TV Cable News: Pro Wrestling Meets The Argument Culture

Barack Obama "versus" Dick Cheney! Cable battle royale!

So what if "Big Dick" had nothing new to say? So what if Cheney's about as popular as swine flu right now, or that he offered only his usual paranoid blatherings? Cable news billed it as a political cage match!

Welcome to what author Deborah Tannen dubbed "The Argument Culture" in her classic book. It's a TV blight beloved only by certain cable-news shows and their segment producers.

It's a world in which heat , not light, is generated -- because that's what some TV producers are convinced most viewers want.

Jon Stewart's audience laughed last week each time a clip was shown from "Big Ed" Schultz's new MSNBC argue-a-thon with four grown men shouting at each other.

Pointless, heated arguments are also the bedrock of the insufferable Chris Matthews and his "Hardball" on MSNBC, on which a "Democratic strategist" is routinely pitted against a "GOP strategist." Matthews would interrupt The Pope to get his two cents in.

This is also why CNN puts on public display a looneytoon like former Congressman Tom Tancredo and lets him rail about Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's supposed "racism."

Gotta hear the other side, even if it's bogus. How about booking instead a thoughtful analyst of the jurist's rulings? Faggedaboudit.

The Argument Culture mentality is also why NBC's estimable Andrea Mitchell had to limit her thoughtful, post-Obama analysis last week to less than a minute. We gotta get Cheney on to contradict the President for "balanced" coverage, defenders of this ridiculous and gratuitous spectacle would doubtless say in their defense.

By that evening, several network anchors were even calling the TV-created Obama/Cheney "showdown" a "classic confrontation." National politics as pro rassslin'.

Pathetic? Oh, just a tad.

Tannen saw this TV-fueled mentality emerging in her prescient 1998 book, which opens:

"This is not another book about civility...it's about a pervasive, warlike atmosphere that makes us approach public dialogue as if it were a fight.
"It has served us well in many ways, but in recent years, it has become so exaggerated that it is getting in the way of solving our problems."

Cable news, like talk radio, has coarsened our culture, turning it into a daily sideshow for loudmouths and know-nothings. It's all about the perceived best way to get ratings - by keeping the pot stirred.

A long-time radio talk host, a traditional conservative, was disgusted but wiser after leaving broadcasting a few years ago - partly due to the disgraceful hatemongering of Michael Savage, who broadcast on the same station. Disgusted, he told me in his exit newspaper interview:

"What do YOU think will get higher ratings - a calm discussion of foreign policy -- or two sailors duking it out down at the bar? That's the way talk-radio programmers operate these days."

Tannen adds this about cable's now-dominant Argument Culture:

"It urges us to approach the world - and the people in it - in an adversarial frame on mind. It rests on the assumption that opposition is the best way to get anything done: The best way to discuss an idea is to set up a debate; the best way to cover news is to find spokespeople who possess the most extreme, polarized views and present them as 'both sides.'"

Sound more than a bit like CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, and Fox News today?

Some might argue there are two sides to every argument.

Not true. Tannen gave a perfect example of this on PBS's "Newshour" when her book appeared:

"Holocaust denial has had far more success in the United States than any other country. Why? In our eagerness to show both sides, sometimes that means giving a forum to people who claim that the Holocaust never happened. A woman did a book discussing Holocaust deniers --and she was invited on television if she would also allow them to invite deniers and debate them. "She said, 'But there's nothing to debate; this is history; it's fact.'"

A Modest Suggestion:

Would it be so heedless to have two thoughtful, even entertaining and witty, people on cable-news shows to discuss an issue once in awhile - instead of shrill and annoying opinion-mongers?

Richard Pryor once commented, "My mama said everyone has two things: An asshole and an opinion."

On cable news today, all too often, we get both.

Comments

[GoodwithWood]

Ya, it’s like arguing the polar opposites of the theory of gravity.
I consider this type of journalism to be a great threat to this country. It’s a cancerous tumor eating us from within. It plays off of the dark side of human nature, which is always the easier path.
I have a saying: “The easiest way to unite a group of people is to give them something common to hate.”

GWW

[Estreet1964]

It seems that this whole genre of "news" started with CNN's Crossfire. Fortunately, Jon Stewart was able to put a stop to that when he called them out and told them to stop "hurting America". They were gone soon after that.

What will it take to shame the rest of these "news" organizations to follow suit?

[newsmann]

"Crossfire" was probably the first major staged argument. But remember "60 Minutes" in the 1970's, when it pit Shana Alexander vs. James Kilpatrick each Sunday? That may be the grandaddy of them all. .

[GTRich2004]

McLaughlin group on PBS was also doing this type of show way back when. From looking at wiki, both shows started in 1982.

[jalowe1957]

What next? Jesse Ventura stuffing Rush Limbaugh into a weasel suit?

[radiclib]

..
.
All this is true and don't hold your breath waiting for it to change.
Fox News is brilliant in low-balling public discourse.
With them, the argument is won by the guy shouting loudest at the end.
And that guy is usually a right-wing bully.
.
.

[Steven Duke]

The American people have not bought it for a long time. We know that we are being lied to and have no trust left for much of the media. This only makes it easier for the people to be misinformed. It is not only the immediate profit of ratings that drives the format, it is the long term ability to turn sensible people off, To create a false consensus to drive public opinion away from the best interest of the public. For the most part the "sideshow" that has become the focus of the MSM did not exist a decade ago. This "tabloid" journalism started with the "Republican Revelution" of the mid 90's. Throughout the Bush years the A/V department of the the Republican party, sorry, Fox News, rose up. That rise has always been attributed to its format. What really happened is that the White House and the Republican dominated Washington shut out and subjugated the "real" press. It created an enormous vacuum that was then filled with propaganda via Newscorp. During this time the media was conglomerated to a handful of owners who monopolize not just information, but the access to it. The traditional media has been turned into a machine to explicitly remove any and all context at any cost, including the failure of the industry, while conservative media rose up to force a false perspective in the absence of that purposely deleted context. I do not believe that any of this was happenstance.

[itolduso]

It just demonstrates how 'out of touch' the msm is, and how slow they are to respond to change. The American people voted & intelligence won, grace won, fairness & diplomacy & thoughtfulness won.........yet here we are many months later and our airwaves are still mired in the mud of the past. I just turn them off and find my news from a better place.

[GTRich2004]

Bravo Bill,
This is probably one of the best articles I've ever read on this site. You can see the evidence of what you are talking about today with President O's nomination of Mrs. Soto mayor. The president hadn't even stopped talking and the "news" outlets were already playing up the battle royal to come. It was laughable as they went out and grabbed anyone and everyone that would say anything outrageous either way and threw them up on the split screen to duke it out.

Well Done!!!!

[Clavis]

When the media is no longer a profit-based set of entities, when maybe this problem will resolve itself. Right now, what do you expect?

[GarryK]

I'm not sure who invented it, but for a while there, Morton Downey Jr. had perfected it.

It's sad that the cable news programs employ Downey's techniques for attracting ratings. At least he didn't try very hard to act like it was genuine civil discourse.

[newsmann]

Cable networks need to start hiring producers and consultants who don't have it in their DNA that the only way to get ratings is by staging arguments.