Some of you may have noticed I haven’t been posting much of late. Some of you may not care. Some of you may be saying to yourself: Where did Booman go? His blog’s been hacked by some moron (okay, hopefully that last category is a tiny minority).
Well, I’m one of the “fortunate ones” this election year. You see, every election cycle we see the same things happen on political blogs, whether left or right, and it mirrors in a way the nature of political reporting on the cable news shows. Everything is “all about the horse race.” I’m not saying literally everything, but when the death of a US Ambassador and three other people in Libya becomes all about the Romney campaign’s gaffes, or (to give the right their due) all about Obama’s allegedly weak foreign policy because it shows he “placates” our enemies, well I think you get my drift.
Of course, I stopped watching the cable news programs over a year ago. I stopped reading the political blogs every day, and more importantly writing for them on a consistent basis, sometime over this Summer. So I learned about the attack in Libya and the protests in other Middle Eastern countries only Thursday night, when I watched the Rachel Maddow Show for the first time in months. And after furiously looking around the internet to figure out what happened, and what people had been saying had happened, I found a lot of blog posts that had little to do with the actual events. This did not surprise me.
It seems every election cycle (which means every two years) the blogosphere becomes more and more like Talk Radio (right wing blogs) or Cable News (both liberal or conservative blogs) the majority of “stories” contains far more opinion, hyperbole, rants, misstatements of fact or out and out falsehoods. Sure, we like to note that the Republicans are primarily responsible for this trend, and they are, in my view the main culprits, but you see many liberal blogs with posts that often jump the gun before all the facts are known, or buy into quasi-conspiracy theories. Often times (and I have been as guilty as anyone about this in the past) the stories we post or tweet have a symbiotic (or maybe its better to call it a parasitic) relationship with other sources of media.
What some popular media figure says, or how some news organization reports a story, becomes a story in itself. People far too often post about important issues facing this country and the world, not in terms of a the dangers they pose or to offer thoughtful policy solutions, but strictly in terms of how it may or may not benefit “our team,” whatever team that may be. I’m not saying that is the case for every blog or every poster, but the “noise” tends to wash out the signal in election years.
Of course, this tendency to see everything, no matter how tangential, in strictly political terms, has been creeping into non-election years as well. In a sense, since the Republicans won the 1994 mid-terms and Gingrich, that little bomb thrower became Speaker of the House, we now live in a society where the campaign never ends, and with the rise of the internet and social media that trend has reached warp speed. We now live in a world where lies and disinformation predominate. A world in which any idiot can film a You Tube video and make it available instantly around the world.
And with the constant politicization of media, every action, no matter how prosaic, is dissected for its political impact, rather than what significance it may have on the lives of ordinary people. Politicians have become entertainment figures, super heroes and super villains, both, in some grand spectacle of Good vs. Evil. Facts be damned, we just seem to want a good story! And the cable networks, talk radio and yes, even the blogosphere is willing to deliver the goods (as opposed to the good).
You can see the desire for fame trumping good governance in any story where minor political figures act outrageously (see, for example, these jokers in Kansas) or the entire career history of people such as Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin and (much as I hate to say it) Anthony Weiner. I suppose that is in part a reflection of a society where money not only buys access and favors from politicians, but also determines which political messages get broadcast and which issues get discussed on the TV — still the largest source of information for most people.
Not to say there was ever a golden age in American politics. But there was a time when the insane 24/7 news cycle did not exist. There was a time where it was illegal for some “person” real or corporate, to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into influencing our elections. There was even a time where local TV news had to devote time for opposing points of view on “issues of the day” from ordinary people, not some “pundit” on a call list.
Of course, I did say I was fortunate, earlier, didn’t I? I was being a tad facetious. Over the last month, my family has experienced various health issues (myself and other members of my family) that have forced me to re-focus my priorities, as they say. I won’t go into the maudlin details. After all, occasionally some of my family members read this blog, and besides regular readers are well aware of the medical issues my family faces and likely don’t need or necessarily want a running update. Lots of people have problems, these days.
However, my time away from the circus atmosphere of media coverage of the “news” and political coverage of the election by all forms of media, including the blogs, has given me time to reflect on the nature of this rough beast of which I have played a small part since 2005. The issues I care about–climate change, civil rights, police abuse, income inequality, racism in all its many forms, etc.–are still vitally important to me. But in an election year no one talks about those issues in any substantive way. Indeed, many of the most pressing issues, such as climate change, are simply kicked to the curb. Republican candidates can’t talk about them in any intelligent manner (regardless of what they really believe) because of their base and the sources of funding they rely upon for funding their campaigns,and Democrats won’t about them for whatever reason. Indeed, I was dismayed to see President Obama in his acceptance speech continue to refer to ethanol and (far worse in my opinion) make this statement:
We’ve opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration in the last three years, and we’ll open more.
I’ve also been dismayed by the lack of investigation and prosecution of Wall Street gangsters (clearly the best organized crime syndicate in the world) but even more dismayed that neither party has made much of an issue of it other than to refer to Romney’s actions as the head of Bain Capital. In the big picture Bain was a minor player. They merely rode the wave created by the Big Boys at Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Wells Fargo etc. Yet, it seems the only way we can discuss the massive fraud and theft of our money by Wall Street is to confine it to attack ads against Romney? Don’t get me wrong, he deserves the ignominy for what were doubtless shady practices at best, and outright theft, at worst, but where is the substantive discussion of what happened and what needs to be done to eliminate the power of our Financial Overlords? Buried in the pages of Rolling Stone Magazine in articles by Matt Taibbi. Who would have guessed that a magazine created to cover the music industry would be the leader in covering the depths to which our financial criminals have plumbed?
So, forgive me if I have been absent from posting lately. What I want to talk about doesn’t seem to be all that important to most political junkies and “news consumers” right now. I will work to do what I can to re-elect Obama, because God knows what havoc Romney could wreak if he were elected, and I will do what I can to get Democrats elected to Congress, but writing about politics on a liberal blog in an election year is a task best suited for others right now. I wish them luck, though to be honest, I fear it is an exercise in hearing ourselves talk to one another.