The "controversy" over Barack Obama's "bitter" comments was a media creation from start to finish - a brouhaha manufactured by very wealthy reporters and pundits who do anything they can to ignore, reject or otherwise downplay the very real issue of inequality and economic class in America. Using MSNBC's Chris Matthews and "The Wire's" Jimmy McNulty, I show in my new newspaper column out today that the very media ideology that spins up these "controversies" has gone from subtle to brazen in the last few weeks - and that intensification is breeding, yes, bitterness.
Matthews is the personification of this ideology inside the Washington press corps and chattering class. He is a guy so out of touch with reality that he looks at his $5 million annual salary, three Mercedes and luxurious Chevy Chase lifestyle and tells the New York Times he's not part of America's winner's circle. In that New York Times profile, he likens himself to a working-class champion, and yet when you watch Hardball, all working-class issues are stripped of their substance and turned into a screaming match over tactics, and nothing more.
This is par for the course in the media. Obama notes that when working-class Americans get economically shafted, they get "bitter" - and millionaire Tim Russert reacts by asking a group of millionaire political consultants to appear on Meet the Press to explain working-class politics to America. ABC's Charlie Gibson takes what could have been a substantive discussion of tax inequality, and turns it into a fact-free diatribe about the capital gains tax supposedly hurting regular Americans - even though most of it is paid by the wealthiest 1 percent. These people all couch their arguments and presentation in blue-collar iconography, but what's really coming through is a powerful form of elitism.
At a time when people are dying because of lack of access to health care and because of a misguided war, only the superrich elite have the luxury of treating politics like an entertaining sport and deliberately obscuring issues so as to justify economic royalism. The problem is that when the superrich in the media do this, it not only makes solving real problems harder, but it can breed - yes - bitterness among us commoners, because the underlying message is that our daily challenges are unimportant.
In my column, I use the example of Matthews and Jimmy McNulty - the latter being the everyman cop in HBO's "The Wire." In season 3 of the show, McNulty starts dating a Washington political consultant, and when he tries to get up to speed on her business by watching Matthews-style cable shows, he laments how divorced from reality the coverage is. Later on, he's downright bitter.
Though McNulty is a fictional character, he's a lot more real than cartoons like Matthews, Russert, Gibson and the rest of the media elite. The feelings he expresses, which I recount in my column, are widespread out here in America - and the media has a heckuva lot to do with that. It may be shocking for political junkies to realize it, but most of America does not wake up everyday thinking about Obama or Hillary Clinton's latest gaffe. Most of America has no idea who David Axelrod or Mark Penn is. Most of America doesn't care what the latest polls in Indiana say. Most of America is worrying about paying the bills, making it through the next day and providing for our families.
But you wouldn't know that if you turn on the television. No, when you flip on the tube, you are led to believe the only thing that matters are politicians screaming at each other, and millionaire pundits analyzing the sport of it. And then, incredibly, these same millionaires wonder why so many Americans think our entire political process is broken, and that the political discourse in this country doesn't care about the majority of the country it is supposed to represent.
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