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August 2, 2006
Cable News: I Watch So You Don't Have To
Hardballed: I watched Chris Matthews, the bland potato-eater, the other day. Amy Goodman, of Democracy Now! was on. (I don't know if that plays in Michigan, it does in NYC and I had friends who worked on her show.) She was calling for an immediate ceasefire in the Middle East. Matthews asked the crowd who was in favor of a ceasefire between Isreal and Hezbollah. Many cheers. He asked who wasn't in favor of a ceasefire. No one said a word.
And Matthews had the gall to look mad at this, annoyed that his fellow Americans didn't agree with his professional opinion, the overwhelming opinion of the mainstream media. Cynical thought: does MSM want this war to continue for ratings? For the promos and graphics? Because Anderson Cooper had to buy an extra flak jacket?
Matthews is also irritating for his pro-pro-pro-Guiliani stance. There are worse people we could make president, I grant you. There are better people as well. Matthews believes that Guiliani will be our next president because of 9/11. 9/11 just doesn't work anymore as a political tool, though. The Bush people have used it too much.
Guiliani will have major problems on the right flank, as he is pro-choice, pro-gay rights and pro-gun control. This will not play well south of the Mason-Dixon or in the red parts of Michigan, Ohio, etc... He's had multiple divorces, too, which you and I could care less about, but the moral majority will. He's a blue state GOP, a New York Republican, the only kind NYC elects. Joe Lieberman is further to the right than Guiliani.
Plus, Guiliani has NO expeirence in foreign affairs, none, if you don't count the cab drivers and cuisine of NYC. Presiding over a city under attack does not mean you know anything about diplomacy, the UN, the complicated tangos of the world. Now, he'd probably do better than Bush, because at this point my dead dog Sprocket would do better than Bush. But we don't need better than Bush. We need a miracle, to quote the Grateful Dead.
I don't know why Matthews salivates over Rudy. Matthews is annoying to the core and the five minutes I watch him before Keith comes on give me a headache. All cable anchors are smug, even Keith; it's in their contracts. Smug comes in different degrees, though. The Matthews Smug is all-knowing, always right, in frustration with those who disagree. Inside the Beltway ugly.
Headline News Is Pure Evil: I do want a channel that will just give me news. No talk, no personality, just headlines, stories, etc... Give me twenty minutes on the serious, ten minutes for weather, sports and entertainment... wash, rinse, repeat. That doesn't exist anymore.
Headline News has the Nancy Grace/Glenn Beck combo on in primetime. It's an attempt to make Fox look like NPR. Nancy Grace thinks she's Nancy Drew, but everybody's guilty except the white girls who find themselves missing. Oh, those poor pure, virginal blond teenagers who are raped/stabbed/drugged by those nasty men... sometimes men of color. Thank you, Ms. Grace, for regurgitating Birth of a Nation over and over to us. Or some proto-feminist misreading of Andrea Dworkin.
True crime sells, but Truman Capote, you ain't, Nancy.
Glenn Beck... you almost have nothing to say. It's just O'Reilly/Gibson/Carlson/Limbaugh... did the Right really need another loud, interrupting Squawkhead? All we really have is Keith and PBS. (Stewart and Colbert, yes, but we really do need to remember: not news programs.)
And this Squawkhead is perhaps the most... squawk-y. He opens up his diatribes with the idea that he doesn't know much. He's a common idiot, he tells us, but he has opinions and he's going to let them loose. This is the 00s culture writ-large; the ascendence of Bush and Paris Hilton. Why give air time to someone who knows anything? We all should be happy not to know much. Stupidity in numbers is the US of A and we should be proud of that.
Remember when we liked smart people in this country? Degrees and academia were admired? Okay, maybe that was never the case in all areas, but it seems as if education and thinking is constantly put down by the mainstream nowadays. Members of my own family (ctriv can guess) are in this vein and I find it maddening. The human brain is fertile and it should not be wasted.
In Praise: So, what is worth watching in cable news nowadays? Not much. The Daily Show and the Colbert Report, again, are not news shows, no matter how much we want them to be. (Although Jon seems to be the only one in "news" that is subtlely calling for a ceasefire.)
Countdown is good, if only for Keith. It's not a great show in what it covers, necessarily, because it covers the same trite everyone else covers. There aren't any shows that delve into deep issues that aren't on the MSM radar: health care, failing schools, Sudan, Russia's non-democracy, gap between rich and poor...
This is not to say that Mel Gibson puppet theater isn't richly entertaining and Keith does follow basic rules of kindergarten: he doesn't interrupt his guests and uses words beyond those we learned in the fifth grade. And Countdown is the only show whose spin is spun on the left side, but you don't often see Keith give an opinion, contrary to popular belief. His guests do and his interviews are quite good, especially John Dean and Al Gore.
The common string of Countdown, Daily Show and Colbert is humor. Serious lefty shows remain on PBS, the greatest network of them all. Is this what we have on the left, humor? Is this our weapon? We're so beaten down in this country, all we can do now is laugh? Like Uma Thurman at the end of Kill Bill, rolling on the floor, laughing and crying?
Better to laugh than to join them, I guess. Still, it would be nice if the left could at least have a voice on cable. Neither Keith nor Jon nor Steven are really a voice for the left: too subtle, too funny... they rarely step out of the box and display true rage at what's going on. Rage apparently is still the wheelhouse of the right. And what do they have to be angry about?
Guiliani for President, I guess.
Posted by emily at August 2, 2006 3:29 PM
Comments
You're forgetting Real Time with Bill Maher. Excellent show. Wonderful stuff.
Posted by: Doc at August 2, 2006 6:09 PM
True, but I don't get HBO, so I have to YouTube that. But you're right... I guess because I can't watch it, I forget about it.
But Maher does have rage and shows it, different from the other three.
Posted by: fat charlie at August 2, 2006 6:54 PM