 |
| Guest poster: Thad Guyer |
Peter Sage: Thad Guyer is an attorney representing employees who are whistleblowers. As a litigator he looks closely at what arguments are persuasive to judges and juries, and he has been flowing this election closely.
The news business is a business. Newspaper readers and TV watchers are audiences that can be presented to advertisers. It isn't a civics class.
Here is Thad Guyer's commentary;
Up Close’s understood my comment to be that “Americans don't want self government, we want good TV”. To be clearer, my message is that Americans do want self-government, but we want the information that is the life blood of democracy to be emotive, inspiring, ridiculing, soaring, or disparaging. We cheer our political team, and boo our opponents. Surely the sons and daughters of the American Revolution wanted the same thing. In the beginning, our mass media was lifeless newsprint. But then new technology, radio, changed that by putting music scores to our news. When I grew up in mid-twentieth century, newsreels from companies like Movie Tone, gave the entire news with music scores. Good news had light uplifting music, bad news had tragic scores, news about communists had dark ominous scores. Music told us how we should think. Entertainment.
The music later went away, replaced by the calm reassuring voices of Cronkike, Huntley-Brinkley and other anchors. They told us that every president and national candidate, no matter his party, must be respected. And respect was easy for the simple reason that the three networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, did not acknowledge, much less give airtime to, either right wing or left wing voices. It was mainstream only. Respect and admiration for a news anchor, for a truth teller, are powerful emotions. We loved the powerful opening music of each broadcast.
Then Vietnam and a black preacher changed it all. Vietnam war protestors irreverently denounced the centrist political leaders the news anchors had long told us we must all respect. Rev. King demanded we wake up to a racist America, one the anchors never told us about. The little commentaries the anchors gave at the end of their broadcasts started feeling intense, polarizing. Rolling Stone and National Review were calling each other liars, and subversive sounding course titles were swelling our student catalogs. By the mid 1970’s I was being told in strong language that America was sexist, racist, selfish and warlike. Impeach Nixon. Kissinger and Westmorland are war criminals. The killing of the Kennedys and Rev. King spawned conspiracies that the establishment and mainstream media were duping us. We started picking the newspapers, magazines, radio and tv news telling our side things, and drawing clearer lines of the we versus they. By the late 1980’s, cable tv and cable news had arrived. By the mid-1990’s we had the internet and could search out our own news agendas. Every scrap of information useful to me as a voter since I was 21 has been emotive; politics has been ideology, entertainment and sport. And respect for network news has been replaced with skepticism.
Even in the begging of this new information and media regime, a B-rated actor could become California’s governor, and then a President. We on the left were horrified that his harsh rhetoric and racial coding worked. We had only a boring Jimmy Carter. But at least he and Reagan, and then Bush 1, Clinton, and Bush 2, and before them Nixon, Johnson, and Ford had been governors or vice-presidents, guys we all knew were qualified executives even if we didn’t like them. That’s the whole list of presidents since I was 21, and I’m 65 now.
Obama has changed America’s idea of not just presidential qualifications, but more importantly, the role of the internet and emotive entertainment that can drive a successful campaign. Not a senator for even one term, and before that in the Illinois state house with a tiny staff for only six years, Obama set the new ground rules—you can be president with no executive experience whatsoever, if you harness the power of the internet and YouTube, and stream a soaring, roaring show telling your base exactly what they want to hear. Emotion, entertainment, a really good show is what it takes. We democrats denounce mean-spirited Republicans for the ever strengthening Trump candidacy. But the reality is that Democrats and Obama have given us the entertainment mechanism and precedent for Donald Trump.
The music later went away, replaced by the calm reassuring voices of Cronkike, Huntley-Brinkley and other anchors. They told us that every president and national candidate, no matter his party, must be respected. And respect was easy for the simple reason that the three networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, did not acknowledge, much less give airtime to, either right wing or left wing voices. It was mainstream only. Respect and admiration for a news anchor, for a truth teller, are powerful emotions. We loved the powerful opening music of each broadcast.
Then Vietnam and a black preacher changed it all. Vietnam war protestors irreverently denounced the centrist political leaders the news anchors had long told us we must all respect. Rev. King demanded we wake up to a racist America, one the anchors never told us about. The little commentaries the anchors gave at the end of their broadcasts started feeling intense, polarizing. Rolling Stone and National Review were calling each other liars, and subversive sounding course titles were swelling our student catalogs. By the mid 1970’s I was being told in strong language that America was sexist, racist, selfish and warlike. Impeach Nixon. Kissinger and Westmorland are war criminals. The killing of the Kennedys and Rev. King spawned conspiracies that the establishment and mainstream media were duping us. We started picking the newspapers, magazines, radio and tv news telling our side things, and drawing clearer lines of the we versus they. By the late 1980’s, cable tv and cable news had arrived. By the mid-1990’s we had the internet and could search out our own news agendas. Every scrap of information useful to me as a voter since I was 21 has been emotive; politics has been ideology, entertainment and sport. And respect for network news has been replaced with skepticism.
Even in the begging of this new information and media regime, a B-rated actor could become California’s governor, and then a President. We on the left were horrified that his harsh rhetoric and racial coding worked. We had only a boring Jimmy Carter. But at least he and Reagan, and then Bush 1, Clinton, and Bush 2, and before them Nixon, Johnson, and Ford had been governors or vice-presidents, guys we all knew were qualified executives even if we didn’t like them. That’s the whole list of presidents since I was 21, and I’m 65 now.
Obama has changed America’s idea of not just presidential qualifications, but more importantly, the role of the internet and emotive entertainment that can drive a successful campaign. Not a senator for even one term, and before that in the Illinois state house with a tiny staff for only six years, Obama set the new ground rules—you can be president with no executive experience whatsoever, if you harness the power of the internet and YouTube, and stream a soaring, roaring show telling your base exactly what they want to hear. Emotion, entertainment, a really good show is what it takes. We democrats denounce mean-spirited Republicans for the ever strengthening Trump candidacy. But the reality is that Democrats and Obama have given us the entertainment mechanism and precedent for Donald Trump.
