Professor Fred Siegel decries the tabloidization of our politics.
Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of Barack Obama. The John Edwards soap opera of first his wife’s illness and then his infidelity. The wildly hyped faceoff between the Obamas and the Clintons which never came to pass. The Sarah Palin saga. All have become grist for the infotainment gossip mills …
Yep! And Siegel decries this trend away from seriousness [e.a.]:
Today politics as entertainment is uninterrupted and interminable. In the ‘80s, “Crossfire” and “The McLaughlin Group” were the first TV talk shows to attract an audience by encouraging discussion to degenerate into the now familiar format of dueling denunciations. Now, comedy shows like “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” provide virtually the only “news” to many of our college students and twentysomethings who would no more scan a serious speech than regularly read a newspaper.
The upshot has been that rather than push voters to rise to the occasion by grappling with sometimes difficult and unfamiliar issues, politics has often been reduced to the personal foibles we can all relate to without effort.
Yep! But I’d like to know of a time when voters willingly grappled with difficult issues or read candidates’ speeches. It is to laugh!
Infotainment rules precisely because the issues are “difficult” and “unfamiliar,” because it is a complicated world with a huge amount of information for people to process, and because reducing candidates to caricatures and reducing the “issues” to loud, crazy debates on TV and in the blogosphere makes the crux of the issues immediately understandable to everyone. And the crux of the issues is all that anyone needs to get in order to make a decision about whom to vote for.
We would all prefer an informed electorate, of course, but we’re not ever going to get it. So get used to this new environment, because it’s here to stay.
