Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m wondering when TV “journalists” will face the truth about their profession—namely, that what you see below is not just the future of “the news” but also the present.

(via FishbowlDC)

Fishbowl quotes some of the “juicy bits” from the upcoming NYT Mag article:

 

“By the way, have you figured me out yet?” Matthews said at the end of another phone conversation the following day. “You gotta under-stand, it’s all complicated. It’s not like Tim.” Tim — as in Russert, the inquisitive jackhammer host of “Meet the Press” — is a particular obsession of Matthews’s. Matthews craves Russert’s approval like that of an older brother. He is often solicitous.

In an interview with Playboy a few years ago, he volunteered that he had made the list of the Top 50 journalists in D.C. in The Washingtonian magazine. “I’m like 36th, and Tim Russert is No. 1,” Matthews told Playboy. “I would argue for a higher position for myself.”

Friends say Matthews is wary of another up-and-comer, David Gregory, who last month was given a show at 6 o’clock, between airings of “Hardball.” It is a common view around NBC that Gregory is trying out as a possible replacement for Matthews.

According to people at NBC, Matthews has not been shy in voicing his resentment of Olbermann. Nor, according to network sources, has Olbermann bothered to hide his low regard for Matthews, although when I spoke to him, Olbermann denied any personal animosity toward Matthews and told me that he appreciates his “John Madden-like enthusiasm for politics.”

Hmmm. Recognize anyone?

Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice, in The Entertainer
London, 1957, photo by Snowden

p.s. The last time I used that image was here, in May 2007.

The last time I wrote about Matthews was here.

————————–

*** When I claimed my blog on Technorati two years ago, this is how I described it:

They call it news. I call it infotainment.

No one can say that we weren’t warned well in advance. See, for example, Neal Postman and Michael Schudson and Joshua Gamson.

Just in time for the Episode Two of The Petraeus Show, which pre-game “reviewers” analyzed and critiqued well in advance of opening night (see the headlines on Memeorandum (at 9:30 a.m., just before showtime),
Gallup releases poll results on Americans’ attitudes toward the war in Iraq.

Upshot [e.a.]:

The 2008 presidential election will present voters with a clear choice on Iraq, with Republicans putting forth one of the Senate’s fiercest supporters of the war and Democrats choosing one of two leading Senate opponents, including Obama, who has made his opposition to the war from the beginning a major focus of his campaign. If McCain is elected, U.S. policy on Iraq will likely continue as it has under the Bush administration, with slower troop drawdowns tied to progress in establishing security in Iraq. If Obama or Clinton is elected, finding a quick end to the war will likely be the new president’s top priority.

In general, the public tends to side with the Democrats from the standpoint of favoring a timetable, but relatively few advocate a quick withdrawal. And most seem sympathetic to the Republican argument about the United States needing to establish a certain level of security before leaving Iraq.

Call me crazy, but it looks to me as if, all things considered, Americans would rather stick around and do the right thing by Iraqis than just get out.

It’s my opinion, based on an anthropological reading of the culture, that Americans would like to win in Iraq—as we like to win everywhere, because we Americans are a profoundly competitive people—but the conventional wisdom these days says otherwise.

See Glenn Greenwald, for example, in a post titled “Cokie Roberts speaks out on the war on behalf of the American people”:

Yesterday, Cokie Roberts — while expressing scorn for the “Responsible Plan for Withdrawal” advocated by 42 Democratic Congressional candidates and numerous military experts, and described by fellow panelist Katerina Vanden Heuvel of The Nation — said this:

VANDEN HEUVEL: It is not, but you know what, the responsible thing to do is withdraw. [you hear Cokie odiously chuckling at this point]

VANDEN HEUVEL: If we withdraw responsibly, the region would be more stable in the long term, America will be restored as a responsible global leader, and there are 42 challengers, you are absolutely right Cokie, who have a responsible plan to withdraw.

ROBERTS: Convincing the electorate of that I think would be very difficult, and I also agree that the notion that Sen. McCain and Sen. Graham you heard this morning putting forward, that Americans would prefer to win, is–

VANDEN HEUVEL: But what is winning? This war is unwinnable, there are no military solutions.

The video is also here. Roberts’ claim — that Americans agree with McCain, Graham and her that withdrawal is a bad idea and that they want to stay until we win — is just a lie. There’s no other way to put that.

Really? I don’t see any evidence to back up your claim, Mr. Greenwald. We may quibble about whether Americans want to “win” (since they’re repeatedly told by the MSM that we cannot win) or whether they just want to do the right thing, but the polling (for what it’s worth) suggests that relatively fewer people want to just get the hell out of there and call it “responsible.”

All things considered, people seem much more interested in the political theater surrounding The Petraeus Show. Here’s a gem from the NYT:

Testimony by General Will Test Candidates for President

All three senators running for president — John McCain of Arizona, Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois — will have a chance to question General Petraeus and Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador to Baghdad. Each of the three is determined to use the spectacle to advantage, but all face political risks as well as opportunities in the back-to-back hearings before the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees. …

Mr. McCain, a Republican, has the logistical advantage in appearing before his two Democratic competitors. General Petraeus is set to testify first to the Armed Services Committee, beginning at 9:30 a.m., and Mr. McCain, the ranking Republican member, will be the second to speak, after the committee chairman, Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan.

Mrs. Clinton, a more junior member of the panel, will speak later. Mr. Obama, a junior member of the Foreign Relations Committee, which is holding its hearing in the afternoon, will be the 13th on that panel to speak, perhaps after the evening news.

The headline of this piece (referring to a “test”) is yet more evidence of Andrew Tyndall’s thesis about the nexus between the campaigns and the media and the gameshow-type coverage that has evolved during this election cycle.

As for the substance of the NYT’s Elizabeth Bumiller’s piece: she suggests that Obama’s testimony occuring “after the evening news” would be a bad thing.

What century is she living in? Her own paper today cites the woes of the networks’ news divisions. The “evening news” is a woolly mammoth.

Cable “news” is the thing, dontcha know? Who cares if Obama’s “test” occurs last on the floor of the Senate? It will happen just in time for Campbell Brown of CNN and Keith Olbermann to lead with it!

I’ll try to follow up tonight. Stay tuned.

Television is virtually a news-free zone—quick! how many TV programs can you name that tell you, with facts and figures and no spin or attitude, who, what, why, where, and when? huh? how many?—and yet supposedly sophisticated TV critics, like the NYT’s Alessandra Stanley, still refer to something called “cable news.”

The funniest thing about it, though, is that Stanley calls it “news” while describing it, essentially, as an unprecedented media and campaign clusterfuck [e.a.]:

The distinction of all three new hourlong programs is that the hosts are not the stars, the campaign is. Speeches, interviews, surrogate gaffes, opinion polls, delegate math and even party deliberations are showcased with the same swooshing sound effects and flashy graphics that tip viewers to an appearance by George Clooney on “Live With Regis and Kelly.”

It’s a marked change for cable news, which over the last few years has followed the lead of Fox News and promoted vividly opinionated hosts who shape the news flow to suit their own personas and pet peeves. It’s also refreshing …

I wouldn’t call it refreshing. I would call it over-the-top infotainment. But Stanley has got one thing right—it’s the campaigns that are the stars of these shows, and the folks running the campaigns understand the circus atmosphere that is today’s media world (much more so than does Alessandra Stanley. That’s why they’ve got their candidates doing the Ellen show, etc.

This kind of coverage is also, as Stanley points out, a ratings boon for the cable shows:

The public has not been this passionately absorbed in an election in decades, and the candidates are passionately intent on making their case on television. When they do, viewership goes up: it’s a boon for the 24-hour news channels, but even they are hard-pressed to keep up with the constant flow of debates, photo ops, tarmac tirades, so many words spoken and misspoken and so many talk-show appearances.

The candidates show up not just on “Meet the Press” or “60 Minutes,” but also on “Saturday Night Live” (Senator John McCain’s star turn dates back to 2002). More recently, Senator Barack Obama kissed and cuddled the ladies of “The View,” Mr. McCain traded insults with David Letterman on his “Late Show,” and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton joked about dodging sniper fire to arrive at “The Tonight Show” on time for Jay Leno. Mrs. Clinton is also scheduled to appear on “Ellen” on Monday, her first appearance on Ellen DeGeneres’s talk show since Mr. Obama’s last one. (In that appearance, Mr. Obama upped the ante by dancing for her — his second effort to, as he put it, “bust a move.”)

And the cycle is endless and self-sustaining: satirical shows like “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “Saturday Night Live” take clips from the news and make fun of them; news programs take skits from “Saturday Night Live” and replay them.

Andrew Tyndall writes about this campaign—and the TV coverage—much more perceptively over at HuffPo. He says the Horse Race has given over to a Gameshow Reality contest:

Stop thinking of this election as a race to the wire to be won by the candidate with the finest pedigree, truest form and best connections. Start thinking of it as a cast of larger-than-life characters, scheming against each other while simultaneously trying to appear attractive to the electorate audience. Week by week the group undergoes media trials such as candidate debates and Sunday morning interviews. Each primary election constitutes another potential elimination round.

The winner gets to be a constant television presence in our homes for four years.

With open contests in both parties, this Presidential cycle offered the perfect opportunity to unveil this new method of coverage. The casting of the contestants could not have been better. In one tribe, as they say on Survivor, there was a handsome Mormon businessman, a colorful big city mayor, a slimmed-down Baptist minister and a crusty war hero. The other tribe had a self-made trial lawyer, a globetrotting Hispanic diplomat, a diligent feminist with that interesting celebrity marriage and an inspirational young African-American.

That’s infotainment! It rules!

Dennis Prager asks a provocative question: “Why Do Palestinians Get More Attention than Tibetans?

He lists a bunch of reasons: terror, oil, Israel, China, the left, and the UN. My favorite answer is last [e.a.]:

The seventh reason is television news, the primary source of news for much of mankind. Aside from its leftist tilt, television news reports only what it can video. And almost no country is televised as much as Israel, while video reports in Tibet are forbidden, as they are almost anywhere in China except where strictly monitored by the Chinese authorities. No video, no TV news. And no TV, no concern. So while grieving Palestinians and the accidental killings of Palestinians during morally necessary Israeli retaliations against terrorists are routinely televised, the slaughter of over a million Tibetans and the extinguishing of Tibetan Buddhism and culture are non-events as far as television news is concerned.

Setting aside Prager’s pro-Tibet sympathies and his Palestine fatigue, it’s worth paying attention to his last argument, which is as profound as it is simple. I repeat:

No video, no TV news.
No TV, no concern.

That is, I believe, an underexamined (so far) reason for the American public’s lack of interest in the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, of course: there is little to no video, except when some American luminary is visiting (and then the usual terrorist suspects in Iraq piggyback on the media coverage and put on a really violent show).

As if on cue, PEJ releases a report about how last week’s “news” was dominated by a pseudo-event (Obama’s race speech) rather than by events on the ground that have an impact on how Americans live their day-to-day lives (which, once upon a time, was the province of the “news”). ETP’s Rachel Sklar notes that the over-the-top Obama coverage totally eclipsed the five-year anniversary of our engagement in Iraq.

Well, the PEJ just released its fifth annual State of the News Media report, in which I read this notable bit [e.a.]:

Citizens suggested that the press failed to deliver sufficient coverage of some basic bread and butter issues, such as rising gas prices, toy recalls, and the legislative battle over children’s health insurance. … To the extent the press covered distant parts of the world, people in some ways thought even that was too much.

PEJ suggests that we Americans just aren’t that into anything that doesn’t touch our daily lives:

This suggests that the media, in not covering Iraq, is merely giving the audience what it wants. Apparently, the majority of people who watch TV don’t want to think about Iraq. That seems to be the consensus.

I’ve noted this before, of course: the “infotainment” in Infotainment Rules refers not so much to the fluffy content offered by the MSM as to the type of coverage that the MSM gives the “news”—that is, stories are chosen for their entertainment value and they are presented with entertainment values (conflict, dramatization, exaggeration of the importance of personality traits in the “characters” [public figures] who are featured in news stories [which makes them into caricatures but also into recognizable archetypes for a mass audience], an emphasis on emotion, etc., etc.].

Turning away from our apparent lack of interest in Iraq and to the general question of what we are interested in leads to questions about our jam-packed attention economy, in which a gazillion items from a bazillion entertainment and “news” outlets compete for just a fraction of our individual focus. As a society, we suffer from information overload and information pollution, and yet as individuals we also want to be informed about the things that might affect our daily life (the “news” is an early-warning system for possible dangers ahead).

Though we say we want “news,” we force the news media (which we depend on) to compete with everyone else who’s got something to sell. We are in control, through our attention span. They are all vying for a bit of our attention.

Those who want to get our attention have to give us a valuable intangible that cannot be reproduced at no cost, says Kevin Kelly. Among those intangibles is trust. There are a bunch of others. It’s fascinating stuff; read all about it here.

Slate’s Christopher Beam awards coolness points to Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton because Obama has a way cooler late-night show behind him:

In a campaign full of bizarre, vaguely defensible analogies—Obama is a Mac, Clinton is a PC! Obama is Starbucks, Clinton is Dunkin Donuts!—here’s a new one to consider: Obama is The Colbert Report, Hillary is Saturday Night Live.

It’s worth reading the whole thing to see how deeply into our culture this year’s political campaign has spread.

The celebrity magazines have gotten in on the act too (or, more precisely, the candidates have both reached out to the vast market of people who follow the ups and downs of celebrities), as was noted in the New Yorker last week:

Back in 2005—the era of Britney’s marriage to Kevin Federline and Lindsay’s turn in “Herbie Fully Loaded”—Janice Min, the editor of Us Weekly, argued that even smart, well-informed people need a “safe place,” free from hard news. But in 2008—as Lindsay emerges from rehab, and Britney from the psych ward—Min has had a change of heart. For the past month, Us Weekly has been breaking political stories …

Min, a longtime political junkie, has started to cover the political candidates in her magazine [e.a.].

“I’d noticed that there’s an incredible interest in what’s going on with the Democratic nomination,” she said. “You look back to when Kerry was running—it was hard to get much enthusiasm mustered up. But it became pretty clear to me that the Us audience is also following these two candidates, who have a lot of star power. You go to dinner with friends and the conversation goes from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to Britney. They are a legitimate part of—for better or worse—the celebrity orbit.”

A longtime and celebrity watcher, Min understands something that few people get—that politics is like showbiz:

“I’ve always said that celebrities are like politicians, in that they need the public to support them to stay in office,” Min said the other day. “An unloved celebrity is no longer a celebrity.”

And an unloved politician is no longer a politician:

But a loved politician is definitely still a politician:

Though, in my opinion, that wasn’t a very swift move.

But what do I know about image creation and management?

I know they mean well, but earnest policy types really need to get their heads out of the clouds or out of their policy papers or out of their own rear ends and take a good hard look at the deeply inhospitable media terrain in which they operate.***

On Sunday, Michael Signer published a piece in the WaPo that was picked up by a bunch of bloggers, and which he followed up with a post on Democracy Arsenal. Upshot: the media ought to cover the candidates’ positions on foreign policy more than it does, because foreign policy is very important.

Well, duh. Everyone knows that.

What we don’t know is how to make that happen in a cultural moment and environment in which the news media has taken a sharp turn away from any kind of hard news coverage and when audiences seem to long for a 24/7 diet of sensationalized entertainment.

We no longer have time to argue about whether or not this is what they indeed long for. Even if audiences wanted enlightenment rather than distraction, the train has left the station. Network and cable news organizations no longer talk about offering the news as a public service; they brag about their audience numbers. (And media critics often join in the horse race coverage.)

Media and news executives long ago came to the conclusion that unless there is breaking hard news that threatens to interrupt life for our nation, what we the audience really want in the “news” is reality-based distraction: fluff, drama, conflict, horse-race coverage, consumer news we can use, crisis-management advice, and stirred emotions. (It’s true that if it bleeds it leads, but we don’t want a diet too high in blood and guts.)

On this blog, I have spent two years elaborating the thesis that the most effective way for the “push” visual media (TV networks and cable channels) to reach a vast, diverse population (and electorate) under the current cultural conditions (which coincide with a time in the evolution of media when we’ve changed from a mass audience into a “mass of niches” audience) is through an effective combination of information and entertainment: infotainment. (Soft news works to get across some kind of information to “low-information” voters; the scholar Matthew Baum has written a book about it and continues to do research in this area.)

My suggestion is simple: Go with the flow. Don’t fight the trend against hard news.

Improve the quality and the information density of soft news. 

Whether your goal (like Signer’s) is to keep people informed about the foreign-policy issues that might affect them or your mission is to get more people interested in the wider world beyond their immediate environment (which is my obsession: it drives me crazy that Americans are so ignorant), it is long past time to stop criticizing the media for what it doesn’t do.

It is time to find effective ways to use the media—or to create your own media channels—to get people to pay attention to your cause.

I’m not saying this is the optimum situation. I would certainly love a more seriously informed electorate. Absent that likelihood (throughout history, most people have been ill informed; there’s no reason to believe that our generation is any different—who doesn’t love recess more than school?), it would be much more productive to work with what we have. And make it better for everyone.

——————

*** Here are some questions for Beltway-and-beyond policy wonks: Have any of you—especially those of you who sit in front of a computer monitor all day long—taken a look at TV lately? at what TV calls the “news”?

Have you watched Charlie Gibson or Katie Couric or Brian Williams for a week? Have you caught one of Keith Olbermann’s Special Moments of Stupidity? Have you listened to Bill O’Reilly rant and rave? Have you glimpsed Larry King puffing up Rudy Giuliani one day and Michelle Obama the next? Have you seen the “ladies” on The View go at it over politics? Have you tuned in to Stephen Colbert, Jay Leno, Jon Stewart, Jimmy Kimmel, David Letterman, or Conan O’Brian? to Oprah? Dr. Phil? Judge Judy? Regis and Kelly? Ellen?

I understand that it’s beneath you to watch a lot of this stuff, but this is what you’re competing against when you want to get “foreign-policy matters” in front of the American people.

Rather than cluelessly belabor the obvious, it would behoove you to understand that this is how passive, “low-information” Americans (those who depend on TV for their “news”) learn about “the issues.” This is the stuff people watch, when they’re not watching American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, etc.

Foreign policy matters—unless they are sensational or catastrophic—cannot possibly compete against this stuff. Instead, TV reduces every “issue” to a hysterical “he said, she said” debate and every public figure to a caricature.

That’s reality. We can’t wish it away. What those of us who care about foreign policy issues should do is learn how to operate effectively in this environment.

I’m not suggesting it will be easy. But if Barack Obama can get and hold people’s attention, maybe there’s hope.

You know that almost 50 people died yesterday as a result of the horrifying tornadoes that ripped through several states, right?

Well, here’s how Good Morning America started the day:

Set to Aerosmith’s “Dream On,” Diane Sawyer who, after anchoring five hours last night, told viewers, “This morning, the dream lives on.” After a mention of the storms in the show open, GMA spent the next 12 minutes talking politics. First with George Stephanopoulos then with Kate Snow (with Clinton campaign), David Wright (with Obama campaign), and Ron Claiborne (with McCain campaign). Next, Robin Roberts interviewed Mike Huckabee. The last question to Huckabee was about the tornadoes that affected his state and others. Sawyer then brought in Sam Champion who reported live from Atkins, AR.

I think I have accumulated enough evidence in two years of writing this blog to show that any TV executive who claims to broadcast something recognizable as “the news” is a big, fat liar.

Can it be any plainer than at CNN, a network that, when it began, was devoted entirely to news.—Now, its honchos are delighted to be able to bring you the liveliest entertainment that they can squeeze out of a given event.

As the exchange grew angrier, Sam Feist, the political director for CNN, said, “This can be the rest of the debate — that’s O.K.” … During the thrust-and-parry between the candidates, CNN’s cameras pulled back to show both men.

“Sit on it,” said Jonathan Klein, the president of CNN, who was in the control booth for both debates. “That’s the story, right here, the two of them.”

This was the “two-shot,” which has become the defining image of the recent televised debates. …

“Television traditionally shows the person asking the question, then cuts to the person answering,” Mr. Bohrman said later. “I’m a firm believer in watching the person to whom the question is being asked. I want to see them think.”

The producers made extensive use of the two-shot throughout the Democratic debate, but they mainly captured the candidates nodding in agreement with each other. Speaking to the moderator, Wolf Blitzer, through an earpiece at the halfway point of the debate, Mr. Bohrman suggested taking a tougher stance with the candidates.

“You have to become part of this, Wolf,” Mr. Bohrman advised. “If this was ‘Late Edition,’ ” Mr. Blitzer’s Sunday interview show, “you’d be having more of a conversation.”

I have no objection to horse-race coverage of elections, which are horse races. But have TV executives given up entirely on delivering hard information to their audiences?

And why am I—a lowly, pseudonymous blogger who watches the media as a mere hobby—the only person who seems to care about the news-free zone that is TV? Especially since there are so many organizations that purport to study the media?

Jennifer Rubin gets off the line of the night:

But How Could It Be?

Even the Fox panel seem puzzled that Hillary Clinton could be winning the night. Reporters, even conservative ones, buy into the Oprah-Kennedy YWC ( “Yes, we can”) festival and are surprised when Clinton’s underlying strength comes through.

This the problem with the news-free universe created by the MSM (the one where infotainment rules): the people who are charged with informing us about what is happening in those places we cannot see with our own eyes or hear with our own ears have become enraptured by the fanciful tales they weave.

One day perhaps the captains of the various media industries (old and new) will understand their vast power to shape public opinion among the ignorant, distraction-loving, and narrative-seeking masses [e.a.].

LONDON (AFP) - Britons are losing their grip on reality, according to a poll out Monday which showed that nearly a quarter think Winston Churchill was a myth while the majority reckon Sherlock Holmes was real

The survey found that 47 percent thought the 12th century English king Richard the Lionheart was a myth.

And 23 percent thought World War II prime minister Churchill was made up. The same percentage thought Crimean War nurse Florence Nightingale did not actually exist.

Three percent thought Charles Dickens, one of Britain’s most famous writers, is a work of fiction himself.

It’s always been like that, you say. What does it matter? you ask.

It matters because this ignorance can be easily leveraged through the myriad new forms of political propaganda that the Age of Technology has ushered in and unleashed.

It matters because unless we educate people (in an engaging way, not only in a boring PBS or NPR way) in their common humanity rather than pander to their tribal instincts, we are moving backward, not forward.

It means a new era of wars, not “post-partisan politics.”

————
*** Do I really have to remind you that infotainment rules?

Whoever thought up and produced this Obama video is a PRopaganda^TMgenius. Not that the under-30 set isn’t entirely in Obama’s corner anyway, but this pretty much seals the deal in terms of putting Obama in the territory of “hip.”***

Though the effectiveness of the message-delivery system can’t be disputed, there is an obvious weakness in this kind of campaigning—and this kind of candidate—as Jeff Jarvis points out: It’s all rhetoric.

To me, this only underscores the notion that Obama’s campaign is the most rhetorical of the bunch: speeches and slogans so neat they can fit in 4/4 time.

I agree. The Obama campaign more and more begins to resemble a celebrity marketing campaign, as I mentioned here:

The way Barack Obama is being covered by the media and the blogosphere, he’s not a political candidate anymore—he’s a celebrity. He doesn’t have political followers—he’s got fans. He doesn’t have a political platform—he’s got a one-word slogan—”change” [which works, ’cause “change is good,” just like Nissan says, right?]. He makes narcissists feel so good about themselves.

So: the slogan has changed—now it’s “Yes, we can”—but the marketing pitch is the same: Obama’s the one.

Howard Kurtz tried to burst this bubble on Reliable Sources this morning [e.a.]:

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
HOWARD KURTZ, HOST (voice over): Conjuring Camelot. The media gets swept away over Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Barack Obama. Are journalists promoting the rookie senator as the next JFK? …

KURTZ: The presidential campaign is a blur now, all sound bites and snippets, a 22-state dash to Super Tuesday just two days from now. John McCain has been boosted by winning Florida, by the backing of his formal rival, Rudy Giuliani, and by favorable coverage from the reporters he talked to for hours every day.

Hillary Clinton claimed victory in Florida, a beauty contest where no Democrats campaigned because of the a dispute within the party, but the press wasn’t buying her spin.

And Barack Obama, well, the pundits have been comparing him to JFK since he first started flirting with running. And when Ted Kennedy and Carolina Kennedy endorsed him this week, the media somehow magically transported us to this moment in 1961. …

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN F. KENNEDY, FMR. PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Let the word go forth from this time and place — to friend and foe alike — that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans. (END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: Every anchor and correspondent, it seemed, picked up that metaphor and ran with it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BRIAN WILLIAMS, NBC NEWS: On the broadcast tonight from Washington, passing the torch.

KATIE COURIC, CBS NEWS: Tonight, passing the torch.

CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC: The torch gets passed, the Clintons get passed by.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Barack Obama touched by the legacy of Camelot.

HARRY SMITH, CBS NEWS: Ted and Caroline set to hit the campaign trail after they announced the heir to Camelot.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: Why have the media gone haywire over this Kennedy endorsement?

The consensus of Kurtz’s panel? Because it makes for a great story. (regardless of what it means, if anything).

The media is all about storytelling. It is not about “the news.” Infotainment rules.

Beyond that: you can’t burst a successful PRopaganda^TM gambit with a lot of words. The only way to beat it is to create an even bigger, better, and eye-catching one.

The campaign ‘08 Battle of Iconography goes on.

————-

*** “He’s got soul,” said one of my son’s friends. Being New Yorkers, with everything that’s entailed (that is: living in a bubble of harmony and tolerance … especially now that Giuliani is no longer our mayor), my (young adult) kids and their friends don’t form a representative sample of youth, of course. But they serve as a bellwether of the attitude of their generation.

They feel betrayed. They feel that they were lied to. They want a reason to believe.