Saturday morning at the foot of the Hollywood Hills, long before dawn, there’s the usual thump at the front door – the morning paper. Open door, note the deep film-noir fog off the cold Pacific, pick up the Times and settle down with fresh black coffee and a pipe to see what’s up, spread across the kitchen table. Crank up the lights, because while that greasy fog sliding past the windows will turn nicely translucent, the long morning will be dim – sun by early afternoon, maybe. What would Phillip Marlow do? He’d read the paper.
There’s the usual – a long feature on some gang war or other, the sort of gangs Marlow wouldn’t understand, something about the old man who died in the house fire in Eagle Rock, a new freeway, a toll road, opening down south, and it seems the FBI and police are looking for the fugitive “Newlywed Bandits” now on the loose. Los Angeles doesn’t change much, really. “A forty-seven-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of kidnapping Friday after police said he snatched a toddler from an unattended stroller outside a downtown Los Angeles toy store.” You can see what those guys from Chandler to James Ellroy were up to – and the site LA Noir keeps it rolling.
Scan the comics, the business pages – recession coming – glance the sports for no particular reason, then check out the state, the nation, politics, and move to the columnists. It’s a habit. You fall into it. It’ll do. But your mind drifts, and it’s dead quiet in the fog.
But then something jumps out. It’s the Saturday media column for Tim Rutten, and this time it’s Barnum & Bailey & CNN. The first sentence jumps off the page –
If you’re one of those dutiful souls who felt that the responsible exercise of citizenship required you to watch Thursday’s debate among the Democratic candidates on CNN, you probably came away feeling as if you’d spent a couple of hours locked in the embrace of a time share salesman.
That was about it. Thursday’s debate among the Democratic candidates on CNN was awful, and you didn’t have the words for it. Yeah, you’ve met the pleasant woman, that VP at CNN who produced it, the wife of an old college buddy, and you wanted to be impressed. She has her Emmy – but something was just wrong.
And that is where Rutten is at his best –
We’re not talking about the candidates here, but about the shamelessly high-pressure pitch machine that has replaced the Cable News Network’s once smart and reliable campaign coverage. Was there ever a better backdrop than Las Vegas for the traveling wreck of a journalistic carnival that CNN’s political journalism has become? And can there now be any doubt that, in his last life, Wolf Blitzer had a booth on the midway, barking for the bearded lady and the dog-faced boy?
Now that is noir. And he is saying that thing would have been “comedic if CNN’s descent into hyperbole and histrionics simply represented a miscalculation in reportorial style, but it signals something else - the network’s attempt to position itself ideologically, the way Fox and MSNBC already have done.”
And you cannot argue with him, that we now do now have “a situation in which the three all-news cable networks each have aligned themselves with a point on the political compass.” Fox was first - they consciously became the Republican network. MSNBC, what with their rising star Keith Olbermann, has become the opposition. CNN was, by default, the odd man out. But then they found a use for Lou Dobbs and hired the dim-witted, dyslexic and xenophobic Glenn Beck, and have long given the shrewish I-know-who-really-guilty “legal analyst” Nancy Grace her half-hour. As Rutten puts it – “CNN has decided to reinvent itself as the independent, populist network cursing both sides of the conventional political aisle - along with immigrants and free trade, of course.” At least they confine Beck and Grace to the “Headline News” backwater, save for when they need a ratings boost.
But Rutten is right about this –
… for the first time since the advent of television news as a major force in American life, the 2008 presidential campaign will be fought out with individual networks committed to particular political perspectives. Why does that matter? As far back as 2004, the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that “cable now trails only local TV news as a regular source for (presidential) campaign information. In several key demographic categories - young people, college graduates and wealthy Americans - cable is the leading source for election news.” Thus, for key segments of the electorate - groups rich in what the pollsters call “likely voters” — the main source of political news is now a partisan, or at least, a politicized one.
Perhaps that was inevitable. The nation is polarized. Ron Brownstein left the LA Times to write a book about that, after all. But Rutten is noir-cynical about what’s happening here –
It would be one thing if all this had occurred as the result of conviction, but the conglomerates that own the cable news networks - Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., GE and Time Warner - don’t have convictions. They have interests, particularly in ratings. They’re all mindful of what occurred in the run-up to the last election, when - as Pew found - the reliably Republican Fox increased its audience by nearly half, from 17% to 25%, while audiences for CNN and MSNBC, then still nonpartisan, remained flat.
You can see Bogart, fedora tipped down, saying it’s a mug’s game – someone is playing us for suckers. And they know how to push out buttons –
Because the ratings-driven world by which the cable networks now measure themselves feeds on the culture of celebrity, each now has a signature personality - Bill O’Reilly on Fox, Keith Olbermann on MSNBC and the neo-populist Lou Dobbs on CNN. Among the three, Dobbs has been given the greatest license by the network’s increasingly desperate executives. His endless fulminations against immigrants and free trade now have been interwoven into the fabric of CNN’s political coverage, where Dobbs plays the role of both pundit and populist partisan. The network has relentlessly sold his new book, “Independents Day: Awakening the American Spirit,” since it came out last week, despite the fact that it’s quite clearly meant to give him a platform for his own political aspirations.
Yeah, that was in the Wall Street Journal, from John Fund –
Lou Dobbs for President? Don’t laugh. After months of telling reporters that he “absolutely” would not consider leaving his highly-rated CNN show in which he crusades against free trade and illegal immigration, Mr. Dobbs posted a commentary on his Web site last week predicting a surprise new presidential candidate in 2008. The mystery candidate is an “independent populist … who understands the genius of this country lies in the hearts and minds of its people and not in the prerogatives and power of its elites.”
Friends of Mr. Dobbs say he is seriously contemplating a race for the first time, although it’s still unlikely.
The model would be Ross Perot, of course – Dobbs would paint the other contenders “as completely out of touch.”
That might work. See Evelyn Shih in the Yale Herald with this –
Dobbs has been using his soapbox on CNN, Lou Dobbs Tonight, to sow senseless paranoia in the viewing public. Whether he’s reporting on outsourcing - the “assault on the American middle class” - or the issue of illegal immigration from Latin America - the “illegal alien invasion” - Dobbs seeks to isolate the United States from menacing “them.” “Feel violated,” he drones into the nation’s airwaves every weekday evening. Feel angry, mistreated, and afraid.
And that’s from two years ago, when Dobbs was a bit more restrained. But it doesn’t matter. Dobbs doesn’t have Perot’s deep pockets, and it probably too late for him to make a move.
So that’s a sideshow – idle speculation. But it was predictable. Cable became partisan. Everything became partisan. And Rutten notes something everyone knows but doesn’t think about – “media consumers’ growing insistence that television entertain them at every available minute.”
Put those two together and you get this –
Clearly, some significant number of our fellow Americans think it’s fun to watch angry people rant. Others among us would prefer to watch something more dignified, say, a cockfight. (Actually, it might be entertaining to watch O’Reilly and Olbermann locked in an empty room and going at each other with luffas. It’s impossible, though, to imagine being amused by anything involving Dobbs.)
To the extent our era seems to resemble the Gilded Age more with each passing day, some sort of populist backlash was inevitable. This week, for example, while millions watched the value of their homes decline by the week and worried over how they’ll cover their adjustable mortgages when they reset next year, the owner of a Beverly Hills jeans company paid more than $16 million for a diamond - the most ever for a single stone - and the fall sales of modern and contemporary art at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in New York rang up a record $1.67 billion. Clearly times aren’t tough all over.
So, just as people got all hot and bothered about the robber barons so long ago – there was that electoral alliance of the original Populists with the Democrat William Jennings Bryan in 1896 – so now, with “our own period’s increasingly unequal distribution of risk, opportunity and reward” something like Dobbs for President was inevitable.
Add the entertainment factor into the mix. And it is all about entertainment, isn’t it? Fund says the man from CNN knows it –
Dobbs himself once told me that “Q” ratings that measure the popularity of media personalities found that no other media figure was more respected (than Dobbs) across the board by Democrats, Republicans and independents. He claimed he was striking a chord with the broad middle class that transcended ideology. I think his ratings may also have something to do with picking a couple of hot-button issues that are easily demagogued, but don’t be surprised if you hear more rumors about a Dobbs candidacy. Even if he doesn’t enter the race, any such discussion would serve to boost his ratings.
Rutten says that, somehow, the election of a president ought to be about more than ratings –
But you’d never know that by watching what now passes for political journalism on the cable news networks, where O’Reilly, Olbermann and Dobbs now stand at the three points of what amounts to an ethical Bermuda Triangle.
An ethical Bermuda Triangle? That’s the basis for many a noir film – fog, wet streets, LA all ominous. It’ll do.
Ah, screw it all. Turn on the radio. NPR is always okay, except when it isn’t –
This week, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin formally announced plans to relax media ownership rules by allowing newspapers in the top 20 markets to also own a TV or radio station in the same market. That’s something that has been barred for more than 30 years.
Viewed alongside some other recent FCC actions, it raises the question, “What is Martin trying to do?”
But then there’s television. PBS is always okay, except when it isn’t –
Remember Michael Powell? He was the last FCC chairman who wanted to let big media have all it can eat. Powell is now in the pay of ‘the world’s leading private equity firm focused on media, entertainment, communications, and information investments.
You can see Bogart, fedora tipped down, saying it’s a mug’s game – someone is playing us for suckers.
