Mr. Colbert Goes to Washington, Round 2

By Charlie Barber
Staff Writer

“God whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”  -Aeschylus

“From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned.” -Orwell

The real horror of the 2010 elections wasn’t the outcome.  It was the refusal of major TV news networks, and National Public Radio to cover Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity” and Steven Colbert’s “Rally to Keep Fear Alive” on October 30th.

Thanks to Viacom Corporation, and coverage from Huffpost.com and others, overt censorship failed to keep this sendup of 24/7 crisis news from the American public.  But a far worse evil was successful—covert censorship.

According to George Orwell, covert, or self-censorship is the single greatest crime against truth that a reporter or a news organization can commit.

I agree. It’s worse than government censorship where facts are suppressed. It’s worse than the corporate censorship of North Dakota newspapers where facts ignored on the editorial pages are sometimes available through the AP wire on the front page. 

It’s also worse than FOX’s behavior, where the news desk makes up its own facts, but where sports anchors and writers, like Howie Long and Jason Whitlock get to face facts and speak truth to power. It is certainly worse than an NBC which balances Joe Scarborough’s sugar in the morning with Rachel Maddow’s vinegar in the evening.

ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, and NPR executives were not too squeamish to cover humorless, thinly veiled racist rants of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin last August.  But in October they couldn’t handle organized rebuke through humor by Stewart and Colbert.

Comedy thus made cowards of big news executives.  Why did they wimp out? In truth, they can’t stand genuine competition. TV and Radio executives can’t handle a comedic approach to news which makes more sense than theirs.

It isn’t just that Stewart and Colbert repudiate the usual elitist approach to political news, common to the right as much as to the left. The elitist approach tells people what to think, rather than how to think, and is quite different from weather reports, where people are given hard data they need to reach their own conclusions.

With politics, facts are manipulated, even invented, by news corporations stuck in a formula of crisis and melodrama. “If it bleeds, it leads,” is the slogan they live by, whether it’s relevant to what’s actually happening to Americans or not. Well-heeled media executives could care less, far more removed from the real world than ordinary bureaucrats or politicians trying to explain Health Care legislation to average citizens.

In his five year long study of Time, Newsweek, CBS, and NBC, [Deciding What’s News, 1979] Herbert Gans shows how news narrative is always set: the drama of the Presidency, conflict rather than resolution. The best NBC executives can think of nowadays is Keith Olberman and Ed Schultz vs. Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh.

The attempted muzzling of Olberman shows their fear of even this mild opposition to the organized and well funded right wing. Isolated TV executives react as if McCarthyism were back. Maybe it is, but it doesn’t feed on fear of Communism.

Fear of falling, fear of losing status, fear of permanent unemployment. Those fears are real,...unless you happen to own a TV network, a bailed out bank, a few oil wells, or acres of wheat.

If you read Gans you learn how most news media are predictable, but reading Gans is tough slogging.  He’s an academic. Stewart and Colbert are more fun, and point out the same truths as Gans. They are thus a threat to self-appointed “news masters” who boycotted their rally. These smug dried up “news masters” hate and fear comedic genius. It shows how clueless they are to the real world they claim to describe for us.

For example:  why is gridlock supposed to be automatic, now that Republicans have captured the House?  In truth, Republicans can no longer successfully be the “Party of No,” as an electoral ploy.  Republican “little people” need jobs just as much as Democratic “little people.” John Boehner is on the hook, and he knows it.  Hence his declaration before November 2nd that he and President Obama could work together, even joke about the respective colors of each others skin.

Though a disaster for 24/7 crisis journalism, it would be a good thing if Barack Obama and John Boehner could get along as professional politicians, regardless of how it is reported.  Bi-partisanship, after all, produced this country’s successful approach to the Cold War, and the passage of civil rights legislation. Agreement on tax credits for job creation that benefits ordinary Americans instead of Wall Street won’t be easy, but it’s not impossible in a Congress that just passed major reforms in Health Care Insurance, and Credit Card practices in the teeth of non-stop media nastiness.

And what about Rahm Emanuel? I hope no one believes that he resigned last September just to run for Mayor of Chicago. In fact, he doesn’t stand much of a chance.  He has to come in first or second in a non-partisan primary that pits him against at least seven other contenders, all of whom have stronger local, ethnic, machine and/or anti-machine connections.

So why did this able, abrasive, advisor to President Obama leave when he did?
Image, of course. Barack Obama’s pollsters were as well as informed as John Boehner’s. With the House falling to Republicans, sweet reason would be the political, and public, approach. 

Actually, Rahm’s real job had been to beat up on Democrats in the House and Senate, not Republicans. That was his training. There aren’t any Republicans in Chicago to speak of. Major issues of what’s good for people or fat cats have always been fought out within the friendly confines of Chicago’s Democratic Primaries.

Rahm used this experience in 2009-2010 against foot draggers in his own party, but the media missed it, caught up in slogans about “Blue Dog” Democrats and “No” Republicans. If you look at the record, instead of the headlines, you’ll see that Rahm and the President didn’t do too badly, but obviously couldn’t overcome in two years all disasters wrought by bipartisan greed since 1980. Thus Rahm leaves quietly, and media are no wiser to his real role than they were in 1968—that Chicago’s “Boss” Daley was a fervent believer in the New Deal, and a dove on the Viet Nam war.

“Crisis journalism” is as clueless about Illinois politics as it is about Chicago. For example: why is President Obama supposed to be embarrassed by a Republican Senate victory in Illinois?  The victor, Mark Kirk, is a moderate conservative, far more capable of bipartisanship than a radical right winger like Sharon Angle from Nevada, who would have snuffed out the career of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Barack Obama isn’t just from Illinois. He is our President. “Location, location, location,” is fine for the real estate business, but not always useful in the business of national politics.

The real story in Illinois was the Governor’s race, won by Democrat Pat Quinn. He promised to raise taxes to solve Illinois’ fiscal problems, the real issue for States other than Wyoming or North Dakota.  As one of Quinn’s voters put it in an exit poll: “If you’re saying you can eliminate the hole we’re in without raising taxes, you’re lying.”

People willing to tax themselves a little to get out of a big hole. That’s the biggest game change in the 2010 elections. Not only did the “smart guys” of TV miss this one, they dare not let it out even if they do catch it. As in the past, citizens willing to institute a fair, graduated income tax will destroy the entire fiscal agenda of the right wing.

Big bucks Republicans also went down to defeat in New York and California gubernatorial races, where voters know they are in trouble enough to need governance that cares more about them than about Wall Street. Those are Blue States, and the Republicans were dumb enough to run candidates more suited to Red States.

In Red States, folks in trouble look more often to the right than to the left.  As Hank Williams Jr. says, “It’s just a fam’ly tradition.” Unless they find Tea Baggers who see the need for private and public sector collaboration, however, these folks are going to be out of luck.

North Dakota is a Red State living in a dream world created by a billion dollar oil surplus on top of profitable agrarian “socialistic” coops. Reality will intrude soon enough with the likely closing of one or both of the Air Bases in Minot and Grand Forks.

Barack Obama, after all, has Blue States to worry about, and North Dakota indicated recently that it has no use for Democrats. John Boehner won’t worry about North Dakota either.  We are not as attractive a place for political investment as States with Republicans with higher unemployment realities—places like, say…Boehner’s Ohio.

North Dakotans who are not wealthy farmers or “oil boom” beneficiaries, supplement modest to meagre incomes with government programs that they rail, and even vote, against. While Stewart and Colbert may not provide comic relief for people in these unfunny positions, they do provide more truth about the situation than nightly news programs. 

It’s kind of like an appendectomy. Your life has been saved, but it hurts when you laugh.

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