Wasn’t it just yesterday (okay, it was 18 months ago, which I know because it was the subject of my very first blog post) that Oprah was burning James Frey (and his publishers) at the stake for playing fast and loose with the facts and didn’t the NYT’s Michiko Kakutani come down on her side and say that “Oprahness [i.e., truth-telling] Trumped Truthiness“?

Didn’t Kakutani’s NYT colleague Richard Siklos add his disapproval about this cultural slide away from authenticity (the subject of my second second post)? And didn’t their colleague Frank Rich weigh in with a column in which he made clear why we should be very, very worried about “truthiness” [e.a.]

As Oprah Winfrey, the ultimate arbiter of our culture, has made clear, no one except pesky nitpickers much cares whether Mr. Frey’s autobiography is true or not, or whether it sits on a fiction or nonfiction shelf at Barnes & Noble. Such distinctions have long since washed away in much of our public life. What matters most now is whether a story can be sold as truth, preferably on television. The mock Comedy Central pundit Stephen Colbert’s slinging of the word ”truthiness” caught on instantaneously last year …
At its silliest level, [it] is manifest in show-biz phenomena like Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey, … [If] suckers want to buy fictional nonfiction like ”Newlyweds” or ”A Million Little Pieces” as if they were real, that’s just harmless diversion.

It’s when truthiness moves beyond the realm of entertainment that it’s a potential peril.

Sociologist Joshua Gamson explained twelve years ago how this works, in his 1994 article “Incredible News” [e.a.]:

The entry of tabloid signs — the subjects, the styles, the stars — into news programming indicates to audiences not only that they should watch, but that they should watch with tabloid eyes. Even a small dose of sensationalism can be enough to indicate that entertainment rules are operating: that the audience is being courted and sold to advertisers rather than being informed, that journalists are presenting information for commercial interest rather than public interest, and that viewers should suspend belief. Let us entertain you, they say; watch us like fiction.

And, resentment in tow [my, how things have changed --ed.] people do accept the invitation, converting themselves from a believing audience into an entertained one.

And so infotainment has ruled on TV for a long time, by the mutual consent of the audience and the producers of that infotainment (read Gamson’s entire American Prospect article).

Frank Rich also alludes to this, and he blames a credulous audience [e.a.]:

This isn’t just a slippery slope. It’s a toboggan into chaos, or at least war. [But what's] remarkable is how much fictionalization plays a role in almost every national debate. Even after a big humbug is exposed as blatantly as Professor Marvel in ”The Wizard of Oz” — FEMA’s heck of a job in New Orleans, for instance — we remain ready and eager to be duped by the next tall tale. It’s as if the country is living in a permanent state of suspension of disbelief.

Democrats who go berserk at their every political defeat still don’t understand this. They fault the public for not listening to their facts and arguments, as though facts and arguments would make a difference, even if the Democrats were coherent. It’s the power of the story that always counts first, and the selling of it that comes second. Accuracy is optional.

Gamson, writing twelve years before the term “truthiness” was coined to describe the “incredible news” phenomenon, didn’t condemn the audience or put it down. In his view, our succumbing to infotainment (which in fact is pleasurable, because it’s fun) wasn’t a dumbing-down of the culture but rather a new way for us to view (i.e., skeptically) what we were being fed by the media—particularly TV:

Having fun with infotainment does not mean that the desire for truth has dissipated, but that the likelihood of finding it on television has declined. It is not evidence that tastes are tabloid-debased, or that the “masses” are dragging the rest of “us” down, or that most people are too stupid for anything but the soap operatic. The popularity of infotainment is based on accepting the summons to treat information as play.

I long ago bought into Gamson’s argument, because I had been treating information as play without being able to articulate it as such. Gamson simply gave me a language with which to describe what I did for fun, which was read between the lines of the media to tease out the subtext.

The slide into infotainment is now all but complete on television—it’s almost all “views” and no “news—. What it means is that the onus for assessing what we see on TV is on us. We all need to be media-savvy in order to be able to tease out meaning from amidst the bells and whistles.

Now (as some observers have been saying for a long time] it’s every TV viewer for himself or herself when trying to decide if, say, Keith Olbermann is being a newsman or an entertainer when he appears in your living room.
And back in May, MSNBC wanted you to know that if you’ve got a problem with the melding of “news” and “views,” well — that’s your problem, because you’re hopelessly old school:

For many years, the rule for journalists was simple: maintain strict objectivity. Even for television hosts unafraid to say what they think — Chris Matthews, for instance — there’s still a little mystery about what they’ll do inside a voting booth.

Some journalists are such purists that they don’t vote at all.

To one critic, Olbermann’s actual performance at the debate and in similar situations was less important than the message sent by his presence.

“It’s sort of like putting a professional wrestler in an anchor chair and saying `he can do this,’” said Tim Graham, director of media analysis at the Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog. “Well, he can do this. But he’s known as a professional wrestler.”

Well, he was known as a professional wrestler. Nowadays, Olbermann doesn’t just proclaim himself to be a Journalist; with his demagogic “special comments,” he eagerly invites comparisons of himself to Edward R. Murrow [!].

At least Glenn Beck has the decency (or savvy) to present himself as a “rodeo clown,” and CNN doesn’t have him anchoring events such as presidential debates—yet. On the other hand, they’ve got Rick Sanchez doing some kind of news-flavored program at 8 p.m.

This guy mugs so much for the camera that he’s only a red nose and a yellow bowtie away from official clown-dom.

I’m telling ya, folks: TV “news” ought to come with a warning label:

NEWS: VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED