Vox Popoli

MEDIA WHORES: COURTESANS AND CHARLATANS OF THE AMERICAN COMMENTARIAT

CHAPTER TWO: The Courtesans

Cogliendo le rose.

Aristotle insists that in the process of rhetorical discourse, it is necessary to define one’s premises. The media brothel exists, of this there can be no doubt, but what defines the whores who inhabit it? For just as not everyone to be found within a brothel is a prostitute, not everyone in the media – not even everyone on camera – is a media whore.

Not all whores are created equal. I was once acquainted with a girl, who, a few years later, happened to find employment working for a certain infamous Hollywood madam. As we had remained friends, when the media pressure got too intense out in Los Angeles, she took refuge with me in Minnesota, which is the geographical equivalent of Stealth technology where the media’s radar is concerned. This girl might have shared a profession with the local hookers working Hennepin Avenue, but the difference between them was both immediately obvious and deeply profound.(1)

Whereas the street hooker is employed solely to provide momentary gratification for a man’s physical needs, the call girl is primarily called upon to stimulate his ego.(2) But in either case, all principles are sacrificed in favor of one overriding principle, the pursuit of the almighty dollar by any means necessary. In the same way, one can distinguish between the two primary sub-species of media whores: the courtesans, or those who are in service to others, and the charlatans, those who are in service only to themselves.

During the Renaissance, the courtesans of Venice were famous throughout Europe. They were confused with the noble ladies of the day, just as today’s media whores are often mistaken for public intellectuals. Georgina Masson, the author of Courtesans of the Italian Renaissance, writes, “it was a public shame that prostitutes were to be seen in the streets and churches, and elsewhere, so much bejewelled and well-dressed, that very often noble ladies and women citizens [of Venice], because there is no difference in their attire from that of the above-said women, are confused with them; not only by foreigners, but by the inhabitants [of Venice], who are unable to tell the good from the bad.”

In the case of the courtesans of the mainstream media, their devotion to the lofty ideals of their would-be profession(3) is entirely absent, regardless of whether they belong to the nominally objective reporting class, or the openly biased commentary class.(4) This can be best demonstrated by investigating the standards set by the professionals themselves. According to the Society of Professional Journalists, a journalist should at all times be physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.(5) Furthermore, a journalist must:

1. Seek Truth and Report It. Journalists should be honest, fair and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information.
2. Minimize Harm. Ethical journalists treat sources, subjects and colleagues as human beings deserving of respect.
3. Act Independently. Journalists should be free of obligation to any interest other than the public’s right to know.
4. Be Accountable. Journalists are accountable to their readers, listeners, viewers and each other.

Some of the specific points of journalistic conduct are as follows:

• Give voice to the voiceless; official and unofficial sources of information can be equally valid.
• Diligently seek out subjects of news stories to give them the opportunity to respond to allegations of wrongdoing.
• Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting. Analysis and commentary should be labeled and not misrepresent fact or context.
• Show good taste.
• Never plagiarize.

As anyone who has read a newspaper or watched a news broadcast lately will recognize, these points of journalistic conduct are honored mainly in the breach. Take the latter, for instance. The Associated Press is nothing but one gigantic mass of plagiarism, as it is standard practice for reporters to take a story that has been written by someone else, move a few words around, then publish it under their own byline. If the standards for fictional plagiarism were this loose, one could publish a fat trilogy about a short, but stout-hearted little fellow travelling across Terra Media to Nordor to destroy the Singular Ring in the fires of Mount Death without fear of the Tolkein estate dropping a battalion of paratrooper-lawyers armed with flamethrowers on your front lawn.

Here’s a shining example of AP-approved plagiarism from when the Swiftvet controversy first exploded, when the Saint Paul Pioneer Press ran an article from the Dallas Morning News that bore an eerie resemblance to another article that had run the day before in the Star Tribune.

The first similarity I noticed was this description of Swift Boat Vet John O’Neill. As written by Bob Von Sternberg on Saturday in the Star Tribune: “In the book, longtime Kerry nemesis John O’Neill accuses him of distorting his war record for political gain.” And as written by Bob Tarrant in the Dallas Morning News: “The book, “Unfit for Command,” is co-authored by longtime Kerry nemesis John O’Neill, a Houston lawyer who followed Kerry as commander of Patrol Craft Fast 94.”

I suppose it’s possible that’s a coincidence. When you’re trying to subtly undermine a man’s credibility, there are only so many words in the English language to use for a particular set of facts. Although I think using “chronic Kerry cat caller” works even better than “long time Kerry nemesis”. My charitable instincts faded when I came across these characterizations of chronic Kerry cat caller George Elliot. First, Von Sternberg in the Star Tribune:

“One, retired Capt. George Elliott, reportedly recanted his accusation that Kerry did not deserve his Silver Star. But after the Boston Globe published a story quoting him as saying he withdrew the charges, the Swift Boat Veterans released an affidavit in which Elliott swore he stood by his accusation. But in 1996, Elliott had been quoted in news reports praising Kerry’s actions as courageous.”

Now, Tarrant in the Dallas Morning News: “One member in the ad, retired Capt. George Elliott, reportedly recanted his accusations that Kerry did not deserve his Silver Star. But after the Boston Globe published that, the Swift Boat Veterans released an affidavit in which Elliott swore he stood by his accusation. But in 1996, Elliott was quoted in news reports praising Kerry’s actions as courageous.”(6)

Of course, mere thievery does not a courtesan make. Other moral lapses are required, preferably those involving a supine position. Here, too, the modern media does not disappoint, as the distinction between advocacy and news reporting has not so much been eroded as obliterated entirely, not only on the cable television networks, but also in more traditional institutions priding themselves on their celodurismo.(7) That the media has abandoned reporting in favor of advocacy would not be so worrisome, were it not for the fact of the john for whom it has reliably and monolithically chosen to whore itself. This, then, leads us to a formal description of the most common subspecies of Scortus medius, the Big Government Courtesan.

BIG GOVERNMENT COURTESAN

Scortus medius washingtonia

Description: Pasty white to dark brown, often with white-tipped hairs, giving grizzled appearance. Dark suit with white shirt and red tie. Facial profile usually clean-shaven. In some areas, individuals may appear brownish or blackish, rarely bronze. Single pair of prominent incisors. Ht about 6′ 0″ (130 cm); Wt 175–250 lb (77–112 kg); some individuals to 300 lb (133 kg). Female has blonde hair, usually dark at the roots. Ht about 5′ 4″ (130 cm); Wt 115–135 lb (147–680 kg)

Breeding: After 4-7 year gestation in elite Ivy League university, young attach themselves to internship programs and entry level positions at media institutions or Congressional offices.

Habitat: Urban centers. Favors television studios, newspaper offices and law firms.

Range: Most of U.S., except less common in rural Texas, n Idaho, New Hampshire and South Carolina. Concentrated most strongly on the coasts. Also s British Columbia east to Toronto.

Scortus medius washingtonia is as common as Blattella germanica, and appears to serve much the same purpose. Day after day, in broadcast after broadcast and newspaper after newspaper, it infests American homes and spreads disease by forcing the American people to submit to its deluge of its pro-government propaganda. This is the case at every level, local, state and federal, and in those very rare cases when the coverage is negative, it is almost invariably focused on criticizing the government concerned for failing to act in an appropriately expansive manner. One will wait in vain to hear washingtonia suggest that any matter, public or private, is not an appropriate concern of government.(8)

If the crisis of the day is a slowing economy throwing people out of work, the only answer, according to the courtesan media, is to turn to government to solve the problem. If the problem is precisely the opposite, an overheated economy driving up prices, the solution is, again, government action. If a global ice age and the threat of rampaging glaciers is imminent, the government must act. If, on the other hand, global warming is about to cause the polar ice caps to melt and drown the coasts, the government must act. The courtesan media is not unlike the man with the proverbial hammer, who perceives every problem as a nail in need of hammering.

In fact, it is almost impossible to conceive a problem for which washingtonia does not recommend expanding the seize and reach of government. Strangely enough, this holds true even if the problem with which the media is concerning itself was caused by government in the first place. This may be because the concept of accuracy is entirely foreign to the news media, as no other industry, not even the telephone psychics industry, has recorded such a poor predictive record on matters great and small.

Greg Easterbrook of the Brookings Institute has kept track of the New York Times’s quixotic quest to predict the final score of an NFL game. Over four seasons, from 2000 to 2003, the Paper of Record went 3-1,085, an accuracy percentage of less than one-tenth of one percent. And even that was the result of a blazing hot 2003 season, wherein the Times racked up two of its three correct predictions in going 2-270. These wildly inaccurate sports predictions are harmless enough, but the effects are not so innocent where more serious matters of politics are concerned.

For example, when the Minnesota state legislature debated a proposed gun carry law in 2002, the Minneapolis Star Tribune dredged up the same dire predictions of imminent bloodshed that the Dallas Morning News and other Texas newspapers had promulgated prior to the passage of Texas’ concealed-carry law in 1995. The Star Tribune did so despite the fact that the Texas papers were proved to be completely wrong, as Texas murder rates dropped 50 percent from 1995 to 2000(9), 1.58 times faster than the decline in the national murder rate. The Star Tribune repeatedly used these hysterical and baseless predictions to justify its editorial opposition to the proposed carry law, which finally passed in 2002 despite the Minnesota media’s bitter jihad against it.

Nor did the Star Tribune change its tune even after it became clear that the cornucopia of shootouts it predicted simply were not occurring with any degree of regularity, or indeed, at all. Of the 15,734 carry permits issued by the state in 2003, only 20 were suspended, revoked or canceled, and none for serious crimes.(10) One could almost feel their disappointment at not being able to break out the giant MURDEROPOLIS headline they’d been saving for the incipient Wild Midwest stories they were so eagerly anticipating.

In like manner, the courtesan media is repeatedly and woefully inaccurate in its economic coverage. This is partly unavoidable, because the vast majority of commentators, aside from Dr. Thomas Sowell, (Senior Fellow, the Hoover Institution, Stanford University), Dr. Walter Williams, (Professor of Economics, George Mason University), Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, (former assistant secretary, U.S. Treasury), and, despite his muddle-headed Keynesianism, Dr. Paul Krugman, (Professor of Economics, Princeton University), could not tell you what M3(11) was to save their lives. Unfortunately, complete ignorance seldom prevents paperboys and talking heads from opining regularly on the subject once known as political economy.

This ignorant advocacy invariably insists that increasing government revenue through taxes and increasing government spending will strengthen the economy, despite the fact that the two actions are mutually contradictory in mainstream economic terms.(12) Not only that, but economic history is very clear that the lethal combination of increased taxation and government spending inevitably ends badly in the long term.(13) Given that the Congress has already managed to destroy 94.71 percent(14) of the value of the U.S. dollar in 91 years, there is no reason to believe that things will end up any differently this time.

But the long term manifestly does not concern medius washingtonia, as it is usually impossible for the species to recall anything said or written the day before. A short-term memory is an identifying marker key to spotting any media whore, but particularly one of the courtesan class. For example, every estimate provided by the Washington Post predicting the results of income tax cuts for the last 20 years has significantly overestimated the subsequent net loss of government revenue. And by the same token, every prediction it has made about the expected results of income tax hikes has significantly underestimated the net increase of government revenue.

This is because the Post’s economics writers use a static model of revenue analysis. In other words, their model assumes that no one’s behavior will change as a result of their taxes going up or down. This is, of course, not only completely illogical and wholly unrealistic, but contrary to every economic model developed since Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776. Although guaranteed to be inaccurate, the Post, along with almost every major newspaper, continues to use this static scoring model because the Joint Tax Committee of Congress and most state governments do.

And why do these governments insist on using such a broken analytical tool? Because from their point of view, anything with an inherent bias towards exaggerating the positive impact of tax increases and the negative impact of tax cuts is, by definition, not broken. Accuracy be damned, in the tangential world of the government bureaucrat, anything that increases budgets is good and anything that decreases them is bad. The fact that the estimates for 2002, 2003 and 2004 were all off-base in the same direction due to the same bias is no more relevant to these bureaucrats making estimates for 2005, or the courtesan media obediently passing these hopeless predictions on to an unsuspecting public, than the past phases of Jupiter.

Another example is the coverage of the Commerce Department’s revision of U.S. Gross Domestic Product in the second quarter of 2004. Originally calculated at 3.0 percent, the number was revised to 2.8 percent on August 27, 2004. The Associated Press reported that this was “slightly better than the 2.7 percent growth rate that some economists had forecast.”(15)

The problem is that earlier in the year, the Wall Street Journal’s Monthly Survey was reporting the consensus estimate to be 4.5 percent, with some economists predicting as high as 6 percent in May. First, in a $10 trillion economy, this is a whopping miscalculation of between $170 and $320 billion. That’s tremendous, but then, economics is more of an inexact art than a science. More troubling, however, is the Associated Press’s disregard for the economists’ actual historical estimates in what appears to be an attempt to provide cover for the consensus view, especially when reminders of earlier optimism would likely have had negative effects on the stock market in the leadup to a November election.

A short-term memory is not the only identifier of a big government media whore. Other important identifying characteristics include the following:

• The ability to turn on a dime. Prior to the Iowa primaries, Howard Dean was the foremost beneficiary of mainstream media love. As soon as the Democratic elders realized that he might actually win the nomination, the love for Howard ended faster than a Jennifer Lopez marriage.
• An eagerness to take the government at its word. For some reason, it is standard practice to assume that the credibility of a government agency always trumps that of a private individual, even if there is no evidence in support of the government’s position. The typical no-holds-barred investigation runs as follows: a) an individual makes a charge about a government agency and provides evidence. b) the reporter asks an individual in the employ of the government agency if the charge is true while ignoring the evidence. c) the employee of the government agency denies the charge. d) the reporter reports that the charge is not true.(16)
• A distaste for independent thinking. One need only look at the flocks of reporters that wait breathlessly upon the press releases issued by the White House, the Federal Reserve and other government institutions before turning around and regurgitating them for the public without even reading them to realize that most reporters are not so much reporting news as they are acting as de facto publicists for whatever agency or politician they are covering.
• A servile attitude towards government officials. In discussing PBS Jim Lehrer’s moderation of the 2000 presidential debates, Jeff Cohen, the executive director of the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting(17), said “The debates have become sort of like poll-tested posturing and rhetoric that never gets pierced by Lehrer. The style of interviewing that he’s perfected is civil, though a more accurate term might be servile.”
• A cheerleader mentality. Gary North writes of just such a mindset: “A cheerleader seeks attention. He wants to be seen. It is not clear to him or anyone else why he should be seen. His means of gaining attention is to attach himself to a team. He wants to be on the winning side. He wants to be seen on the winning side. Cheerleaders pretend that they control the crowd. The crowd pretends that their organized cheers in some way help their team or thwart the opposing team. They stand, they sit, they cheer in an organized way. They do what the head cheerleader tells them to do. These efforts have no effect. The team pays no attention. The outcome of the game is not influenced by organized cheers. This is boola-boola in action. This is a system of pretense: layers of pretense. The cheerleader thinks of himself as part of the team effort. He isn’t. The individuals in the crowd think of themselves as part of the team effort. They aren’t.”

The significant difference here, though, is that big government’s cheerleaders in the media do play an important role in the team effort. It is no accident that as the corporate media has gotten larger and its relationship with government more incestuous, the old tradition of the Fourth Estate providing a check on the other three has faded away. The list of those who’ve gone from government service straight into the media is a long one and extends to both sides of the factional aisle, including luminaries such as George Stephanopolous, Pat Buchanan, Peggy Noonan, David Frum, David Gergen and James Carville, to give a few of many possible examples.

This is why the word “cheerleader” fails to do justice to those who have so richly earned the title of Scortus medius washingtonia, big government courtesan.

FOOTNOTES

(1) I am speaking of variances in comportment and purpose, you understand.

(2) Paying $1,500 a night to have sex is morally reprehensible. Paying $1,500 to NOT have sex would seem to suggest rather strongly that the money would be better spent on a psychiatrist than a high-class prostitute.

(3) Journalists like to consider their occupation a profession, but as the late Michael Kelly of the Washington Post explained to Hugh Hewitt, a true profession requires a license and a governing body, both of which are lacking in the case of journalism. Hairdressers have a better case.

(4) There is supposed to be a nominal difference between the two, not that you’d know it by listening to disgruntled liberals fulminating about Fox News Channel’s editorial commentators lacking journalistic integrity. Or by reading the “objective news reporting” of the New York Times, for that matter.

(5) Sorry, that’s the Boy Scouts, isn’t it. I was just a little overwhelmed by the raw fumes of moral purity and journalistic integrity emanating from the Society.

(6) I didn’t actually write any of that. I just cut and pasted the entire thing, beginning with “The first similarity…” from my man Saint Paul of the Fraters Libertas blog. But I manifestly did not do anything questionable because I am the proud owner of a license to steal, that is to say, a Press Card from Universal Press Syndicate. I am journalist, hear me roar!

(7) i.e. the hardest of the hard news.

(8) Unless the future of a prominent Democratic politician is at risk. In which case, everything must be considered a private matter and we should all pretend it never happened. Sex is the one subject beyond government purview, unless you happen to need a condom, a birth control pill or an abortion, in which case the government is expected to provide it for you.

(9) The National Center for Policy Analysis, May 26, 2000.

(10) “Of 15,873 who applied for the permits in 2003, 139 were denied, according to a Bureau of Criminal Apprehension report released Monday. Another 20 permits were suspended, revoked or canceled. In three cases, they were taken away because permit carriers were under the influence of alcohol. In two other cases, holders were under restraining orders for stalking or threatening people. In one case, a permit was suspended over the reckless discharge of a gun. Another wrote a bad check.” Star Tribune, March 2, 2004. Note that this is quoted from an editorial written by former Minnesota governor Arne Carlson arguing AGAINST the Minnesota Personal Protection Act.

(11) The broad measure of money supply, not the BMW. It is now being phased out, so the proletariat don’t immediately realize the implications of Ben Bernahnke’s printing press philosophy.

(12) The mainstream Keynesian formulation is C+I+G+(x-m) = GDP. Increased taxation reduces C and I, while increased government spending increases G. So, the two tend to cancel each other out, leaving only the question of which is more efficient, Consumer spending + business Investment or Government spending. As history suggests that government efficiency is inherently oxymoronic, the answer should be obvious.

(13) Hence John Maynard Keynes most famous quote: “In the long run, we are all dead.” Our problem is that John Maynard is dead and the long run is now.

(14) According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. In the unlikely event you know anything about hedonic adjustment and the fiction known as the Consumer Price Index, then you understand the real situation is actually worse.

(15) “Economy More Sluggish Than First Thought”. Jeanine Aversa, Associated Press, August 27, 2004. Despite the title, only the earlier official 3.0 percent estimate by the Commerce Department is mentioned.

(16) I once spoke with the editor of a large metropolitan newspaper about this sort of thing. He refused to believe that his reporter could possibly have been played so badly by a state government employee until I emailed him the story his reporter had written, the misleading statements about the state law by the state employee and the actual text of the state law. It was immediately evident that the reporter had never bothered to so much as glance at the law.

(17) The Associated Press, 10/18/2000. For a former senior producer of Donahue and founder of a leftist media organization to call you servile, you’ve got to have an awful lot of shoe-black on your tongue. 

Back in 2004, an editor at Thomas Nelson contacted me with an idea for writing a book about the corruption of the mainstream media. I wrote four sample chapters and was signed to a contract to write MEDIA WHORES: COURTESANS AND CHARLATANS OF THE AMERICAN COMMENTARIAT, but they killed the book after discovering that I intended to write about media whores who were nominally on the Republican Right, such as Bill O’Reilly and Michelle Malkin, in addition to the various figures on the Democratic Left that they had expected me to target. This was one of several books I was paid to not write during that period of profitable unpublishability.

Since most readers were not reading this blog 15 years ago, when I posted two of the sample chapters (One and Two), I’ll repost them, along with the other two that were written back then (Three and Ten), over the next week. You can probably understand why Thomas Nelson decided not to publish the book after they ran the sample chapters and the following table of contents past Andrew Napolitano to see if Fox News would put its weight behind the book.

It’s interesting to see the hits and misses. Malkin, Shapiro, Hannity, and Franken were spot on. Hitchens zigged away from the media proper and zagged into New Atheist quasi-celebrity, and O’Reilly self-imploded while Alterman went from being viewed as The Next Big Left-Wing Thing and my primary competition for Universal Press syndication to being mostly irrelevant despite his high-profile positions at Brooklyn College, The Nation, and The Center for American Progress.

INTRODUCTION

1.     Building the Brothel
2.     The Courtesans
3.     The Charlatans
4.     Me So Michelle: Michelle Malkin
5.     A Hedgehog, Deceased, On the Left Side of the Road: Eric Alterman
6.     MoDo’s Diary: Maureen Dowd
7.     The Littlest Chickenhawk: Ben Shapiro
8.     The Naked Economist: Paul Krugman
9.     Hunting the White Whale: Michael Moore
10.     Brave Sir William: Bill O’Reilly
11.     What a Friend We Have in Trotsky: Christopher Hitchens
12.     He-Man and Skeletor: Hannity and Colmes
13.     The Smears of a Clown: Al Franken

MEDIA WHORES: COURTESANS AND CHARLATANS OF THE AMERICAN COMMENTARIAT

CHAPTER ONE: Building the Brothel

Vir qui amat sapientiam laetificat patrem suum qui autem nutrit scorta perdet substantiam.

The Buggles were wrong. Video didn’t kill the radio star. The truth is precisely to the contrary. Video not only made the radio star huge, it also made him a best-selling author, and more often than not, a pop icon to boot. Radio, television, cable, the internet, and even traditional newspaper and book publishing have insensibly merged into one massive and amorphous entity, known to its consumers as simply “the media”. But it too is a consumer; it is a voracious beast, devouring all that come within its grasp, and only the strongest, most single-minded parasites can survive and thrive in its acidic maw.

With the gradual transformation of what was once news into infotainment, the requirements for the talking heads who serve as the primary conduit from the beast to its beholders changed too. In the early days of television, talking heads were reporters who had spent years in the field, researching, interviewing, writing and recording their own news stories. Murrow, Cronkite, and even the recently retired Dan Rather are examples of this sort. They feigned an Olympian objectivity, hid their political affiliations and projected the sort of deep and immobile gravitas that made the term “network anchor” seem so fitting.

As the producers became more sophisticated and technologically adept, it became less and less necessary to have an experienced reporter reading the news or even writing original stories in the newspaper. Gravitas went by the wayside as attractive, focus-tested women were added to the mix, and with the exception of the primary network news broadcasts – the majestic second triumvirate of Brokaw, Willams and Jennings – the two-headed bi-gendered news team came to the fore. Teleprompters and professional writers meant that the talking heads were no longer required to write or think, allowing producers to concentrate on what matters most to the television viewing audiences, namely, looking at attractive men and women.

This second generation of television news brought to the forefront men with chiseled jaws and names like porn stars(1), accompanied by blondes with journalism-lite backgrounds that often included acting credits and tasteful nude photography(2). This model quickly became de riguer for the local news format, which is now such a matter of rote that one cannot easily distinguish between the ABC affiliate’s newscast in Minneapolis and the CBS affiliate’s newscast in Albuquerque. The basic cast is always the same; the forty-something neo-patriarch with a full head of hair touched with gray at the temples, the thirty-something blonde co-anchor, (ethnic optional in cities with large Black and Hispanic populations), a weatherman who is either a sexless androgyne or a beta blonde, and last and least, the roguish sports anchor.

The first cable channel, CNN, was largely content to follow in the footsteps of its predecessors, although its expansion of the news spigot from one to 24 hours daily would insensibly make its effect known over time. However, the shift from journalism-free journalists to full-blown infotainers accelerated quickly with the appearance of the Fox News Channel, which like Athena sprang fully accoutered for battle from the head of Roger Ailes, wisely eschewing the leftist slant hidden behind the condescending pretense at objectivity of the ABCNNBCBS cabal.

Infotainment had long been present within the cabal, of course, but it was kept on the sidelines by an embarrassed media elite, in the context of crossover shows like 20/20 and Today. Barbara Walters became the unquestioned queen of the quasi-news with her infamous interviews on ABC, The Barbara Walters Specials, where she enlightened the American public by eliciting answers to insightful questions that no one else had ever dared to ask of international figures and celebrities.(3)

The terror of creeping infotainment at the networks during the early Eighties was such that Ms Walters managed to hold a co-anchor spot at ABC only briefly before being banished to matters arboreal. But it returned with vengeance in 1996, when the Fox News Channel burst onto the scene and in less than seven years, not only overturned the existing order but turned the cable news ratings war from a horse race into something bearing closer resemblance to a prison rape.(4)

The brilliance of Roger Ailes was two-fold. First, recognizing the iron law of supply and demand in a country evenly divided between what passes for “liberal” and “conservative” in the political spectrum, he offered a taste of what had hitherto been absent from the television screens of America. Where CNN was self-consciously international, Fox News was proudly patriotic. Where the ABCNNBCBS cabal inordinately consisted of those supporting Democrats(5), Fox dared to put self-proclaimed Republicans on the air without the accompanying soundtrack of The Imperial March(6) or pairing them with a polar opposite providing instant counterpoint.

Ailes’ logic was impeccable, demonstrating that alone among the executives of the media industry, only he understood the lessons of the talk radio phenomenon. Of the 105,405,100 votes cast in the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore and George Bush both received about 48 percent of the vote(7). But not only does the ABCNNBCBS news cabal market itself entirely towards the pro-Gore 48 percent, it is joined in doing so by PBS, MSNBC, and, to a lesser extent, CNBC. This abandonment of the opposite 48 percent equated to a wide-open market of epic proportions, which Ailes has exploited with ruthless abandon. The motto is “fair and balanced” and while the actual slant is only vaguely rightward, the symbolism is much more strongly so. Liberal-minded CNN cast-offs, such as Geraldo Rivera and Greta van Susteren, are forced to keep their inclinations firmly in check, while moderates are spun as conservatives at almost every opportunity.

Second, the Fox News chairman wholeheartedly embraced the concept of being the humble servant of the marketplace. The media has long had an inflated view of itself; it is nearly impossible to listen to a mainstream journalist recite a ponderous description of his ever-so-weighty responsibilities without bursting into laughter. The elite journalists see themselves as the Fourth Estate, asking the tough questions and dedicated to afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. If you have ever seen a journalist performing a Monica on a big celebrity get in what is apparently supposed to pass for an interview, it’s not hard to see that the media are not only deluded in this regard, but are also incredibly ill-suited to accurately observe human events.

Due to this delusional self-regard, executives at the ABCNNBCBS cabal have long considered themselves above the dirty and unpleasant realities of the market, while government-funded PBS actually is free to ignore the wishes of great unwashed as it fulfills its sacred mission of allowing liberals to pretend they are intellectuals and loftily look down their noses at those who prefer entertainment that offers a frisson of divertissement. Fox News, on the other hand, appears to have an interest in making money, which in a capitalist society tends to involve paying a certain amount of attention to what the consumer wants.

And what the cable news consumer wants, apparently, is pretty girls, in-depth coverage of murder trials, missing children(8) and car chases. Only eighteen months before the launch of the Fox News Channel, the famous O.J. Simpson car chase(9) and subsequent trial took place, and apparently it left an indelible impression on the soon-to-be Fox News Channel executives. It could be seen, in retrospect, as the perfect Foxian trifecta, combining a celebrity, a car chase and a murder trial. Had there only been an Amber Alert involved somewhere in the mix, it would have been the perfect story. And although the quattrocephalic news cabal flogged the O.J. trial mercilessly, no channel drew more useful conclusions from it than Fox News.

In the eight years since it made its debut, Fox News has covered 416 car chases, 42 missing children and 11 murder trials, which is approximately 469 more stories of the sort than PBS has covered(10). On a directly related note, the O.J. trial also marked the launch of the instant news celebrity. Greta van Susteren, Marcia Clark and Gloria Allred are now inescapable, appearing with wearisome regularity on the screen like the haggish handmaidens of Big Brother, three Erinyes convinced that Orestes is to be found hiding somewhere in a television studio.

But if O.J. got the ball rolling, it was the Monica Lewinsky scandal that cemented the instant news celebrity in the public consciousness. Not only do we owe Miss Lewinsky a linguistic debt(11), but without her and Paula Jones we would not have come to know and love Lucianne Goldberg, her lovable teddy bear of a son, Jonah, Ann Coulter, and interchangeable Republican Barbie.(12) But it was not only these perma-guests that were made by the scandal; shows such as the O’Reilly Factor and Hannity and Colmes also saw their popularity explode.

The reason was simple. There was continuing interest in a story in which very little was known and almost nothing was happening. Even if the ABCNNBCBS cabal had been inclined to cover the self-destruction of a Democratic president – they weren’t – there was very little that a show even half-heartedly committed to hard news could cover. Bill Clinton wasn’t talking, Monica Lewinsky wasn’t talking, Paul Jones wasn’t talking, and even those who weren’t directly involved in the two cases were claiming legal considerations that prevented them from speaking with reporters.

But it wasn’t possible to simply ignore a story that had more compelling elements than any three Hollywood movies. Was Bill Clinton’s penis really crooked? Were we really supposed to believe that a notoriously horny old dog would hook up with a ripening young 38DD and keep his hands off her most prominent assets? Had he really done THAT with a CIGAR… with Yasser Arafat was waiting in the next room? Add a bad rhythm guitar and a moustache, and you practically had a 70’s porn flick in the making. No wonder the world was captivated.

And yet, there was still really nothing to say. No one actually knew anything new until Matt Drudge unveiled some shocking tidbit of information, at which point everyone learned about it at the same time. But the camera abhors a vaccuum no less than nature, and thanks to the 24-hour cable news channels, more time than ever required filling. Enter the new talking head, who substituted wisecracks for written copy, who was quick enough to think and spar on her feet, and was entertaining enough to allow people to forget that they were no more informed at the end of a show than they were at the start.(13)

Conservatives excelled immediately at this game, partly because years of being shut out of the mainstream media had prepared them for an adversarial relationship with the television hosts, and partly, as was previously mentioned, because they were seldom permitted to appear alone on a ABCNNBCBS show without being accompanied by a liberal(14) Greek anti-Chorus. The fact that many of them had some degree of familiarity with the brutally combative arena of the conservative talk radio ghetto meant that they were seldom thrown off-balance when a deceitful host tried to set them up for an ambush or a bait-and-switch.(15)

In short, they were ready to rumble. And audiences fell in love with hand-to-hand combat long before the first gladiators were shouting “morituri te salutamus!”(16) No blood is shed in the televised arena, but the news shoutfests bear far more similarity to a gladitorial combat than to the somber pronouncements of Walter Cronkite. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; certainly it is vastly preferable for half of the viewing public to see someone championing their point of view instead of being forced to sit through pompous neosocialist lectures condemning the many evils of their bourgeous perspective. Give and take will always hold the attention longer than a monologue, Shakespeare’s excellent soliloquoys notwithstanding.

However, there can be little question that despite the divergence of views on offer, the end result provides far more entertainment than information. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, for as novelists as diverse as Umberto Eco(17), Rigoberta Menchu and Dan Brown have all discovered, few things sell better than a product that makes its consumers feel smarter. You may not actually be in possession of a single iota of new information after watching Bill O’Reilly thump his chest and shout down a guest or seeing Tim Russert delve into the minutae of the House Appropriations Committee with a congressman, but you will nevertheless be left with the vague impression that you are better informed than if you had instead tuned in to the third re-run of Friends that evening. After all, you’ve been watching the news!

FOOTNOTES:

1. Can’t you see Stone Philips fronting the list of names starring in “I Know Who You Did Last Summer”? Okay, maybe it’s just me.

2. “I did pose for ‘Black and White’ magazine, a prestigious, artistic publication, several years ago.” Former CNN Headline News anchor Andrea Thompson in The New York Post. In 2002, the Washington Post reported that the CNN anchor had also performed “clothing-challenged work for an Australian magazine and an Italian erotic flick….”

3. She reached the apex of her unique brand of unintentional comedy in 1981, when she asked actress Katherine Hepburn the question: “If you were a tree, what kind would you be?” It seems Kate saw herself as an oak. I think I’m more of a birch. But a really tough-barked, hard-core birch you wouldn’t want to mess with, you know what I’m saying? A son of a birch, if you will.

4. The August 11, 2004 ratings showed that Fox News Channel’s prime time ratings averaged 2.058 million viewers, almost double the ratings for CNN, MSNBC and CNBC combined. Fox’s top show, The O’Reilly Factor, almost tripled the viewership of its top rival, CNN’s Larry King Live, with 2.666 million viewers compared to 985 thousand. Hang onto that soap, Larry.

5. 89 percent of 130 Washington bureau chiefs and congressional correspondents reported voting for Bill Clinton in 1992, compared to 7 percent for George Bush, the elder. Twelve years later, it is still almost impossible to name a single anchor or reporter working for the cabal that does not openly or implicitely pledge allegiance to the Democratic Party.

6. Or, as it is known in the colloquial, Darth Vader’s Theme.

7. Al Gore received 50,999,897 votes, or 48.38 percent of the popular vote, while George W. Bush received 50,456,002 votes, 47.87 percent. However, since the United States of America is a constitutional republic and not a pure representative democracy, Bush’s 271-266 victory in the Electoral College made the popular results irrelevant. That’s all completely beside the point here, but it’s best to get it out of the way anyhow.

8. Missing children who happen to be pretty little girls, anyhow. I have no evidence that Fox News has a detailed system wherein a missing child is assigned 2 points for being white, 4 points for being blonde, and 10 points for having an attractive mother, but I am suspicious. And is it truly only little girls who go missing? I’m just curious.

9. The O.J. car chase was the greatest moment in live news history. Listening to “Robert Higgins” telling Peter Jennings in an outrageously fake black accent so obvious that only a lobotomized Canadian could think it was real: “Oh my Lord, this is quite tenses… Ah see… OJ! Ah see OJ, man!” was, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the ultimate in news entertainment. We were screaming with laughter almost from the start. The best part was how Jennings had no idea that the caller was a prankster until Al Michaels explained it to him. Yeah, they’re real sharp, our media elite.

10. Yeah, like I watched and counted. If you harbor a strict accuracy fetish, simply substitute “a lot” for each of the categories mentioned.

11. I would argue that she must be credited, not only with her inadvertent eponymous contribution, but also for popularizing the concept of “obtaining one’s kneepads” as a synonymous alternative.

12. Ann Coulter, Barbara Olsen and Kellyanne Fitzpatrick nee’ Conway were the original three. Since then, Laurie Dhue, Linda Vester, Rita Cosby, Heather Nauert and Michelle Malkin have followed in their footsteps, but none of them have yet demonstrated the unique combination of savage intelligence and eye-rolling, hair-tossing nonchalance of the original.

13. Being blonde and looking good in a miniskirt didn’t exactly hurt either.

14. For simplicity’s sake, I use the terms “liberal” and “conservative” in the sense of being largely synonymous with “Democrat” and “Republican”. The former indicating an orientation towards the political left, the latter indicating an orientation towards the political right. As the two major parties have merged into a single bi-factional big government ruling party, these terms have become increasingly meaningless. See Appendix B.

15. Thomas Sowell explained why he turns down 90 percent of his TV and radio invitations in an April 2004 column, entitled “Bait-and-switch media”. After being invited on the program to talk about his book on affirmative action, he found himself being grilled by a third party about minimum wage laws. The old lion, familiar with the trick, left the host in the lurch live on the air by simply hanging up the phone. Booyakasha!

16. “We who are about to die salute you!”

17. I once asked Dr. Eco about the characterization of his novels being extremely successful, but often unread. He replied: “I must confess, there are books that I love very much, and I didn’t read them completely. It happens. When “The Name of the Rose” came out, so difficult and full of Latin quotations, and it had the success, it started the legend that it was an unread book. I am content.” And yes, we were actually hanging out at a monastery that day… because nobody kicks it like the real old skool.