I was enchanted by the idea of the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.”  I have enjoyed Stewart’s and Colbert’s shows.  Especially during the worst years of the Iraq war, I watched them to maintain my own sanity.  In their rally, they accurately highlighted the strength of their satire, looking for sanity in insane times, using the form of the day, the great Washington Rally organized by cable television.  I have principled problems with this new form of “Media Events,” but such is the world we now live in.   Stewart and Colbert claimed that theirs wasn’t a response to the Glenn Beck organized event, but it clearly was.  There is irony in their satire, which challenges political clarity but for good cultural reasons.

I was pleased by the turn out.  It seems that more people attended the Stewart Colbert satirical event, than attended Beck’s earnest rally to restore honor.  I appreciated that “we” saw ourselves as outnumbering “them,” and it felt good.  But was there any more to it than that?

There indeed was concern in this regard.  The ambiguity of the event’s meaning led to significant criticism after the fact, most vividly expressed in Bill Maher’s response.

The left and the right are not equally insane, the critics point out.  The problem is not in the media portrayal of our politics, something that Colbert and especially Stewart seem to focus on, but the politics itself.  The event energized a part of the public, but didn’t lead to specific political action.  This, of course, just before the midterm elections which promised to lead to broad Democratic losses and Tea Party gains, and which proved to be the case.  The only person to even allude to the elections was Tony Bennett in his closing performance, calling out to people “Vote!” after singing “America the Beautiful.”  It was a political event about nothing according to Maher, echoes of Seinfeld here.

Stewart in his nightly show defended himself in amusing ways last night.  His main point: the rally was about something, just not about what his critics wanted.  He is mostly concerned not with the partisan disagreements, but that we have lost our ability to disagree civilly and constructively.  His critics in turn wonder whether it is possible to constructively disagree when one side of the disagreement is acting in a fundamentally dishonest way.   Assertions about death panels, the illegitimacy of the Obama Presidency because of his non – citizenship, wild claims about the dangers  of Sharia law in Oklahoma,  and the crime wave and voting fraud being perpetuated by illegal aliens, all coming from Republicans in engaging important debates of the day, do not have Democratic equivalents.  How then can Stewart claim to be non-partisan?   But we have to watch their tongues as they go into their cheeks.

The correlation between fact and party

This debate on the left, and the ambiguity of the event, I think, underscores a fundamental problem in our political culture.   There is too clear a correlation between commitments to facts and party identification.  One party is associated with facts, while the other seems to be more committed to its own fictions.  Indeed, more disturbing than the disagreements about how to address the problems of climate change is that the scientific finding of global warming has somehow become a partisan issue.   More unsettling than the disagreements about the details of TARP is the fact that there are those who seem to deny that there really were dangers of the collapse of the financial system and a global depression on the order of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and that government action was imperative.  And though I have to accept that some are not as thrilled as I am by the fact that America has matured to the point that it has elected an extremely intelligent African American President, bi-racial, with Muslims in his family tree, it is deeply unsettling that there are those who live with the myths that he is somehow not really American, and that elected representatives of the Republican Party actually perpetrate these myths or do little to criticize them.  One party has become the party of facts, the other of fictions.  Truth shouldn’t be a partisan issue but it has become one, in many different instances.

Stewart and Colbert and their critics disagree about how to voice objection to this situation, and about their perceived roles.  But they are responding to the same political cultural dilemma.  How to fight against the fictions that Republican partisans are using to mobilize their constituencies so effectively?  And the “fictoids” keep coming , the latest from Fox News – President Obama’s Asian trip is costing $200 million dollars a day, $2 billion for the whole trip, with 3,000 in his entourage, and 34 war ships providing protection, as Stewart was quick to ridicule, following his defense against his liberal critics in his program last night.

A modest suggestion

The Rally was of those who oppose such politics and such media, which lightly substitute such fictions for facts.  The participants and their supporters, and their liberal critics, became visible in large numbers.  And as I tried to argue in my last post, they, we, are going to have to organize ourselves to act not only against policies we disagree with, but also against the lies.  As the Republicans obstruct responsible governance, I hope to see an alternative cast against the Tea Party mobilization.  A key to this will be a commitment to truth, something to which the Rally, its participants and organizers contributed.   And I have a suggestion for how we might start contributing to this cause at Deliberately Considered, by collecting and analyzing fictoids.  The floor, or at least the blog, is open for contributions.

President Obama offered a critique of Fox News in an interview published in an issue of Rolling Stone.    This absolutely shocked and appalled Fox shock jocks Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity the evening of Obama’s speech at the University of Wisconsin in Madison on Tuesday.  They were shocked by any suggestion that they were anything but “fair and balanced,” providing the alternative to the kowtowing liberals of the mainstream media.  They were appalled by Obama’s criticism.  (link)

Their response is cynical.  They pretend to be what they are not, news commentators on a news network. Obama’s critique on the other hand is on firmer ground, even if it is not clear that it was wise.  Isn’t it below the President’s dignity to engage in polemics with partisan press criticism?  Doesn’t it enlarge them and belittle him?  These are the questions of the talking heads on cable and on the Sunday morning shows.

But actually in the interview Obama was quite careful, offering a measured serious answer to a provocative question:

Rolling Stone: “What do you think of Fox News? Do you think it’s a good institution for America and for democracy?”

President Obama: “[Laughs] Look, as president, I swore to uphold the Constitution, and part of that Constitution is a free press. We’ve got a tradition in this country of a press that oftentimes is opinionated. The golden age of an objective press was a pretty narrow span of time in our history. Before that, you had folks like Hearst who used their newspapers very intentionally to promote their viewpoints. I think Fox is part of that tradition — it is part of the tradition that has a very clear, undeniable point of view. It’s a point of view that I disagree with. It’s a point of view that I think is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world. But as an economic enterprise, it’s been wildly successful. And I suspect that if you ask Mr. Murdoch what his number-one concern is, it’s that Fox is very successful.”

Obama placed Fox in a tradition of opinionated American journalism, and noted he disagreed with the Fox opinions and doesn’t think they are good for America.  While I don’t see how a reasonable person, either pro or anti-Obama, can find fault with his response, I also don’t think that Obama went far enough.  Serious media innovation is occurring at Fox, with potentially deep political effects.  It is probably the reason why Obama feels compelled to criticize it from time to time.

Fox News is a truly innovative media form, particularly for television.  It purports to present news, but actually it is in the business of political mobilization.

In the case of the Tea Party protests, this is most clearly the case.  Glenn Beck announces a mass demonstration, the 9/12 rally.  On the Fox News programs and discussion shows, the developments leading up to the demonstration are reported, and their significance is discussed.  Together with Beck’s agitation for the event, these reports and discussions bring the planned event to the attention of a large audience.  Even if the event was initially the result of grassroots organization, as were the Tea Party Protests called for “tax day,” April 15, 2009, the attention of the public to the event now goes well beyond its original planners and their capacity to mobilize the population.

The French media theorist and sociologist, and my friend, Daniel Dayan, who I hope will join us in a future post, highlights the importance of this showing in his work on “monstration. ” In his research he is particularly interested in how the experience and expressions of a particular social circle moves beyond a delimited public, and is brought to the attention of a broader public.  This act is of primary political significance in media politics, something Fox has done very well, helping the previously marginal to become part of the mainstream.

Then the event happens.  Fox is there giving it full coverage. It is the major event of the day, the story that is given wall to wall coverage, while the other news sources tend to report it as one story among many.  The fact that only Fox “properly” reports on the event is said to reveal the bias of the “lame stream media,” to use the language of the American media critic and Fox commentator, Sarah Palin.  The format applies to major happenings, but also to the trivial, from the Islamic bias of textbooks in Texas, to the booing of Palin’s daughter Bristol on “Dancing with the Stars.”

Fox is not just biased as it reports the news.  It produces the news from beginning to end.  Its competitors in broadcast and cable journalism may lean left, MSNBC, or center, CNN, but they are not in the news making business in the same sense as Fox, and to a greater extent, its parent company, News Corporation.

To be sure, this form of media organization makes money.  Murdock’s number one concern may be to be successful, as President Obama maintained in Rolling Stone, but it is notable that the success is political as well as monetary.  Rupert Murdock and News Corp makes money, while America is given a strong coordinated push to the right.

When I went to the television to watch the speech, I was surprised to see that only CNN was broadcasting it, and even they cut it. They skipped the opening remarks when the President thanked the notables present (significantly including Russ Feingold who was missing from Obama’s last full throated partisan address in Milwaukee on Labor Day), and broke off from Obama after about fifteen minutes into the speech so that their regular talking heads could analyze his remarks and the latest political gossip, proceeding with their usual nightly opposing talking point exchanges. I quickly ran to my computer to watch the remainder of the speech, which I found to be an impassioned and reasoned account of why it is important to vote for the Democrats in the upcoming elections.

Transcript

I was surprised the speech wasn’t covered by the news programs. I guess it was deemed to be too partisan, but it was strange. Fox was going on about why Obama is obsessed with them, celebrating the fact that a President has made negative remarks about their one-sided coverage. MSNBC commentators were continuing to fight last summer’s intra-party battles, exploring how the President had not adequately confronted Republicans, caving into Lieberman on the public option before it was necessary, getting less on healthcare as a result, and CNN turned to a Republican operative to balance the President’s partisan remarks. Instead of highlighting the political position of the President, as he carefully presented it to his supporters, the politics of the day was reduced to endless bickering from three different political angles.