The Media Equation - Cable Wars Are Killing Objectivity - NYTimes.com
Apparently there is an ingredient in tea that causes hysteria when given to cable news anchors. How else to explain the coverage of the tax day tea parties on Wednesday, which was the day when we procrastinators finally mailed the check to the feds?
The movement — if that’s what it is — was spawned by a rant on Feb. 19 from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange during a live report by the CNBC reporter — if that’s what he is — Rick Santelli, suggesting that it was time to organize a “tea party” to protest government spending on failed mortgages.
The cable news networks took it from there. Fox News, after running more than 100 promos about its coverage of the event, which did a pretty effective job of marketing them at the same time, had wall-to-wall coverage on the anointed day and dispatched four of its leading hosts around the country to perform a kind of hybrid task, covering events that they also seemed to be leading.
And in the increasingly politicized environment between the covered and coverers, Susan Roesgen of CNN, covering a tax protest in Chicago, could not have been more contemptuous of the people she was interviewing, shaking her finger at them and shouting them down. In a move that I’m sure freaked out her bosses, she suggested that the protests were “antigovernment, anti-CNN.”
Rachel Maddow of MSNBC frantically belittled the rhetoric and motives of those involved in the tea party events, even as she spent oodles of air time on the rallies.
Cable news stations have been criticized for “event-izing” all manner of minor news occurrences — President Obama’s first news conference comes to mind. But the Tax Day Tea Party was all but conceived, executed and deconstructed in the hothouse of cable news wars.
It used to be that cable networks would dispatch reporters to the same event and then head back to the studio where shouters from various sides would have it out. Now, in a kind of Hearstian twist, the news media are supplying both the pictures and the war.
“Bring your kids and experience history,” Glenn Beck advised on Fox News as he invited people to join him at the Alamo for a tax day protest, because, he said, “our kids are being sold into slavery.”
It was a kind of al fresco Howard Beale moment, an opportunity to gather in a group and shout about very real rage — these are scary times for all working people — that is nonetheless inchoate and unnameable. The burden being placed on the American economy and future generations is a significant issue — according to fivethirtyeight.com, more than 300,000 people attended rallies in 346 cities — but the event that gave voice to those concerns was far from spontaneous.
The numbers that drove the fervor are not the kind that appear on a 1040 form. Last Wednesday night from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m., Fox News had an average of almost 3.4 million viewers, up more than a million compared with its average in March. MSNBC got a bump as well, with 250,000 more viewers, while CNN was only slightly up.
In a sense, we seem to be returning to the days of the party press, where news outlets reflected viewpoints of specific wings of political thought. So perhaps the invocation of an event that took place in 1773 is not that far off the mark.
Even if the historic message of no taxation absent representation doesn’t really scan because the current president won election decisively in a free and open election, the Tea Act that drew the scorn of colonials was, at bottom, a bailout of the East India Company, which was close to bankruptcy after huge misadventures in India. With bankers thumbing rolls of federal billions, the homage to the original Boston Tea Party was not quite a non sequitur.
“The original tea party was something of a media event,” said Robert J. Allison, professor and chair of the history department at Suffolk University and author of “The Boston Tea Party.” “The papers at the time were very politicized and did a lot of campaigning during the run-up to the event.”
He added: “When you think about it, they could have done worse than a bag of tea in terms of symbols. As a historian, I am charmed and fascinated that something that provoked the original revolution still has such resonance.”
The tea references are not the problem. When a media company sets itself as the party of opposition, it can have unforeseen consequences. The theatrics make it hard to tell where talk of secession — the governor of Texas made a veiled threat — states’ rights and stringing up public officials transforms from hyperbole to reality.
The president was likened to Hitler on various posters at rallies, and a sign in Lafayette Park read, “Stand Idle While Some Kenyan Destroys America? I Don’t Think So.”
The Fox Business reporter Cody Willard got in the spirit of things covering a Boston rally by suggesting that conservatives and liberals were “both fascists who are taking my money and building up corporate America with my welfare.”
You have to worry whether something that was intended to goose ratings and kick up debate could metastasize when it meets some of the baser urges of the fringe, among people who don’t come out to rallies but are sitting in a basement steeped in their own misanthropy.
“Together, they will draw a line in the sand, here, where it was originally drawn, live, at the Alamo,” Mr. Beck said as Ted Nugent served up tasty guitar fills. Then Mr. Beck inveighed against Washington, the media, Democrats, Republicans, politicians — you know, everyone who was not standing there at the Alamo.
It had all the earmarks of a stump speech, replete with soaring applause lines and calls to action. But let’s remember: the only thing Mr. Beck and the rest are running for is first place in the demo.
No comments:
Post a Comment