Anyone who's a trivia buff may find it useful to know that Meet the Press is network television's longest running program. It started in November of 1947 which means it has been on almost twice as long as Saturday Night Live (the cultural benchmark of my parent's generation) and more than three times longer than The Simpsons (the cultural benchmark of my generation). What attracted me to it initially was that there was nothing else on at 1:00 am on Sunday mornings. You see, when the lobby is empty, your Facebook friends have gone to bed, and the thousands of pages you read last semester in your return to college have temporarily zapped your lifelong love of reading, television becomes your refuge. So I decided to turn on the cultural benchmark of my grandparent's generation - Meet the Press.
Almost immediately I was hooked. It was so informative. The moderator actually made politicians get off their talking points. I had long ago given up on the concept that there was such a thing as a balanced and honest newscast, and here it was, the grail that the nerd in me had been searching for without even knowing it. I likely have overstated how much I like this program, but it was refreshing to watch and made me think about the news from years past. Edward R. Murrow brought down Joseph McCarthy. Woodward and Bernstein brought down Nixon. Walter Cronkite helped bring an end to the Vietnam War. All of this was before I was born. Today news is, as Homer Simpson would say, "infotainment".
I can't help but wonder if this change is more in the American public than the news media itself. I think most people today prefer to be entertained than informed. I've heard that the U.S. media has a liberal bias. It may (that's a debate for another day), but my belief is that the bigger bias within our media is a bias towards sensationalism. What sells? Controversy. Heated arguments. Glenn Beck. Keith Olberman. Pit two contenders in a battle where there is no middle ground, and the result is polarization. Couple this with a public whose attention spans have been zapped by too much television, too much computer time, too many video games, and you are looking at a public debate that is a cliff notes version of reality.
The most famous political debate of U.S. history might have been those between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. I've been fascinated reading excerpts from these in my Civil War and Reconstruction class. The first candidate would get up and speak for an hour, the second candidate would get up and speak for an hour and a half, then the first candidate would speak to the assembled crowd another half hour. People would sit and listen to a three hour debate where a candidate at most spoke twice! It wouldn't work today. People crave simplicity.
To prove my point: the Republican Party recently released its "Pledge to America" basically a manifesto about what is wrong with America and what steps can be taken to fix the problems. I decided today to look it up. The document is 48 pages long. 24 of these are filled with the table of contents, pictures, and section headings with just a handful of words (one example: A plan to reform Congress and restore trust). The other 24 pages are pictures and text, text alone, and pages with graphs. This is AMAZING to me. One of our two political parties has a manifesto with as many pages devoted to pictures as to text. (Though to be fair the picture of Mount Rushmore is almost as beautiful as that of the cowboy roping steers). With as much money as our political parties do on polling and understanding the psychology of the American voter, I have to believe that the reason the conservative ideas in our country are best represented by using patriotic pictures rather than lengthy textual explanations of concepts such as limited government and lower taxes, is that is what works best with to garner votes from the American people. As for what the 24 pages of text said, I don't know...
I only read the cliff notes.
