Of Sharks in the Water, Superdelegates, and Hannah Montana's Breasts

If Marshall McLuhan was right when he wrote, "The medium is the message," then the message is clearly the following: We are the stupidest species ever to walk the earth.

What other conclusion can be drawn after two weeks which saw the ABC Presidential Debacle, in which Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos raced to the bottom of the manure heap; cable news's overblown, but predictable, reversal of the Obama-Clinton storyline after Hillary's Pennsylvania victory; and the Return of the Rabid Reverend, yet another non-event transformed into a Major Crisis simply by the fact that the media won't shut up about it?

This last was both particularly inane and particularly insidious. Inane because all day long on Thursday, April 25, the cable news channels ricocheted between Reverend Wright's bland interview with Bill Moyers and the oh-so-spectacular death of a swimmer in San Diego at the hands (or fins?) of a great white shark. You could see the anchors verging on panic, unsure which bloodsport to concentrate on, never quite sure which deadly attack their producers were asking them to pontificate about at any given moment. On the one hand, getting more juicy quotes from the explosive Reverend Wright was, so to speak, a gift from God, especially since the "Bittergate" story had more or less run its course; on the other hand, someone actually died in San Diego, in a gruesome, Spielbergian way, and there's just no substitute for cranking up terror by convincing the population they are in grave and gathering danger. (The truth -- that the number of annual deaths-by-shark worldwide averages a whopping one, fewer, one imagines, than death-by-waterboarding -- has never stopped Anderson Cooper, et. al., before...)

In the end, Reverend Wright defeated Jaws, more by TKO than knockout. After all, his delivery was hardly Tyson-esque, and the uproar must have shocked even a man who likes to communicate by shock. When asked by Moyers whether it hurt his feelings that Barack Obama had distanced himself from Wright in his speech on race, Wright shrugged and forgave, usefully pointing out that he and Obama "speak to two different audiences. And he says what he has to say as a politician. I say what I have to say as a pastor. But they're two different worlds."

Pretty innocuous stuff. But not according to Dan Abrams, whose voice actually rose two octaves as he breathlessly declared, on Verdict that Wright had called Obama "just another politician." He and his guest Joe Watkins shouted down Lawrence O'Donnell -- who tried to give a more reasonable interpretation -- insisting that Wright had just "thrown Obama under the bus!" Not to be outdone, Chris Matthews called Reverend Wright "Barack Obama's Iraq!" Andrea Mitchell summed the whole thing up devastatingly -- "Reverend Wright told Moyers Obama's speech was political" -- proving yet again that nothing scandalizes Americans more than the truth.

"Just another politician" is, of course, devastating to Obama, whose campaign has been built on the promise of a new politics. Leaving aside the question of whether that was ever accurate or possible, the charge that he's "just another politician" takes all the air out of the balloon and undoes a year of careful branding, especially when spoken by someone Obama has pointedly refused to "throw under the bus."

Too bad Wright never said it. But what does the truth matter when a lie might bring down a public figure?

It seems almost prissy to insist that news anchors stick to the transcript when it needs just a tiny tweak to become the juicy story they really want to tell: Two Black Men Trying to Tear Each Other Apart! What could be sexier to American audiences than that?

The poor shark never stood a chance.

Now we've moved on to Indiana and North Carolina, the latest "last stands" in a string of last stands that goes all the way back to New Hampshire. In the wake of Pennsylvania, you could more or less hear the news outlets shoving each other out of the way in the race to pronounce Hillary the new new frontrunner. She's no such thing, of course -- but again, why let facts get in the way?

The truth is that the length of the primary season has forced the news media to depend on turnabout -- on some change in the story that they've all grown so bored of telling. In The Poetics, Aristotle identifies reversal as an essential aspect of great drama: the mighty fall, the blind see, the disgraced achieve redemption, etc. Obama's rise to frontrunner status was, then, a sublime exercise in reversal, not just Hillary's unexpected defeat in Iowa but the unraveling of an interminable year in which the story was her "inevitability." (What could be dramatically duller than inevitability?) After Iowa, news outlets exaggerated the story of Hillary's fall, in the process convincing viewers that it was far more dramatic -- and fatal -- than it really was. And now, like a blessing from Heaven, they get to tell the story again: a double reversal!

Now everyone's rubbing their hands together and drooling at the mere mention of the superdelegates -- the wild card in this wild narrative, the deus ex machina that could throw the whole process into chaos come August -- as though the superdelegates were crazed mutants of unthinkable power, straight out of a Stan Lee comic, and not just a bunch of BlackBerry slaves in flannel pants who might know a few more things about national politics than you or I or Anderson Cooper.

But chaos trumps even a reversal -- something Aristotle would certainly have understood if he'd had cable -- and if you're sick unto death of how the media have made Barack and Hillary, two admirable candidates, look like snotty, vicious sandbox fighters, you'd better strap yourself in for Superdelegate Smackdown, coming soon to every TV, blog, periodical, and iPhone in the known universe.

Until then, we'll have to satisfy ourselves with the occasional snarl from Howard Dean (what I wouldn't give for the innocent days of the Dean Scream!), the inevitable if temporary migration of pundits back to Hillary's camp (it's only a matter of time before someone drags out the old dated vs. married adage), and endless opinions about What's Really Driving Bill.

That is, if we don't first get swamped by the growing national crisis that is Hannah Montana, aka. Miley Cyrus, who apparently allowed (or didn't allow) Annie Leibovitz to take topless photos of her (though she isn't actually topless) for Vanity Fair against her parents' wishes (or with her parents' full knowledge). Depends who you ask. But please don't ask Disney, which has more or less perfected the stance of Idiotic and Hypocritical American Outrage, furiously charging that "a situation was created to deliberately manipulate a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines."

Can you imagine?

Forget about the silly photos, one of which People informs us exposed Cyrus's midriff (gasp!) and another in which "a hint of a bra is evident." (Have these people ever been to the mall?) Forget about how gosh-darn "embarrassed" Hannah Montana is about the whole terrible affair and the sad truth that her public statement -- "I never intended for any of this to happen and I am truly sorry if I have disappointed anyone" -- comes verbatim from the Handbook for Disgraced Public Figures. And forget about how obvious it is that the whole stupid issue has been cooked up and manufactured by publicists in order to gin up controversy and draw attention to Cyrus's forthcoming memoirs. (Yes, it's true, a 15-year-old is publishing her memoirs -- and reportedly was given a seven-figure advance.) Forget, even, that that advance, and publishing contract, come from none other than Disney.

Instead, think on this: The same corporation which feigns outrage at the "manipulation" and accuses Vanity Fair of just trying to "sell magazines," and which has almost certainly created the entire hullaballoo just to sell its own product, is also the corporation which owns ABC -- and with it George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson -- and created the pathetic outrage that was the most recent presidential debate.

It would be disgusting enough if they were just trying to sell me a magazine. But the load of shit they're really selling has a much more dangerous objective. That is, that the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama and Clinton, Iraq and health insurance and Hannah Montana will all get stirred into the same idiotic, phony pot, to which the only rational, human response is to throw up our hands and scream, "Who the hell cares?"

Comments

[DallasMike]

If the MSM did not pander to the Holywood types then the lib polaticians would not get their contributions durring election season.

[willie3070]

why is it that the media have neglected the war,s and our young men and women who are dying?I am so disgusted with all of the media.It seem,s that trash new,s is more important than reality.I am ready to open my window and shout "I,m MAD AS HELL,AND I WON,T TAKE IT ANY MORE". Anyone care to join me,or are we all asleep? fed up.

[drblack]

It is sad that Huffpost is at least 50% this type of trashy , mindnumbing stuff. Oprah, Miley, Britney etc...are people who contribute nothing.
Albert Hoffman died today. He had a great influence on Humans and where is his story?
I have been coming here since Huffpost started and was concerned when the fluffy ,"entertainment" stories came on board. It has cheapened Huffpost and it cheapens all "news" that covers them in the slightest.

[Bobzmcishl]

It's getting almost impossible to view any of the MSM or cable networks. I gave up on Fox years ago, and now MSNBC & CNN are following down the path of Fox with their emphasis on titillating us rather than informing us. They have all become part of the network entertainment divisions with rare exceptions. What was pathetic today was the blurb of O'Reilly calling out Bill Moyers for his "softball" interview of the Reverend Wright. Moyers is one of the best interviewers in the business and knows his stuff. We learned a lot about the intellectual side of Reverend Wright, which none of the MSM or cable networks have bothered to cover. They would rather just give us the Reverend Wright, the pastor showman, soundbytes. Nor have they bothered to take on the right wing Christian evangelicals such as Reverend Hagee and Pat Robertson, and the late Jerry Falwell. What a double standard. When this issue finally dies down, maybe someone can take a more reasoned view of how this all came down. Personally I think Reverend Wright was done a major disservice by the media.

[LizzyTish]

The only stew of nonsense I see is the ultimately murky "point" of this article.

The only thing that draws from me a huffy "Who the hell cares?!" is when something like this passes as media savvy.

What all the carrying on boiled down to, after you crossed the Miley Cyrus line, is that Disney controls everything and they are trying to destroy us all.

I can not tell you how tired I am of seeing Disney portrayed as some kind of godlike power for good or evil. It's a freaking entertainment corporation made up of regular people. It's job is to create media and to (usually shockingly brilliantly) publicize or promote it. There's no evil in the fact that's it's doing it's job well.

What's WRONG is a society that thrives on not being able to discern this in a defensibly intelligent way, and which narrowly exposes itself to one source for media entertainment and news. There are options out there, it's not a successful media company's fault if people fail to exercise their right to think and choose for themselves in a smarter way.

And maybe you really SHOULDN'T care this much.

[bigdgib]

Right behind you on this one, Andrew! My sentiments exactly! Which is why I no longer watch MSM...

[fairwitness]

That sure captures MY mood today--how can one even possibly care about AMYTHING after enduring these media waves of cacophonic bullshit and the pervasive bleating of oh-so-self-important dilattante-wannabes? How can one possibly know WHAT to care about, with the inevitable and all-so-urgent Crisis-Of-The-Day and Important Stories which assault us if we even peek for a moment at the tube or the web? Can one BE more nauseated at the sound of Wolf Blitzer's falsely serious voice?

We are so ill-served by the media that you'd think they were paid to pour their crap into our homes and invade our minds with their chaos.

Oh, yeah. They are.

[AOGutierrez]

Thanks, Andrew. It nice to my opinions on a number of subjects, the abject hideousness of Disney in particular, rolled into a single coherent controlled scream of WTF!!! I believe you have hit the nail on the head with your theory that the corporate goal is to force a return to confused apathy and ignorance.

[DickTater]

"The truth is that the length of the primary season has forced the news media to depend on turnabout - on some change in the story that they've all grown so bored of telling."

No, although I agree with most of your assertions, you are not going far enough, nor are you seeing the whole picture.

If reversal was what they wanted, McCain should have them dizzy by now. Clinton should also. It is a shark feeding frenzy on BHO. The corporations (the networks and the hugeco people want HRC or McSame) are going to attack BHO with everything they have, and obviously, even things they don't have.
HRC and McSame really pose no threat to regular politicians and their corporate masters. BHO threatens to overturn their lucrative applecarts.

[dperino]

wow. one must have much faith in their candidate in order to believe in these qualities afforded "bho" by you (no doubt many more). while in some fashion i suppose this is to be commended, but the realist (some would say cynic) in me steadfastly believes that obama is, in fact, just a career politician who talks a good game (in which i defer to statements made by the esteemed rev wright). this latest canard (revgate?) does shed light on the current media opportunities afforded to the good rev and how the pastor is taking full advantage of his world wide 15 minutes. i can't judge his views because i don't know them, but i suspect i wouldn't be in glowing disagreement, nor would turn a shade of bombastic purple, as the media hawks insist that i do or am.