The Primary Smokescreen
When the TV Turned Red, White & Blue
By Mick Farren
Ground Game
The low point came last week when Sylvester Stallone paused from promoting the inexplicable new Rambo, and endorsed John McCain for president, and the cable news channels all fell over themselves to report the obvious promo ploy as a real story, linking it with how Mike Huckabee hardly makes a move without Chuck Norris at his side.
The overall impression is that my TV screen has suddenly and mysteriously turned red, white, and blue, and that absolutely nothing else was happening on the entire planet except the U.S. presidential primary races. Between the actual elections, the debates, the clips from the debates, the weird game-show sets in which these debates are now held, the sound bites from speeches, the multitude of opinion polls, the raucous pundits, the candidates’ scratching and hissing, and all the other excesses of an over-stimulated, flag-draped, quasi-patriotic clown carnival, TV news has effectively been taken over by an all-consuming electoral putsch. Only mandatory celebrity trivia time remains uncut, mostly filled by the death of Heath Ledger, and wholly uninformed speculation as to whether he had taken too many Ambien.
The leadership crisis in nuclear Pakistan was wholly occluded by endless discussion of how close to tears Hillary Clinton really came, and was it real or was it faked? Scientific speculation over a possible falling-domino seismic event around the Pacific Rim was buried without trace by the dispute over what precisely Barack Obama meant by “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America.” The collapsing dollar, stock exchanges across the world becoming panic-stricken roller-coasters, and the domestic crisis of subprime mortgage foreclosures couldn’t exactly be ignored, but was usually couched in terms of how it might affect the chances of the various candidates. You can be certain something is going radically awry with TV news when it turns on itself with a fanged narcisism, as it rapidly becomes clear our best-known television talking-heads would not last a Las Vegas minute as professional gamblers. Overwhelmed by the need to create a story from tenuous guesswork, they start to act like oracles or infallible soothsayers. But when their sooths prove hopelessly inaccurate, they have the gall to appropriate even more airtime to spin their errors into what they hope is a semblance of near-miss plausibility.
More serious still are the equal errors that have been made by the very expensive, and supposedly ultra-sophisticated public opinion polls. Polls and combinations of polls are the math that drives campaign strategy, and if they reveal themselves as devastatingly inaccurate, entire political machines may have to be retooled. The divergence of individual polls has become so marked, and their capacity for error so plainly revealed, that pollster John Zogby amiably told Jon Stewart that phone-sampled voters may now simply lie because they are sick of the whole process, and Arianna Huffington urged readers of The Huffington Post to refuse to respond if called by any polling organization.
Among those seriously edged out of the spotlight by this primary overkill has been George W. Bush. In his case, though, this may be more blessing than oversight. The study by the Center for Public Integrity that tallied the 935 lies told by Bush, Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, received some play, but only a fraction it might have had without the electoral distractions.
The real missing news, however, is from the War in Iraq. Since primary-mania took hold, news of the war has dwindled to next to nothing. So next to nothing, in fact, that Bush and his few remaining supporters can claim their surge a boffo success, and start pulling out the old “Mission Accomplished” banner. Last week, surge impresario General David Petraeus was rolled out to spread the positive word, but also the caveat that it might take yet another six months to assess its success. And that was about all anyone had to say on Iraq.
And this is where the TV election obsession becomes treacherous. It may be amusing to watch Bill Clinton argue with every camera that’s pointed at him, but it is positively dangerous when election news coverage usurps hard and vital information on one of the major issues in the entire campaign.
Mick Farren blogs at Doc40.blogspot.com.
2008-01-301
Published: 01/30/2008
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