Last Sunday's Washington Post
contained a humorous thought-procedural
on media consumption in 2008. The gag: writer Gene Weingarten would spend 24
hours watching, hearing, reading, and otherwise imbibing the 24-hour news
culture that is, he'd have us think, ruining our civilization. It takes six
TVs, two radios and an overheating laptop to yield this insight:
Do you know how many volume bars it takes to turn a
TV up to full shout? How many of those little bars show on the screen? I bet
you don't 'cause you've never done it 'cause you've never been in Hour 21, have
you? It's 63 bars! The TV is blasting through the quiet washingtonpost.com
building, and that's when I notice something big. Something transformational.
When you have a TV at full blast, and there's a
talking head, you hear his intake of breaths in between sentences really,
really clearly. Ha-ha! And if you listen carefully for those, as though that
was the important part of communication, you wind up not really hearing
anything else! It is just a person gasping for breath! Ha-ha. The effect is
especially great with Nancy Pelosi.
In this manner, I entertain myself satisfyingly for
10 minutes.
Much of Weingarten's rambling, pitiful despair is hilarious, and proves an oddly effective critique of today's media environment. Often, though, his faithful transcription of an average news day
merely reproduces the painful noise of wall-to-wall coverage (maybe it is just
bad writing)--with a dose of heavy-handed "meta-commentary" thrown in
to remind the reader just how terrible
and debased our sleepless, soulless
news culture has become. To wit:
When I looked down toward my computer screen to see
what the bloggers were saying about it, I noticed that a button on my shirt had
come undone.
There I was, literally contemplating my own
navel. But I didn't even crack a smile because, in the relentless drone of
insipid opinion, irony no longer held any meaning.
Well. I myself have somewhat soured on watching the campaign sausages get
made. (How we all howled in January about
"the Pennsylvania
scenario!" As if!) But the death of irony? Our swallowed chuckles aside--are things really that dire?
Perhaps. The foil of informed
media analysis is the bedrock of politicking in America. No getting around that. But the marathon Democratic race--coupled with the retail approach to PA media that both Clinton
and Obama are deploying--has left a "news" vacuum that has
essentially forced the national media into a sort of 1950s, pre-technological childhood,
playing Sputnik with an old refrigerator carton. It is a shame that, while the horse-race is on pause, there
has not been a discernable turn toward issue-oriented reporting, at least on TV.
(A colleague reminds
me that one minute of every five hours of cable news focuses on the
environment--while "accidents and disasters" take up 12.) Thankfully, however, Weingarten discovers life outside punditry:
Someone is saying somewhere that someone is
cravenly misleading someone about something, and I get up from my chair, put on
my coat, take the elevator to the lobby and walk out into the street.
It's a nice evening. Not too cold. People walking.
No one seems to be arguing with anyone. Nice people, walking. Here's a person.
"Sir, do you think that McCain is going on the
offensive against Obama in a subtle but devious attempt to ensure that Hillary
is his opponent because her negatives continue to outweigh his negatives but
Obama beats him by four to six points, according to the latest 24-hour polling
data?"
"Uh, I, uh, never really thought about
it," says Anthony Booker of Falls
Church, backing away.
--Dayo Olopade