America Is Too Dumb for TV News
This latest episode with Trump and the 9/11 “celebrations” was fascinating. When Trump started to take heat, he at first did something one journalist I know calls “panic-Googling.” Panic-Googling is saying or writing something dumb, then frantically rushing to the Internet to see if you can luck out into evidence for what you’ve already blabbed in public.
Trump thought he lucked out, digging up a September 18, 2001, Washington Post article by reporters Serge Kovaleski and Frederick Kunkle. The old clip claimed a few people had been detained after allegedly being spotted celebrating in “tailgate-style” parties on rooftops in northern New Jersey.
Seizing upon this factoid, Trump tweeted, “I want an apology! Many people have tweeted that I am right!”
Forgetting that this didn’t come close to being an affirmation that he’d seen “thousands” of people celebrating on television, Trump’s supporters howled in outrage. Who were these biased witch-hunters to accuse him of lying? The Donald was right all along!
Other supporters referenced an article by Debbie Schlussel, Detroit’s schlocky Ann Coulter knockoff, who long ago insisted in print that she once watched an MTV news report describing post-9/11 celebrations by Arabs in Paterson, New Jersey. It wasn’t Jersey City, Schlussel said, and Trump got the numbers wrong, but aside from those minor issues, he was dead right.
Next in the progression came Rush Limbaugh, who came to Trump’s defense by saying that “regardless of the specific details,” Trump was right about Muslims on American soil celebrating the collapse of the towers on 9/11. “The bottom line is that a lot of Americans are well aware that Muslims were cheering,” Rush said. “Maybe not in New Jersey in great numbers, but around the world they were because we saw the video.”
As if the “regardless of the specific details” excuse wasn’t weird enough, Trump spokesman Corey Lewandowski next went on Breitbart radio to explain that the campaign had in fact provided material about celebrating Muslims to mainstream news outlets, who were now collectively declining to run it because of an ongoing conspiracy against Trump.
“They want to try and discredit as many people as possible so they can have an establishment candidate come in,” he said. “Because they are all controlled by special interests and all controlled by the media.”
This is a horrible thing to have to say about one’s own country, but this story makes it official. America is now too dumb for TV news.
It’s our fault. We in the media have spent decades turning the news into a consumer business that’s basically indistinguishable from selling cheeseburgers or video games. You want bigger margins, you just cram the product full of more fat and sugar and violence and wait for your obese, over-stimulated customer to come waddling forth.
The old Edward R. Murrow, eat-your-broccoli version of the news was banished long ago. Once such whiny purists were driven from editorial posts and the ad people over the last four or five decades got invited in, things changed. Then it was nothing but murders, bombs, and panda births, delivered to thickening couch potatoes in ever briefer blasts of forty, thirty, twenty seconds.
America Is Too Dumb for TV News, Page 2 of 3