Laughing Ourselves Sick
Celebrity overtook politics a long time ago. Now entertainment has replaced journalism.
Numbers don’t lie.
Saturday Night Live reached an average 7 million viewers with each broadcast in 2018. The New York Times has 1 million home subscribers. When we add digital NYT subscribers, they reach a total audience of 4 million readers. Yet, when we add DVR viewers in the week following a live broadcast, SNL reaches more than 10 million viewers.
It’s similar when we look in other places.
The Daily Show with Trevor Noah reaches about 750,000 viewers. Late Night with Stephen Colbert reaches 4 million. Yet, the Washington Post reaches 475,000 subscribers and the outstanding political coverage of The New Yorker is reaching and grasping to find 2 million subscribers.
Matt Taibbi gave American journalists a drubbing in the wake of the Mueller Report. Taibbi makes a good argument with which I agree: the irrational pressure to get an eye-catching story first with less care about getting the story right overtook reporters in the run-up to the Iraq War and the hunt for WMD’s. A similar enthusiasm to catch Donald Trump (forgive me) red-handed in collusion with Russia also has characterized the Mueller coverage, and it has not served the American public well. Taibbi points to a crisis of confidence in reporting, another notion with which I agree.
Taibbi’s argument has generated considerable interest. He has gotten rebuttals in Bloomberg, Politico, and on NPR. But none of those responses quite raises the questions that concern me most.
Just why should we think that journalists have shaped how the public understood the Mueller Report? Why is the reporting relevant to our politics? Why should we ignore the evidence that most Americans’ understanding of l’Affaire Russe did not run any deeper than what they got from watching SNL or Comedy Central?
The studies have been available for a very long time. Journalism has been giving way to entertainment for decades. And, those of use who study or teach about politics have known for decades how the television age has changed politics.
Poor Richard Nixon. He won his debates with John F. Kennedy among radio listeners, but he never quite got over the sting of not being as telegenic as his opponent. He wore pancake makeup whenever he appeared in public for the rest of his life, and he turned to a young Roger Ailes to make sure he got a good presentation in 1968. The television presidency had begun. The 1980’s were dominated by The Great Communicator and a presidency rich in imagery while thin on substance and sensible policy. Reagan used to joke that he couldn’t imagine how someone could be president without having worked as an actor.
We have entered a time when it is impossible to imagine someone who could be president without having been successful on reality television. A president simply must be entertaining, a character for late-night talks shows and sketch comedy. Can the YouTube presidency be far behind?
Trump’s real and dangerous skill lies in how he understands that voters have a short attention span (like his) and they respond to outrageous gestures (like he does). We’ve all been watching TV for too long. The attorney general’s summary of the the Mueller Report is a perfect example. The first impressions of the Report were shaped by a summary in direct contradiction with its own content. Trump was exonerated by a summary which said that the Report “does not exonerate him.” While polling tells us there is skepticism still about Trump and Barr’s summary, there is no clamor demanding release of the full report. There are no marchers in the streets. Something has quieted and softened real outrage.
This is masterful manipulation of narrative and attention span. It is cleverly-edited splash of red wine the face, calculated to distract and entertain. It is precisely what voters expect, what we have been conditioned to expect.
Taibbi is wrong because the reporting on RussiaGate did not tarnish reporters or journalism. It can’t. Nobody reads or watches them. Or, at least not enough of us. We are forming our political opinions someplace else — from Robert DeNiro’s tough-guy Mueller impression, or Stephen Colbert’s monologues. Those influences both created the heightened expectations of a Mueller showdown and softened the blow when there was none. After all, Saturday Night Live was there to make the Mueller Report funny for us, on cue.
The Trump Administration is a TV show. It is entertaining, the ratings are great. Everybody is watching. The networks are doing well. Comedy has never been better. Probably, the show will get renewed. Maybe there will be a re-boot in 2024, with Ivanka in the starring role. A shocking twist, a woman in the Oval Office.
The entertainment is thrilling. The civic and human costs are something else.
