Toward a unified field theory of current civic insanity

If you’re up for pondering a unified field theory of the insanity that passes for public discourse these days, as served up by cable news networks that likely give Joe Goebbels lumpy wet dreams in hell, then the following two finds may be worth a read along with the Steve Benen post I highlighted last night.

First there is Benen’s follow-on to his earlier email conversation with veteran Republican pol Bruce Bartlett, in which Bartlett theorizes about why Republican dead-enders hold such sway over the national media today. Benen provides a reality check to Bartlett’s overly robust assertions about our traditionally “liberal” media, but agrees with much of what he has to say (as I do, too). Bartlett:

Liberals have long been content with the mainstream media because it did largely reflect their values. It doesn't any more but liberals still treat the mainstream media as if it does. Thus as the mainstream media has declined, liberals have lost their primary sources of news and commentary and have not replaced them with those that are explicitly liberal in the same way that the right has created a fully-formed alternative media.

The missing piece of the problem that Bartlett and Benen don’t mention, though, is the consolidation of news media under transnational corporate ownership, and the funding of it under transnational corportate sponsorship. The unsurprising result of those developments has been the demolition of the traditional firewall between the newsroom and the business operations shop. Fat chance that MSNBC could become the liberal version of Fox when it’s principal function is to serve as a profit center for Microsoft and General Electric. Still, Bartlett would appear to be that rarest of birds these days: a reality-based conservative. And I salute him for that. (Not that I really consider “free market economics” to be reality-based, but at least I probably wouldn’t bar him from my swingin’ New Year’s Eve party based solely on his previous unfortunate associations with the G.H.W. Bush cabal.)

Second is a column I’ve seen several references to over the past few days: a Rick Perlstein Washington Post essay on why our current political ecology is no more deranged than it has been since the 1940s but, at the same time, very much more disturbing. Pay attention to Perlstein's 1963 anecdote about a protestor whacking the inoffensive milquetoast Adlai Stevenson with a picket sign to his bafflement. Also note Perlstein’s reasonable inference that if the Stevenson incident were to have happened last week, with America’s current U.N. ambassador as a stand-in for Stevenson, the furious wingnut protestor lady would have been interviewed on CNN and Fox, and her droolings would have become part of our national dialog. But Perlstein left out one other significant speculation, which I’ll now provide: if the lunatic protestor had been a sloppy, tie-dyed liberal whale named Wavy Gravy Jr., and the U.N. ambassador had been John Bolton, and the incident had happened 4 years ago, then our hypothetical Mr. Gravy would probably be awaiting trial in some U.S. penitentiary located in the deep, deep south.

Bartlett half-astutely notes in Benen's column that liberals “need to abandon the mainstream media and create their own alternative media,” but he seems to think that this alternative should manifest as a liberal version of Fox. I disagree, because such a thing could never work correctly in the context of being a corporate profit center. The alternative media are emerging on the web. The leading example is TPM, which combines a lucid, largely fact-based commentary function with a very impressive investigative reporting unit. Television should be left to feed on the shrivelling brains and souls of helpless right-wing consumers.