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.

1) Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium will become the first Sony film mixed both for Dolby Atmos and for Barco’s rival Auro 11.1 format. Meanwhile, the British theater chain Vue said it is currently “testing” Atmos in its select Xtreme auditoriums, while Barco signed a 15-picture deal with DreamWorks Animation. The two companies are hoping that their products will coexist in theaters so as to avoid an all-out format war.

2) DreamWorks also announced a potentially controversial coproduction with its Shanghai based Oriental DreamWorks and the state-owned China Film Group to adapt the popular Tibet Code adventure novels for the big screen. Jeffrey Katzenberg, however, denies any political motivation behind the project. The Indiana Jones-esque films will begin production after King Fu Panda 3.

3) Quentin Tarrantino’s Django Unchained will get another chance at the Chinese box office after officials pulled the film from theaters within minutes of its initial release on April 11th. The film will re-open on May 12 with several sexual and violent images likely removed.

4) In streaming news, Amazon.com announced it will soon release a set-top box to compete with Roku and AppleTV. Netflix is adding the option for a single account to stream up to four videos at once.  The current limit is two simultaneous streams. Netflix also unveiled nine new posters for their upcoming season of Arrested Development.

5) NBC renews five of its dramas for next season, including Revolution and Grimm. Meanwhile once-popular shows like The Office and Fox’s American Idol hit all-time ratings lows this past week.

6) In cable news, CNN is in talks to add Stephanie Cutter and Newt Gingrich to its reboot of the network’s once-popular Crossfire debate show. CNN also topped Fox and MSNBC in the 25-54 demo during the Watertown manhunt on Friday.  However, Fox bested all of cable programming in total viewership during the week of the Boston bombing, edging out USA 2.87M to 2.62M.  CNN placed third with 1.99M and MSNBC placed 19th with only 923k.

7) Reddit general Manager Erik Martin admitted he deeply regrets how some of the Boston marathon discussions on his site “fueled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiraled into very negative consequences for innocent parties.” Some media outlets have been critical of the way the website was handling the ongoing investigation, though others were more defensive of Reddit’s involvement.

8) In twitter news, the AP’s twitter feed was hacked with claims of two explosions at the White House, causing the Dow to see momentary drop of about 130 points. The Onion‘s twitter feed responded in form, and has had more than 1,000 re-tweets since its posting. None of this seemed to deter Former President Clinton from officially joining the social media site, nor from making the announcement on The Colbert Report.

9) Disney’s slated film adaptation of Stephen Sonheim’s Into the Woods is inching toward including Meryl Streep and Johnny Depp as leads. The company’s theme parks in Florida and California will also stay open for 24 hours on Friday, May 24th in order to offer visitors an all-nighter to celebrate the beginning of summer.

10) iTunes celebrates its 10-year anniversary, and though some journalists called the online music store an “instant revolution,” analysts suggest it is now losing significant market share to streaming services like Spotify.

For experience is […] a broadening and an identification, a passage from the particular to the universal, the experience [épreuve] of scission, of the finite, of the conditioned. It is voyage (Reise) and migration (Wanderung). Its essence is to throw the “same” into a dimension that will transform it. It is the movement of the “same” which, changing, finds itself to be “other.” (p. 44)

I thought of this passage when I read about the January 2nd deal to sell the U.S. cable station Current TV to the Qatar-based news network Al Jazeera. I have a longstanding interest in how TV news translates foreign experience for viewers (see here and here): How do journalists explain to viewers how members of a foreign culture understand the world and their place in it? But what makes the Current TV/Al Jazeera deal interesting is it inverts that question: How might a foreign network explain Americans to themselves? Might Al Jazeera provide something like an “experience of the foreign” for Americans? What would that even look like?

A number of analysts have provided useful accounts of the deal and its implications. (Here’s what the New York Times had to say, and here’s the Columbia Journalism Review.) Current TV began in 2005, a creation of Al Gore’s. At first, it had a populist, DIY-inflected approach, and it solicited videos from viewers. It evolved in the following years, never finding much of an audience. Most recently, it tried to brand itself as a liberal news outlet, and in 2011, it hired Keith Olbermann, formerly of MSNBC. It fired him a year later, but the image stuck. When the Al Jazeera deal was announced, pundits on Fox News began to rave about links between liberals and Osama bin Laden, leading the Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart to call the announcement the “first Fox boner alert of 2013.”

Al Jazeera, of course, is a network with a global reach that has so far failed to penetrate the US market. Al Jazeera English is currently available only in New York, Washington, DC, Burlington, VT, Toledo, OH, and Bristol, RI, for a total reach of just under 5 million viewers, although people can stream it online. What Al Jazeera gains in the deal with Current TV is not so much the network itself as access to its viewers. Current TV is available to about 40 million cable and satellite subscribers, although some cable operators dropped it after the deal with Al Jazeera was announced.

What makes the deal interesting to me is that Al Jazeera plans to launch Al Jazeera America instead of airing Al Jazeera English. Rather than focus on the majority world, as Al Jazeera English has done, Al Jazeera America will focus on domestic news, but from a perspective other than that of its major commercial competitors. As commentators like Danny Schechter argue, it could succeed precisely because it reaches viewers who don’t find themselves represented elsewhere:

An Al Jazeera America needs to plug in to and resonate with American sensibilities and our mix of opinion from A to Z, not just A to B. It needs to understand our country’s growing anger and frustration with such issues as inequality and dissatisfaction with posturing politicians of all political stripes.

In other words, Al Jazeera America’s “translation” might have a paradoxical effect: its “foreign” lens might bring into sharper relief distinctive (and distinctively) American perspectives that are absent from CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and even NPR.

Of course, I’m not sure Al Jazeera America is the right network or the only network to provide a foreign lens for Americans to examine themselves. And Matt Sienkiewicz is right to encourage a healthy skepticism where Al Jazeera’s claims are concerned. Nor am I so naive as to believe it will attract many viewers who aren’t already inclined to think outside of a “mainstream” American framework. But its potential to do something new will make it a very interesting network to watch.

* “Man” is the historically accurate term here — the Romantics were writing in the eighteenth century.

Journalists and bloggers have lined up to peddle new conventional wisdom as to why, given all the time and effort employed to preach right-wing Republicanism all the time, the network seemingly failed as both an electoral strategy and as a news organization. Fox’s mission, they argue, was supposedly repudiated. They point to the failures of Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, who has featured too many kooks on his network for it to be taken seriously. They argue that Fox misinformed its viewers over the last four years—from its mad-cap conspiracy theories and outright lies to its closing campaign to push unrealistic fantasies of a Romney landslide. They point to the failures of the audience, which supposedly wants to be lied to, or wants to hear what it wants to hear. They point to the failures of Fox’s supposed electoral strategy of constant anti-Obama, anti-Democrats rhetoric, and thus, they contend, Fox must start over.

Perhaps some of those arguments have merit, but I tend to think they miss more important, better explanatory points. The failures of Fox is not about misinformation, for information is not the commodity it is selling. The failures aren’t about Ailes trying to get his guy elected, for there is no overall electoral strategy from which Ailes is working. And it’s not about making the audience comfortable by giving it the lies it wants to hear, because audiences don’t directly drive the specifics of content. Rather, Fox is fundamentally about two things that go together—community and money. Through the former, the latter arrives with ease.

The creation and sustaining of a community of viewers is one of the most important cable industry strategies of the post-network era, as I have argued elsewhere. Fox News has, by all accounts, created one of the most loyal audience communities, and done so largely through ideology. As numerous polls have shown, conservative viewers have found the place on TV where they call home.

Another, perhaps more helpful word for community, though, is tribe. Fox isn’t attractive to viewers because viewers have some overt affection for Dick Morris, Michelle Malkin, or Steve Doocy, or belief in the information (or vitriol) these commentators and hosts spout. Rather, those are just people found within the tribe. The tribe coheres, and its participants return, for other reasons.

Let’s look at the Chicago Cubs as an example. By all measure, the Cubs are losers. They haven’t won the World Series in over 100 years, and when post-season opportunity knocks, they are always sure to disappoint. What is more, there is a completely viable team that could be cheered instead—the recent World Series champs (2005), the White Sox—who live right across town, where the baseball fan can even find a ticket on any given day.

But Cubs fans come for something else. It is who they are; it’s where their peeps reside. And never mind that tickets are hard to come by, or that you have to sit on the roof of a house that isn’t even in the damn ballpark. To be a Cubs fan is to be at Wrigley Field and to be with other fellow Cub fans, irrespective of the manager’s strategy for winning, and irrespective of the fact that you rarely hear what you want to hear (e.g., the roar of the crowd). The same goes with conservatives and Fox News. Audiences come because this is their crowd and their team and their stadium. They lost this season, but 2010 was glorious.

What Fox is selling is a worldview that makes sense to its audience’s worldview. They aren’t selling information, because the audience didn’t come for that. Indeed, as Chan-Olmsted and Cha argue in the International Journal of Media Management, studies of cable news audiences suggest that the motivation to view in order to learn information is not a primary factor in people’s choice of cable news viewing.

Fox News CEO Roger Ailes

Neither is Fox in the business to convert voters in Wisconsin, Colorado, or Nevada. They are concerned with feeding their tribe in Alabama, Indiana, and Arizona. It’s about communion, a word that shares a central relationship to community and communication, as James Carey famously pointed out. These are communers who return day after day, week after week, and by doing so, leave their offering in the viewing plate.

News Corp didn’t just renew Roger Ailes contract before the election because they were confident he had brought or would bring them a victory. They did so because he makes them nearly a billion dollars in profits (40% of News Corps profits), a unit that is second only to the company’s film division for profitability. We might argue (as did Thomas Frank in 2004 concerning the electoral defeat of certain right-wing culture war initiatives) that failure is good for business. It sustains impatience, and given the network’s tendency to cast the viewer as protagonist in the struggle against evil liberals and the Kenyan Overlord, the viewer is, as Victor Turner once wrote, “overborn by duty” to keep tuning in, ever vigilant in defense of his or her core values that are under attack.

Perhaps the most prescient analysis of Fox News was made over a year ago, and unrelated to this election. Former Bush speechwriter and conservative columnist and blogger David Frum noted, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us. Now we’re discovering that we work for Fox.” Literally, Fox has masterfully mined the fields of Republican politics for a cast of characters that make up the Fox team. Win or lose (preferably the latter, for then the Palins, Roves, and Huckabees are available for air time), they provide the talent and ideological perspective from which Fox crafts its programming around daily events and partisan struggles.

We make a mistake, I contend, in continuing to evaluate Fox’s place and role in American political culture through the lens of journalism (and its assumed information-seeking citizen-viewers), or even through the lens of politics. Fox News is about television and the assemblage of the largest audience it can muster. Like other reality shows that feature food or fashion or fishing, this one just happens to use politics for its performances.

It is in this regard that Frum gets it right—as the tribe comprised of the Republican politicians and Republican viewers engage in their ritual performances, they provide the (free) labor, while Fox simply coordinates, orchestrates, and performs its public demonstration of the tribe’s fight for survival. Unfortunately for Republicans, in this instance, another tribe has spoken.

But there was a second reason to celebrate for social scientists.  If Wednesday morning left both the electoral map and Republican politicians feeling a little blue, there was another occupational group in need of collective introspection: the class of political journalists, commentators and pundits, who in the cause of the campaign had increasingly wilfully disregarded the lessons of the academic disciplines that form journalism’s very foundation.

Obama’s victory was decisive, winning 332 votes in the Electoral College compared to Romney’s 206 (assuming Obama will hold his nearly 50,000 votes advantage in Florida). His margin in the popular vote will be around three million, taking eight out of the nine states news media had identified as swing states throughout the campaign. The clarity of this victory appeared to have been surprising to many. For months many news media had promised a nailbiter, talked of a race that was “too close to call.” Some predicted a Romney victory or even a Romney landslide, leaving Jed Levison to gleefully list 34 blown election predictions on Daily Kos. From Glen Beck to Newt Gingrich reviewing these predictions promises a great deal of liberal Schadenfreude, but they are unsurprising. They were attempts by individuals who had openly pinned their colors to the GOP mast to present the Republican ticket as competitive for obvious strategic reasons. And while I am aware of the dangers of taking Fox News blatant disregard of fundamental journalistic ethics in their entirely partisan perspective, few will disagree if I rank Fox News among these campaigners and lobbyists rather than among actual news media.

The denial of Republican activists and supporters upon learning of Obama’s victory which we could witness across Twitter and broadcast news alike the day after the election is as much an expression of the first stage of grief as it is of the fragmentation of the public sphere which has allowed audiences to construct textual boundaries in their engagement with news that limit the discourses they encounter to those that correspond with their own partisan perspective and horizons of expectation.

This crisis of public discourse is not a new insight. Yet, it is confounded by a failure of political journalism that includes the standards of many, though not all professional journalists. The most shocking aspect of the campaign coverage was that mainstream media’s staunch reluctance to indicate the way the race was leaning and developing. After the first debate between the candidates in Denver, the notion of “Mittmentum” captured the journalistic imagination. Predictions commonly identified all nine swing states as ‘toss up.’  As little as a week ago, the Washington Post moved Ohio back into this category. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, to the bewildered amusement of Obama supporters, continued calling polls showing the President leading by 2 or 3% a “statistical tie.” Right up to the election pundits from NPR to the BBC stressed how in such a close race any outcome was possible.

But was it? While the old hacks of the trait peddled the story of a “too close to call” election, those contributing to the debate from different professional backgrounds, often via the blogosphere, offered alternative ‑ and as it turns out far more accurate assessments ‑ of the state of the race. Nate Silver, economics graduate and baseball analysts, is only the most prominent exponents of the many who approached the polling data with the systematic approach that was not only absent among many political journalists, but that also proved entirely accurate.  On his blog Fivethirtyeight, licensed by the New York Times two years ago, Silver quantified the chances of an Obama re-election at 90.9% while many political journalists continued to resort to the old “toss up” line. In the end, Silver called every single of the fifty states correctly, including closely fought North Carolina, Florida, Virginia and Ohio. Other’s such as the Princeton Electoral Consortium, run by Sam Wang, neuroscientist and regular contributor to the BBC’s outstanding statistics radio program More or Less, were similarly accurate.

Ezra Klein summarized the backlash against Silver by political commentators and politicians Silver’s model suggested were loosing last week in the Washington Post. Now that his predictions have been proven highly accurate again, those who rushed to his defense before have plenty of cause to celebrate the triumph of maths. Anthony Goldbloom in the Sidney Morning Herald echoes many such reactions when he claims “the ability to analyze large amounts of data is starting to replace expert knowledge.”

It is tempting to agree with Goldbloom’s claims. Too often during the campaign was political journalism lacking in basic literacy and numeracy. My personal highlight in this respect came early on election night with CNN’s Gary Tuchman exemplifying political journalism’s crisis in just three words: trying to compare the handwritten returns from three polling stations in Virginia to the respective 2008 results, Tuchman concluded they are “almost exactly similar” – a phrase that in its tripart oxymoronic denial of numerical and linguistic logic is a multifaceted complex of stupidity and ignorance reminiscent of an Escher painting.

But it is a false dichotomy. This is not about data crunching Wunderkinder with degrees in economics, sociology or statistics whose computer-powered precision faces off with the gut and intuition of aging political journalists. While Silver’s model (whose code he understandably doesn’t disclose) appears to be remarkably accurate and he is to be congratulated on his remarkable achievements, it does not spell the redundancy of political journalists. It doesn’t prove the supremacy of statistics over other forms of analysis. Rather it calls for something else: better political journalism and a thorough reflection on what political journalism is for and how it ought to be conducted.

The accuracy of Silver’s predictions is not a triumph of maths and statistics, it is an illustration of the need to reflect on methods and epistemology. What much of political punditry over the past months failed to recognise are the basics of methodology that any student on our undergraduate courses in sociology or Media Studies will learn in their first year: there is no universally accurate method, and different research questions require different methods of study. If we are interested in question of “how many?” and “who?” (which tend to be fundamental to predicting election results), political commentator’s gut feeling or “having talked to the people here in Ohio” are a poor substitute for systematic analysis of different polls and polling average. And while no one asks for the bulk of political journalists to share the depth of statistical literacy that mark Silver’s or Wang’s work, asking about sampling strategies of different pollsters – who was being interviewed and by what means – is no prerogative of experts but are questions that our said undergraduates seem to have rather greater confidence in answering that many professional journalists across major networks and national newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic.

The point is that it is not the job of political correspondents, pundits and commentators to sit around tables and predict elections in the same way that retired athletes get to make a living by speculating about the outcome of sporting competitions. They are, evidently, no good at it. Instead, we need commentators and journalists who understand the nature of evidence (be it statistical or otherwise) and focus on the questions they are better equipped to answer ‑ not the quantitative, but qualitative questions of the campaign: the “whys” and “hows”, not the “who” and “how manys.”

There are two possible explanations for their failure to do so, both of which I believe are contributing factors. Firstly, broadcasters have a double incentive for portraying a close race. Again, much like sporting contests that are billed as epic battles full of suspense and surprise, covering a closely fought presidential election is likely to attract higher ratings than a foregone electoral conclusion. Yet, even more importantly, portraying the contest as close is the premise for sustaining the enormous influx of revenue from campaigns buying airtime with donors on both sides being much less likely to contribute the cash that ultimately ends up in media organizations’ pockets if there appears little to play for. Someone like Nate Silver only spoils the party here.

Beyond this institutional failure, however, also lies a failure of journalistic integrity and competency on an individual level, as many professional journalists fail to approach their work in a systematic and indeed scientific fashion; a failure to question the empirical basis of their assumptions and conclusions and to engage with the plethora of information and knowledge from the academic community and other expert citizens that via the world wide web has become easily accessible to journalists and the general public alike. This failure is reflective of a disengaged, complacent and lazy attitude towards the nature of knowledge. I am not quite, like Judith Lichtenberg, raising the spectre of positivism here. But in face of a cultural and political movement that has appropriated the lessons of deconstructionism to set out to construct its own reality, political journalists have to learn that the old party trick of ‘balancing’ won’t do. Truth is not the mid-point between Karl Rove’s opinion and that of a morally sane person. Instead journalists need to take the real lesson from the accuracy of Silver’s predictions: not that numbers beat words, not that quantitative research is inherently superior to qualitative investigation, but that whatever type of knowledge and information we deal with, not least professionally, we need to critically examine its empirical and epistemological premises.  From election predictions to reporting on social deprivation, global warming, and a range of other topics in which journalists seem unable to penetrate the fog of political spin through an almost hysterical reluctance to engage with the science behind the claims, leaving them to simply recycle talking points and poorly understood statistics, it’s logic, not balance that matters. Now that the election is over, those who make a living from creating and distributing knowledge, information and evaluation, shouldn’t marvel at the “magic powers” of maths – they should appreciate the indispensable need to critically reflect on the processes by which they do so. As the godfather of political punditry James Carville himself would have said: “It’s methodology, stupid!”

The “Occupy” movement that has taken hold in cities and towns across the United States was first ignored, then mistreated by some, revered by others, and, strangely, mocked by still others.  There has been some thoughtful reporting of the movement in corporate media, and I do not want to lump all coverage together. But when I think about how anti-war protesters were marginalized by cable news in 2003 and how the Tea Party protests were glamorized in 2009, I’m quite intrigued by the TV journey this movement has taken.  Three moments in the recent coverage stand out to me:

Fox News vs. Jesse LaGreca: In this interview (which actually did not air), a Fox News reporter listens to LaGreca’s eloquent defense of Occupy Wall Street, which includes a spirited critique of the news coverage.  The Fox News reporter then challenges La Greca and says, “…you wouldn’t be able to get your message out there without us.”  Sadly, LaGreca did not correct his interviewer.  How did Occupy Wall Street launch and organize, if not via social media?  TV news was late to the party but still wants to take credit for throwing it.

MSNBC takes to the streets: We all know that MSNBC has executed a few brand shifts over the years and has emerged from a confused adolescence into a focused adulthood.  The brand it has settled on is “to-the-left-of-CNN,” and some of its personalities reflect this more than others.  During the eight hours I’m in my office each weekday, I keep the TV on MSNBC, partly because I have no remote control for that TV.  So, when I see Dylan Ratigan participating in a secular call-and-response with NYC protesters, I scrunch my face a bit and wonder whether this cheerleading is productive.  I’m no believer in journalistic objectivity, but I’m also suspicious of news folks who insert themselves into the story.  With Glenn Beck it was demagoguery, but with Ratigan it feels like shameless self-promotion.  Which, in light of MSNBC’s recent promotional spots, fits in quite well with the network.

The Daily Show throws rotten fruit at the stage: First, I wish people would stop looking to Jon Stewart to be the voice of the young(ish) Left.  He isn’t truly happy with a rally unless he’s staging it on the National Mall and taking a firm stand against taking a firm stand.  And, at times, TDS goes out of its way to sever its ties with liberal causes.  Case in point: Samantha Bee framing a Occupy Wall St. segment in terms of potty breaks and bad hygiene.  Yes, we get it.  You can be as grouchy toward these protesters as you can be toward the Tea Partiers.  But without Bee’s charm, this is a Fox News story.

Aside from these moments, we see a lot of the same old material: violence-driven stories that point out the NYPD’s excessive force or dismissive stories that paint the protesters as a nuisance.  As I write, @Occupy_Boston is tweeting for reinforcements as Boston PD is threatening to remove the protesters from their campsite.  Impending police action was the main thrust of the local Boston news coverage of today’s largely student-led march.  These stories are all to be expected.  And while at one level I question the usefulness of much of this coverage, I know full well that I searched the sky fruitlessly for a news helicopter covering the Occupy Boston march I attended on October 8.  There was no news helicopter.  There was no aerial shot to capture the crowd of marchers descending on Newbury Street and befuddled Brooks Brothers shoppers.  There were many tweets and cell phone videos that could only fit a handful of protesters into the screen.  Even though television news often misses the figurative big picture, it’s the only outlet with the means to give us the symbolic value of the literal big picture.

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.

I quit The Daily Show cold turkey this summer. I had stopped watching the cable news networks long before that because I couldn’t take the yelling, the distorting, and the shallow reporting anymore. And unfortunately, The Daily Show just kept reminding me that what I hated was there, unrelenting and unchanged. Jon Stewart thoroughly depantsed Jim Cramer in an interview; he went right back to his boobish antics on CNBC. The show exposed Fox News’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal hypocrisy; the network’s ratings stood strong. Stewart mocked Glenn Beck’s chalkboard hysteria in an impression so spot-on it might as well have been the real thing; some weeks later, Beck trotted out his chalkboard on the National Mall to many thousands of devoted supporters. So at some point I just couldn’t take any of it anymore, neither the inanity of the TV news media nor the seemingly ineffectual mockery of it. I was just exasperated by the lack of consequences for what I perceived as journalistic injustice and felt alienated by seeing it paraded on TV so much.

Then I heard rumblings about a rally, at first a (seemingly) grassroots movement to encourage Stephen Colbert to host a Rally to Restore Truthiness, then the real deal, an official announcement of the Sanity and Fear rallies. I was highly intrigued. This, I thought, this promised to finally…um…er, what exactly? I didn’t really know. But the call to restore sanity spoke directly to my frustrations with the karmic illogic that had driven me away from anything related to basic cable news. I was mostly excited that this was to be a public gathering, not a TV show, where I could share thoughts in the moment with like-minded people, rather than just yelling at my TV screen.

So I went to the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. Did it reinvigorate my faith that blowhard news pundits would be shamed into doing credible work and real journalism would rise up? No, not at all. In fact, as affecting as Jon Stewart’s ending speech was, its substance was really no different than what he had been saying on his show when I stopped watching. But thankfully, at least, my feeling of alienation was obliterated by the roar of the crowd, the graciousness of the gathered, and the recognition that it wasn’t just me and my TV screen in a battle, it was a huge group of us (plus innumerable signs) yearning for rationality and accountability.

In fact, skimming tweets after the rally, it became overwhelmingly evident that the TV experience was quite different than the live experience. Yes, both at home and on the Mall, there were moments of boredom (turns out John Legend is a Chicago Cubs-caliber rally killer). But to cite just one example, the bit I saw mocked the most on Twitter, the Mythbusters-directed wave, was actually a joy to experience live (in my section of the crowd, at least). It offered our first glimpse on the video screens of the whole assembled audience, which resulted in a collective “Woah,” and waiting first for the wave to get to you and then for it to finally end after you really hit home what a mass of humanity we were. Ok, I’ll grant that the group sounds thing fell pretty flat live (coordinating movements with strangers is fine; making weird sounds with them is uncomfortable). But the group jump was followed by awestruck, giddy laughter as we now not just saw but fully felt our mass together. That visceral feeling of unity was exactly what I traveled to experience firsthand (even if it was measured by science as no more impactful than a minor car crash). It was what I had lost from being immersed in the divisiveness of TV news images and online comments sections. The subsequent events and Stewart’s eloquent final speech also reminded me that recognizing the problems of political discourse doesn’t have to come with only misery attached. It can come with pride in the collective acknowledgment of what is still just and a defiant spirit of hope (yes, I got a hopium contact high out there).

Again, I don’t expect a single change in the news media or politics or human relations in the wake of the Rally for Sanity. It really did just boil down to a party where we reveled in self-congratulatory agreeability for a little while. I do hope that I can carry the spirit it captured back home with me, though, and translate it into a renewed faith in the power of television shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to make us more self-aware of the discourses around us, both on screens and right next to us, and the power of sharing a public moment with strangers.

(This report was made possible in part by support from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame.)

1. This is not about media excess. Lunatics don’t need mainstream news media to create enormous problems. Witness the Reverend Fred Phelps, infamous for his “God Hates Fags” protests. The media typically ignore his shenanigans, yet it will take a ruling by the Supreme Court to finally put an end to his protests at funerals. Here too, as Justin Elliot reported in Salon, this story was getting a lot of attention in the Muslim-world long before it became a media spectacle in the U.S. The reason why, of course, is that it fits within the broader right-wing war against Islam that is being waged daily in the U.S. and in Europe. Irrespective of whether those wars are waged over real (Iran) or fictitious (Obama as Muslim) issues, they are rightfully received as threatening to the Muslim world. Where the media has demonstrated excess is in its coverage of the Park51 “Ground Zero mosque” project, buying into the right’s cynical machinations and Fox News’ promotion of this as Issue Number One, while stoking a “controversy” where none had previously existed.

2. This is not about a lone lunatic fringe figure named Terry Jones. In suspending his antics, Jones directly linked that “deal” to the discussion over the “Ground Zero mosque.” Jones figured himself as an important figure, even a hero, in that battle. But that battle is larger than Jones, Sarah Palin, Fox News, and the other instigators of this hysterical outpouring of bigotry. What is ascendant is the tendency toward fundamentalism in American thinking and behaviors, or if not the “American” mindset writ large, certainly in the rhetoric that continues to dominate public discourse. Writing during the Cold War, political scientist Murray Edelman noted the tendency for nations to mirror their enemies. Fundamentalist thinking isn’t just that which dominates Middle Eastern politics and religion at this moment in time—it is that which consumes us as well. Jones is just one of the less “respectable” members of a much larger constituency.

3. This is not about the book-burning event itself. Now that Jones has “suspended” his ceremony and no books were actually burned, has the Muslim-world breathed a sigh of relief and gone back to its previous concerns? Protesters in Afghanistan rail on, while two have actually been killed as a result of the fervor over the stated intent to burn the Islamic holy book. Americans have, in effect, already “burned” the Quran, whether real copies were turned to ash or not. We burned it with our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. We burned it every time we offered our blind support of Israel’s worst offenses against international law. We burned it by allowing citizens to use the religion as a substitute racial epithet when attacking our president. The damage has already been done, whether Jones’s event proceeds or not.

As news media take measure of their performance during the pause in the action, perhaps they should stop obsessing about themselves and train their sights on the broader discourses of fundamentalism, bigotry, and hatred that define our times.

Take the Tea Party “Movement,” for instance. By most level-headed accounts, this “outpouring” of populist rage, right-wing hatred, and visible anger is less a “movement” or political tsunami than a media event. What is worse, it is something that liberals have played an important role in constructing. Certainly cable news has played a big role here as well, helping craft the movement (see Glenn Beck), then supporting and promoting its activities at every opportunity (Fox News, but also CNN and MSNBC). But is all this attention merited? It is hard to imagine other “movements” of much greater importance—immigration reform, for instance—receiving the amount of attention these folks have received (that is, until Arizona rightwingers overplayed their hand). The same holds true for the specific politicians and wingnuts that populate and animate this “movement,” from Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann to Glenn Beck and Michael Steele. Liberals—myself included—rant, rave, scream, laugh, and gesticulate over every idiotic statement and boneheaded hiccup these folks emit, positioning ourselves somewhere between amazement at their stupidity to outright fear and terror that the clowns might end up running the circus.

By focusing on them so intently, their extremism doesn’t marginalize them, as should be the case. Instead, their nuttery becomes the center of gravity, pulling other members of the minority party toward them. And why not? Given the attention they receive, what better way to make a name for themselves when their party really has nothing else to sell? This is true whether we are talking about Jim Bunning, Joe Wilson, or Michelle Bachmann. They easily become the party “stars” of the moment. Why? Because their ideas make sense? No, because they attract attention and loathing from the left, which attracts attention and fawning from the right, not to mention money. Furthermore, they fill a media hole–reminding citizens that the Republican Party is actually alive and seemingly “standing for” something.

One might argue that this is a good thing, exposing the idiocy and downright hatred that might have been hidden in the old system of party or think-tank-driven agendas. One might also argue that such attention means the right is overplaying its hand, and therefore will alienate independents or more moderate voters who will, in the end, give such nuttery the cold shoulder it deserves. Yet new media users nevertheless participate in drawing attention away from more moderate voices, ones that could be helpful to all pragmatists interested in seeing our attention devoted to solving common problems. Again, I count myself guilty as charged.

To be sure, I am not making a technological determinist argument. New media are not responsible for this change. But given the opportunity to share, discuss, participate, explore, expose, ridicule, and foment, citizens increasingly are shaping what the political landscape looks like by focusing on things that may not deserve their place in the spotlight or may not deserve to be taken as seriously as they are taken. Maybe we should all check our dismay at the door and move on.