We’re devoting a lot of good energy these days to exploring the failings of the media and how we may best affect that media from our vantage point here in the blogosphere. Recently we’ve seen an excellent effort led by Jane Hamsher at FDL to take down the ratings at Amazon for the odious Kate O’Bierne’s latest piece of excresence titled “Women Who Make The World Worse”. We’ve seen several paid off opinion writers resign or be fired after their financial dealings withoutside groups have been revealed.
Now we have the latest raft of insulting and tasteless bullshit from Chris Matthews, a prominent pundit on a steep ethical decline, and we wonder what we can do to effect significant pressure on him and his corporate enablers. I don’t have any specific answers for this beyond all that’s being said by everyone already; write letters to MSNBC, to Hardball, to sponsors, etc. But I do want to explore some of the other dynamics involved in the failure of the media in general and what, if anything, we can do about it directly. And I don’t want to dwell on the money/profit angle too much because that is self-evident anyway. suffice it to say that if viewership goes down ratings go down and if ratings go down ad revenue goes down and if ad revenue goes down shows do, eventually, get bumped off. I’m not sure if this is still true but Matthews’ show’s ratings were on a pretty solid trajectory downward for a while. Olbermann’s show consistently outranks Hardball in viewers and I’m sure this rankles the hell out of Tweety. The reporter David Gregory usually makes Matthews look prety lame by comparison too, and I expect Gregory is remaining alert to the potential of sabotage against his career by Tweety and “pumpkin head” Russert. But Tweety himself is headed for the pre-emptive demise of his own show as long as his current behavior continues.
Even though Matthews has been “off the rails” (as far as responsible news handling goes) for a long time now, I still used to watch his show with some focus just to pick up the nuances that might lead to a fuller understanding of what the wingnuts’ next moves were going to be. and I found that despite the terrible factual negligence and arrogant laziness of Matthews personally, I still managed to extract some relevant info from his show.
But no longer. Matthews is now a major contender for most irrelevant pundit on TV. (I don’t include any of the Fox hacks in this contest because they are all shitbirds and constitute a league of their own). Admittedly he has a way to go; I think Russert is still way out ahead, but in Matthews case, his failings, IMHO, do more damage to the public mind than most of the others simply because he was at one time more trusted to be a balanced commentator.
I don’t regard Matthews as stupid by any stretch of the imagination, nor do I think he’s been co-opted by material rewards from the regime wingnuts. I think his primary failing, the proximate cause of his inability to do his job well and be responsible for conveying the facts and rational analysis to the public, is simply that, like so many others, he’s become his own biggest fan.
Many years ago a friend of mine launched into a fascinating discourse about how the greatest threat to a guru was the temptation to be corrupted by the power inherent in both the knowledge he posesses and his position as the disseminator of that knowledge. Expanding on this basic theme, my friend went on to describe how so many spiritual “teachers” end up tricking themselves into believeing they are the source of wisdom, rather than the messengers of it; how so many, especially in the realm of religion, come to believe that it is they themselves that are deserving of worship from their acolytes, rather than the deity to which they supposedly pay homage.
Matthews has this problem in spades. Of course most of the rest of the millionaire media mannequins have the same affliction too, and sadly for us all, given that the media is now fundamentally an entertainment industry rather than a responsible information disseminator, there is precious little emphasis on reining in these tendencies one they start to appear in their star pundits and news readers.
Whether Matthews makes an apology to Michael Moore or to anyone else by itself is not very important. If he were to see the error of his ways and make an honest and sincere apology, now that would be something, but I suspect the odds of such a thing occuring are zero. Short of a powerful personal epiphany of some sort, I just don’t think he is capable of any such honest self-examination.
For me, virtually every single newsperson who’s ever attributed any sort of innate intelligence or awareness or courage or understanding to George Bush owes all of us an apology for suggesting that this blazing numbskull is anything but a complete imbecile on every level. If there does come a time when such apologies are tendered I will be very surprised. I’ve frequently wondered whether, once Bush is out of office, the prominent news people will feel emboldened to speak out more honestly as to their own real opinions of him as being a fool. I do find it hard to imagine that so many otherwise thoughtful and intelligent people could truly believe Bush has a functioning and aware mind that is anywhere even close to being adequate for the task of being chief executive of anything, let alone president. Time will tell whether such honest appraisals by the press will emerge, but I will certainly not be holding my breath.
In the meantime, Matthews show is, for me, no longer a barometer by which I can measure anything of substance, so I basically ignore it. It’s true I’ll have it on in the background sometimes, on the off chance I hear the voice of someone who’s ability to be relevant and truthful I respect, but, alas, on Matthews’ show this happens less and less often, just as it occurs less and less across the entire bandwidth of cable news media.
I ignore a vast number of people in the news business now, simply for the reason that there’s so much going on, and so much misinformation, deliberate disinformation and outright bullshit being spread about that the sheer volume of such crap has it’s own tactical effect in that when we try to pay attention to all of it it just burns up the clock on us.
We wind up spending so much time expressing outrage at creeps like O’Reilly or Coulter or Hannity, so much time refuting the falsities of lazy journalists that we spend far less time devoted to exploring in depth what we belive we need to do to effectively deal with the urgent problems we are faced with.
I recognize that we need to monitor the crazies, and to at least note the insanity of the prominent ones like Malkin, Limbaugh, etc. But I hope we’ll spend less time discussing the minutia of their idiotic and hateful crap, and just treat them with a sort of “there they go again” disdain that puts their remarks on the record as being noted without allowing ourselves to be drawn into such deep discussion. and besides, these crazies thrive on the attention they get from us; they celebrate the outrage they manage to incite, and for me it seems a shame that we so often respond to them in a way that gives them exactly whast they want. Ridicule and pity are more appropriate for these loonies, and for Matthews and his ilk, ridicule and disdain are likewise likely to affect them much more than outrage. After all, no one who’s his own biggest fan, no one in love with himself, ever likes being ridiculed or held in contempt. Less attention rather than more attention; this is what gets to them.