(This is the second and concluding segment of “Is free speech really overrated.”)
With the expansion of cable television and the attendant stultifying silliness of network fare has come the ungovernable opportunity for every nutcase to have his 15 minutes of fame, leaving a landscape of mind-numbing inanity for all to ponder. The fragmenting of the airways and the near-exponential growth of the Internet have arrived at a time when partisanship has reached an all-time high – or maybe we should say low . There has never been a moment in my lifetime (born 1950) when people across the political spectrum seemed so utterly unable or unwilling to even flirt with the idea of compromise.
Just in the last three years, we’ve had to watch as nearly half of the Congress has defiantly placed the defeat in 2012 of President Obama atop its agenda to the detriment of the American economy and the social welfare of 300 million Americans. Whatever anyone feels about our President, it’s hard to evade the horrifying truth that torpedoing virtually everything he’s ever done or proposed has become the paramount goal of the Republican Party, to the exclusion of such paltry concerns as the state of the nation or the pursuit of the common good.
I haven’t got the wisdom of Solomon to be able to discern whether the mainstream media fosters or merely reflects that polarization (here’s a bit of compromise: I suspect it does both), but I don’t doubt for an instant that the fracturing is real and pervasive. As I write this, much of what used to pass for political commentary on television has long since passed the point of being even remotely acceptable human discourse. Pundits from right and left scream and holler in incoherent sound bites made all the more disturbing and infuriating by their almost universal incivility.
Interrupting, especially by self-important “anchors” who don’t even pretend anymore to be adhering to the idea of objectivity, is so prevalent that it can make shows unwatchable. And this is not a partisan observation: the most egregious proponent of this barroom brawl interviewing style, Chris Matthews, would be regarded by me as suitably left leaning in any instance where I was reading a transcript. But watching him bulldoze guests from across the political spectrum and almost literally prevent anyone from finishing anything more than a single sentence is way more than I can bear anymore. And sadly, his hardball style (now nothing more than a synonym for rude and inconsiderate) is widely imitated across the cable universe.
There used to be a time when television pundits (any other terminology seems too prestigious and respectful) would leave the ranting and raving to hired guns brought in for particularly hot topics, but the years of close proximity to such unrepentant venom and hysteria was apparently too much for most to resist. Many anchors have assumed the cloak of the fringe lunatics that they used to “interview” with epic condescension.
And while television is a handy punching bag for such discussions, print doesn’t really fare all that much better. Long anointed the “last true bastion of journalism,” and lauded as the home of serious journalists, as opposed to the pretty faces of television, print media has taken a number of hits over the last three decades. The prodigious litany includes outright fabrication of articles and sources, shameful partisanship and outright war sloganeering and a pathetic “follow the herd” reporting mentality, all of which have combined to seriously undermine a long-standing and previously inviolate trust with the reader that is eroding pitifully as each year passes,
Examples abound of transgressions that flowed from this lazy journalism, but easily one of the most potent condemnations comes from the media’s wretched handling of the Iraq War. Caught up in the understandable rage and confusion following Sept. 11, 2001, most of the media meekly surrendered its watchdog responsibilities in a democratic society and took up pom-poms and sashayed up and down the sidelines as the Bush Administration roused a mystified populace into an Iraq War frenzy.
Just as galling is the realization that there has been hardly a smattering of comeuppance for either the administration hacks who crafted the Iraq nonsense in the first place or the obsequious media groupies who blissfully helped give the tawdry plan a glistening shine worthy of Madison Avenue. It’s understandable that a disgraced former Vice President might scurry from one news outlet to another trying to rewrite history and polish up the turd that is represented by nearly a wasted decade in Iraq, but just as annoying that a once highly-respected journalist like Charles Krauthammer would be given a complete pass on his embarrassing role in selling the Iraq debacle to America in the months leading up to its launch in March of 2003. Given his impressive credentials (in journalism and medicine), it’s understandable that one epic swing and miss would hardly spell the end of his career, but couldn’t we have at least asked the one pertinent question? Mainly, why should we listen to just about anything you have to say when you were so spectacularly wrong about something of such staggering national importance and gravity?
The absence of genuine reporting and in-depth examination of the fairy tale assessments of Bush, Cheney, Powell, et. al in the run-up to the war is a wretched embarrassment to a profession that has so many glorious triumphs to its credit. And like the various political figures that the media often chides for a seemingly pathological inability to own up to mistakes, major media outlets haven’t exactly fallen all over themselves in offering up mea culpas about Iraq. The New York Times and a few others, it should be noted, did fess up a bit, though it was many months after the misdeeds and doled out about as grudgingly as the last spoonful of soup at the Salvation Army.
But skirting its responsibility was simply one more misstep for those in the journalism mainstream. The media’s collusive insistence on playing the matter down almost across the board in the years since the invasion is little more than a reflection of the very arrogance and disconnected self-importance that had already caused so much of the public to question its sacred role in the public square.
So just like the Bush Administration itself, the media sort of owe us one. Even if they aren’t of a mind to actually settle up with a full-throated apology, let’s at least hope that they do a lot better the next time. It wouldn’t seem possible that they could do any worse.
- T. S. O’Connell