtle by far than Fox News’s use of it—it provided Fox with the shorthand to criticize Clinton, even while allowing the network to be in on the joke for a change when it comes to political satire.

That being said, even ostensibly liberal supporters of Clinton placed unrealistic obstacles on her announcement. Bruce Ackerman, among others, writing for The Huffington Post, blasted the video as a “capitulation” to Madison Avenue—i.e., controlling the narrative. Once again, we must turn to Jon Stewart to find a way to navigate the utterly absurd narratives that have been imposed on her. Stewart debunked many of these narratives for their absurd use of dystopian and apocalyptic imagery, pointing out that they vastly exaggerate Clinton’s center-left voting history, even while they also produce a reality for the Fox viewers who are the intended audience.  The reception of Clinton’s announcement video can tell us quite a bit, then, not just about perceptions of her as a candidate or the conservative efforts to derail her candidacy. It can also tell us quite a bit about the role of cable news in constructing artificial “candidate challenges” that do little to inform us about how that candidate will actually govern.

While the criticisms of CNN’s approach to Malaysia Airlines 370 are by now familiar, I want to explore the possibility that CNN’s coverage is actually—albeit unintentionally—meaningful. With its reliance on speculation, dependence on simulation, and occasional swerves into absurdity, it indexes the incomprehensibility of this disaster, marked by the failures of so many systems that seemed to promise safety, visibility, and order. To be clear, I do not mean to exonerate CNN, which is rather unabashedly utilizing this as a ratings grab. Nonetheless, their coverage vividly captures the essence of this disaster.

Some measure of qualified guessing is expected, even necessary, in any coverage of an unfolding disaster; CNN’s coverage is distinguished by its continued recourse to hypothesizing, but also the amount of latitude it gives to conjecture, as when it reported, in a way that many found insufficiently incredulous, that some people believed zombies had hijacked the plane. Criticizing such reportage is important, surely, but also eclipses its significance, as CNN’s speculation starkly illuminates the enormous epistemological gap created by the plane. It also reflects the failure of the rational and technologized systems designed to track aircraft during flight or locate them afterward. The imagined world governed by those devices (organized into grids of latitudes and longitudes, synchronized time zones, and orderly networks of predictable flight paths) cannot countenance the possibility of something like this.  But CNN’s coverage shows us how far we have strayed from that map.

This departure is amplified by the visual elements of its coverage. The now-infamous use of a toy plane as a prop surely risked trivializing the disaster; likewise its reliance on flight simulator cockpits and computer-generated images that hover around its “virtual studio.” Even as it spectacularizes the disaster, however, simulation also resonates uncannily with it. All the visual modes of searching have failed to locate the plane: satellite images, aerial surveillance, maps of ocean topography. The utterly perplexing and apparently absolute disappearance of the plane, whereby all that is solid does not melt into air but vanishes into the sea, is the sort of thing that we, with expectations that our most advanced machines will function perfectly and our acculturation to being monitored at all times, can scarcely imagine. In that context, a holographic plane is only marginally more unreal.

The only signature element of CNN’s coverage that has not yet been widely lampooned is its attention to the stories of bereaved families and friends, many of whom give interviews in which they profess hope that their loved one will be found alive. Stories like that of the daughter who has been devotedly tweeting her crew-member father, steeped in poignant absurdity, would not find much purchase in a more staid outlet. One man, Pralhad Shirsath, in an April 23 interview, asserted that the paucity and poor quality of the information from the Malaysian government indicates that they do not have enough “data” about what happened, and, by extension, to convince him that his wife is truly lost. Necessarily, the journalist pressed him, citing conclusive evidence about the fate of the plane, but the potential widower remains undaunted. CNN, by creating this universe that defies the conventions of journalism (and the sometimes cruel boundaries of common sense), has provided these mourners with a space where their bewildering grief might be articulated. Given the likelihood that it will be months, or years, or longer before the plane is found (if it is found at all), CNN’s lingering on the story mimics the looping returns of sadness in the perseverating endlessness of grief.

Although CNN’s vigil is often self-interested and carnivalesque, the clamor against it is problematic, too. It endeavors to sanitize our visual field by expunging the traces of the logically unknowable, the empirically invisible, and the affectively unpalatable in defense of all that they threaten to destabilize. To partake of CNN’s vision of the disaster is to acknowledge that it was, and remains, both tragic and incomprehensible, and to allow those two dimensions of the event to dictate the disorderly and unpredictable terms by which it appears.

With Glenn Beck’s upcoming departure from the cable news network that made him a household name and political player, it certainly seems time to reflect on the impact he has had on television news. Although Beck had been in cable news (CNN) prior to his arrival at the Fox News Channel in January 2009, it was the unfettered platform that the conservative network provided Beck to unleash his “Mad Prophet of the Airwaves” persona that enabled his stardom. What has transpired since that time is that Beck (with Fox News) has been an enormously influential force in redefining cable television news and the role it plays in the construction political reality. Thus, as he departs Fox News to create his own network (GBTV), here is a cursory look at his legacy:

1. News is Political Entertainment Too: Certainly the lines between entertainment television and serious public affairs programming have been blurring for decades. When we speak of “political entertainment,” though, Jon Stewart and Bill Maher typically come to mind. But Glenn Beck has demonstrated the meshing of entertainment and politics from the other side, that is, “journalism.” For Beck, politics and current events were simply the raw material for his spectacularly entertaining performances of right-wing ideology. With a wardrobe of Viking helmets and 3D glasses, demonstrative stunts (gasoline cans and boiling frogs), and a professorial chalkboard, Beck entertainmentized public affairs on a news channel, all while arguing that he was delivering valuable public information important to a democratic polity. As he ventured on comedy tours and political rallies outside the television box, he demonstrated further how politics and entertainment are largely one and the same, free and open to all performers who can capitalize on public passions and the audience’s desire to participate in such “non-fiction” performances.

2. News Creates Political Reality: Following J. L. Austin’s theory of performativity, speech acts—including the news—don’t just report on reality, they are capable of creating reality as well. A variety of political players have honed this to an art form in the contemporary political arena (Sarah Palin’s “Death Panels”), but Glenn Beck became a regular and reliable fount of such political reality creation. It doesn’t matter whether what he asserted was untrue—Obama as racist; Obama favoring the Muslim Brotherhood; socialism=fascism; Van Jones as “radical revolutionary communist;” Sharia law in America. It only matters that his viewers believed these things to be so, and they do so in part because of the authoritative platform from which Beck speaks. When numerous Republican presidential contenders assert their vigilance against the assertion of Shariah law during the first Republican presidential debate of the 2012 campaign season, one begins to see just how powerful such reality creation has become.

3. There Is No Such Thing as Too Crazy for Journalism: Through Beck, Fox demonstrated that if a host can draw and keep a large audience, that is sufficient for staying on the air, irrespective of the wildly irresponsible and bat-shit crazy statements, antics, and rantings Beck produced. While one might think such antics would hurt Fox’s credibility as a “fair and balanced” “news” network, in fact, Beck served a quite useful purpose in building its brand as a place where liberal ideas and pieties would be attacked with full force. What is more, with Beck defining just how far out the far right could go, he made others at the network—Steve Doocy, Bill O’Reilly, Megyn Kelly—seem sane and somewhat moderate by comparison. To stay with the analogy to the movie Network, Sybil the Soothsayer seems, well, completely natural and normal when placed beside Howard Beale.

4. Conspiracy Theories Constitute Legitimate News: Gone are the days when the John Birch Society peddled its conspiracy theories via newsletters, pamphlets, and other small time means of communication. With his “expert” guests, blackboards, documentaries, and readings lists, Beck demonstrated that a news network was the legitimate place for the presentation of all sorts of fanciful political renderings to millions of viewers. A self-taught man, Populist Beck nevertheless saw it his duty to connect the dots of an overarching grand conspiracy of liberal and progressive agents destined to subvert “traditional American values” from within. Beck’s blackboard was literally his canvass, and his viewers were cast a studious pupils ready to receive their lessons in order to save democracy. And here again, the overtly ridiculous nature of Beck’s conspiracy theories only made the network’s other grand conspiracy narratives offered up in its “news” programming—the Ground Zero Mosque, Obama’s birth certificate, Black Panthers intimidating voters—seem legitimate and not too far fetched.

5. News Credibility Is Not What You Think It Is: Irrespective of Beck’s wild assertions and conspiracy theories, Fox felt fully comfortable in having Beck appear across a variety of Fox programs in the morning, afternoon, and evening. Typically an appearance on another program suggests some level of expertise or credibility as a source. Fox smartly realized that Beck, like network contributor Sarah Palin, need not have any credibility as someone with a relationship to truth or facts, only credibility in his or her relationship viewers. If viewers trust in his or her opinions, then the credible truth is what viewers and hosts make it out to be.

Upon announcement of Beck’s departure, Fox noted that it would maintain a relationship with the host as he continued to develop future projects for the network. It is hard to fathom, though, how any such projects could be as significant as these fundamentally redefining aspects of that which now (legitimately?) comprises television news.