self-involved nation

The next time you hear that the media is to blame for everything or that TV news executives and their corporate parents are conspiring to keep us stupid (former Dateline correspondent John Hockenberry tries to make that case, and then some, in this self-serving, bitter, and blistering attack on NBC, from which he was laid off in 2005), consider the headlines on Memeorandum at this moment.

In the political blogosphere, it’s not only “all about the horse race”—it’s all about the U.S. election campaign, which is eleven months away. There isn’t one item about anything that’s happening anywhere else in the U.S., much anywhere else in the world.

Here’s a sample:

Kevin Drum / Washington Monthly:NEW! MISCELLANEOUS OBAMA BLOGGING….

Marc Ambinder:
Some Clintonology — A hoarse, happy, Barack Obama blew

Michelle Malkin:
What about Wyoming? “Where real America is.” … Find

Dr. Helen:
Is Senator Obama a Rorschach Test?

Matthew Yglesias:
Clinton: Obama’s Too Liberal

If TV “news” has all but vanished in favor of entertainment—and Hockenberry, for all his bile, writes clearly about this subject at least [e.a.]—it’s because we Americans (and humans) like to be entertained.

 Stories from the edge were not typically reassuring about the future. In this sense they were like actual news, unpredictable flashes from the unknown. On the other hand, the coveted emotional center was reliable, it was predictable, and its story lines could be duplicated over and over. It reassured the audience by telling it what it already knew rather than challenging it to learn.

Well, yes. Because television is an entertainment medium, not a classroom.

Among the greatest frustrations of working in TV news over the past decade was to see that while advertisers and entertainment producers were permitted to do wildly risky things in pursuit of audiences, news producers rarely ventured out of a safety zone of crime, celebrity, and character-driven tragedy yarns.

Well, yes. See above about entertainment vs. school.

Here’s the Memeorandum headline that tells our nation’s story:

Glenn Greenwald / Salon: Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Reynolds warn of “social unraveling” if Obama loses

Folks, in the blogosphere (as in the media and as in the “public debate,” which, once upon a time used to be called the “national conversation”), it’s all about the culture war).