Talking Heads Tilted Right

Sorry for my absence—the end of the semester, as it usually does, has swallowed most of my free time of late.

Just a brief observation about the public sphere as it’s now enacted through the media: have you noticed that between dinner and bedtime, you can actually find it difficult to find anything like “news” on the 24 hour cable networks? Moreover, what you get instead (commentary) is heavily weighted to the conservative side of things.

On any given weeknight, channel surfing CNN, Headline News, MSNBC, and FOX, you’ll come across former GOP Representative Joe Scarborough holding forth for an hour. Flip the channel, and you get the risible Glenn Beck. Bow ties your thing? You’ve got an hour of Tucker Carlson you can watch. Want the semblance of balance without actually wanting to deal with the real McCoy? You’ve got Hannity and Colmes (or, as Al Franken more accurately terms it, Hannity and Colmes). Fiscal conservatism and anti-immigrant rhetoric float your boat? Lou Dobbs trades in little else on his nightly show. For that matter, so does Brit Hume. And, of course, you’ve got “Papa Bear” Bill O’Reilly inhabiting the center of the conservative babbleverse.

On the liberal side you’ve got . . . Keith Olbermann? I like K.O., but his show is hardly equal time.

All this would be bad enough if it wasn’t for the continual opining by conservatives of their alleged marginalization in the media. Recently, Glenn Beck complained that as a white Christian male, he’s overlooked and ignored in society. The fact that he complained about this on his very own national television show didn’t seem to trip is irony alarm. Nor did the fact that every other talking head on the news networks is also a white Christian male. Apparently in Beck’s universe, African American Buddhist lesbians in wheelchairs are setting the public agenda rather than people like him.

The usual reply I hear in response to this point is that O’Reilly, Beck, etc., are 1) commentators, not news reporters, and 2) are only a drop in the bucket compared to the huge number of liberals that man the news desks of the mainstream media.

To the first point, I simply say, “Yes, exactly so!” The problem is precisely that time that could be spent doing journalism (involving things like, you know, investigating and reporting) is squandered with the airing of half-assed bloviating by folks whose only area of expertise is their own opinions. And on top of that, it largely reflects only one half of the political spectrum (making it, I suppose, quarter-assed bloviating).

As to the second, I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me how Katie Couric is somehow Trotsky in drag or how Dan Rather’s reporting, as flawed as it might have been, on the truth of Bush’s National Guard service (or lack thereof) somehow proves a systematic liberal bias, yet the fact that the mainstream media passed on unsubstantiated (an often demonstrably false) claims by the Bush administration about Iraq’s WMD programs (or lack thereof) to the public, paving the way for the invasion, doesn’t mean anything.