It’s fun to be a detached observer of the Incredible Campaign of 2008, which has galvanized a nation. Our “mass of niches” culture seems to have coalesced in these past two weeks into a genuine mass audience. It’s probably temporary and of course there’s no guarantee that getting our attention will lead to our doing something (or even voting), but we are riveted to the political soap opera unfolding before our eyes.

The viewership for various segments of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions was huge.

As a television draw, John McCain was every bit the equal of Barack Obama.

The GOP presidential candidate attracted roughly the same number of viewers to his convention acceptance speech Thursday as Obama did before the Democrats last week, according to Nielsen Media Research.

It marked the end of an astonishing run where more than 40 million people watched political speeches on three nights by Obama, McCain and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. The Republican convention was the most-watched convention on television ever, beating a standard set by the Democrats a week earlier.

Three times in two weeks, political speeches were watched by more people than the “American Idol” finale, the Academy Awards and the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics this year.

“It clearly suggests that a great number of Americans think that who will be the next president is important and worthy of their time,” said Tom Rosenstiel, a former political reporter and director of the Project for Excellence in journalism.

One day, this will be seen as a watershed—the moment that the world of politics, borrowing from the world of showbiz, inspired the Couch Potatoes of Amercia to take a good, hard (though, possibly, brief) look at their country, their neighbors, and, most of all, themselves and to see if maybe we all couldn’t do a little bit more to get along, goddamnit, and while we’re at it, to do more for ourselves—individually and collectively.

But I must be dreaming, because that would be true progress.

However, I do have some hope that something better will result from the election of 2008, regardless of whether the Republicans or the Democrats win the White House this time around, because all of the candidates are dedicated—and inspiring—public servants (even if they are politicians and thus by nature suspect. Every one of the current crop has sacrificed something and done good things for others. Along the way, we unruly American, with our crude democratic system, shoved aside some folks who had already had their turn and we got rid of at least one rotten apple and we rejected alarmism as a way of daily life).

Well, goddamn!

Ain’t that America somethin’ to see, baby!

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, agree with ‘em or disagree with ‘em, we’ve finally got some great role models (new heroes and villains, as JFK memorably referred to them in 1959,***) that people are paying attention to.

And so we sail into uncharted waters.

————–

*** Admirably, JFK warned the people not to believe in the false idols launched by the new TV era. Then he proceeded to become one of them. He succeeded beyond his wildest imagination, because politicians are still emulating his style, and Democratic politicians all covet the imprimatur of the Kennedys and … but that’s a story for another day. Let’s just say for now that the imprimatur will long outlive the Kennedys.

Politicians cannot possibly accomplish everything they promise the people. They are ambitious above all else. John McCain knows this and is torn up about it, as the NYT reported the other day; nevertheless, he’s running for president for a second time. And he is using war strategies (such as surprise) in his political campaign. He means to win—with honor and within the rules of the arena.

The other day, Stanley Fish mourned the passing of the primaries, because things have become unbearably dull on cable “news” [e.a.]:

From early February through the beginning of June, the lament one heard from the political pundits (echoing Cicero’s first oration against Catiline) went this way: How long shall we have to endure the ordeal of the Democratic primary? How long before we get to the real thing?

But now it turns out that the primary season – extended, it was said, beyond expectation or reason – was the real thing. And I say that because, at least to date, the current season – the season that was to bring a once-in-a-century contest between two men of different generations and clearly opposed ideologies – has been totally uninteresting. …

I cite in evidence the desperate efforts of cable-news commentators to fill out an hour or even 15 minutes arguing about whether Bill Clinton’s statement of support for Barack Obama was so brief and pro forma that it amounted to a slap in the face, or about whether Obama (or a staff member) was wise to banish women wearing head scarfs from photo-ops, or whether Michelle Obama came across as a regular – that is, all-American and not angry – person on “The View,” or whether John McCain could or should separate himself from George Bush.

Fish was amusing but wrong. The gossip that passes for commentary on cable “news” is the main event, not the sideshow. Look no further than this for evidence:

Clark Attack On McCain Upstages Obama Speech

The fallout from retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark’s Sunday comment that “riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down” is not “a qualification to be president,” dominated campaign coverage yesterday. In today’s coverage, Clark is widely seen as having hurt Sen. Barack Obama by seeming to belittle Sen. John McCain’s well known record of service in the Navy and his experience as a POW. Moreover, the controversy distracted media attention from Obama’s speech on patriotism.

The main event was supposed to be Obama’s big patriotism speech. It was kicked off the air—and along with it Obama’s carefuly crafted speech and carefully staged photo op in Independence, Missouri [get it? huh?]—by breaking gossip.

One pseudo-event was upstaged by some smart-alecks who dissect, parse, deconstruct, and beat it to death on television (for a handsome living).

That’s the inextricable link between American politics and the newsbiz, 2008-style!

That’s infotainment!

See? I told you that infotainment rules!

Back when we all had a sense of humor about the buffoon George Bush, we greeted that malapropism with the appropriate skepticism.It turns out, though, that PBS has found a way to do just that—increasing its viewership for Frontline, its superb documentary series,*** by streaming it on the Web:

Executives at “Frontline” do not yet know how many people watched their recent four-and-a-half hour documentary, “Bush’s War,” because of PBS’s complicated Nielsen ratings.Online, however, “Bush’s War,” which was produced for the fifth anniversary of the United States’ invasion of Iraq, has set a record, with more than 1.5 million views of all or part of the program, which was streamed in 26 segments.“Frontline” has streamed most of its documentaries free since 2002 (www.pbs.org/frontline), part of an effort to reach younger audiences than typically tune in to PBS. The online viewing to date of “Bush’s War,” which was broadcast in two parts on March 24 and 25, is an estimated “10 times the traffic of a normal show for us,” said Sam Bailey, the program’s director of new media and technology. Viewers are also sticking around much longer than they usually do on the site, typically for 7 to 10 minutes.

Who says that quality doesn’t sell?Think again.————–*** I have long been a devotee of Frontline. I’m on record as saying that I wish all hard-news on TV were done with the depth of Frontline documentaries. But of course I know it can’t and won’t happen.Still: kudos! serious television lives!

Dave Marash beats around the bush a lot, but eventually he explains, more or less, why he left Al Jazeera English [e.a.]:

Just as Al Jazeera Arabic can rightfully claim to be a first-class news organization with high professional standards, but one that authentically represents the point of view and interests of the region defined by the Arabic language, less defined by but certainly involved in the Islamic faith, and most particularly the gulf region, I think that Al Jazeera English is a very competent, very professional news organization that does a particularly great job south of the equator, but tends to report almost everything from the point of view of either the Arabic-speaking world or at the very least what you might call the post-colonial world. And since I’m not authentically those things, I don’t belong there.

Huh?

Marash notes a shift in perspective, dating to the flexing of the Saudi Arabian muscle during the time of the Mecca Agreement (last year), when, Marash suggests, there was a shift in the balance of power in the region [e.a.]:

BC: What changed?

DM: I think that the world changed about nine, ten months ago. And I think the single event in that change was the visit to the gulf by Vice President Cheney, where he went to line up the allied ducks in a row behind the possibility of action against Iran. And instead of getting acquiescence, the United States got defiance, and instead ducks in a row the ducks basically went off on their own and the first sort of major breakthrough on that was the Mecca agreement, which defied the American foreign policy by letting Hamas into the tent of the governance of the Palestinian territories. This enraged the State Department and was one crystal clear sign that the Mideast region was now off campus, was off on its own. And it is around this time, and I think not coincidentally, that you see the state of Qatar and the royal family of Qatar starting to make up their feud with the Saudis, and you start to see on both Al Jazeera Arabic and English a very sort of first-personish, “my Haj” stories that were boosterish of the Haj and of Saudi Arabia. And you start to see stories of analysis in The New York Times where regional people are noting that Al Jazeera seems to be changing its editorial stance toward Saudi Arabia. I’m suggesting that around that time, a decision was made at the highest levels of [Al Jazeera] that simply following the American political leadership and the American political ideal of global, universalist values carried out in an absolutely pure, multipolar, First Amendment global conversation, was no longer the safest or smartest course, and that it was time, in fact, to get right with the region. And I think part of getting right with the region was slightly changing the editorial ambition of Al Jazeera English, and I think it has subsequently become a more narrowly focused, more univocal channel than was originally conceived.

Marash also explains what drew him to the concept in the first place:

[T]he thing that I loved best about the original concept was the sort of fugue of points of view and opinions, because I think that’s what desperately needed in the world. We need to know, for example, in America, how angry the rest of the world is at Americans. Our own news media tend to shelter us from this very unpleasant news. So if you watched and every piece seemed tendentious and pissed you off, and I don’t think that would be the case, but even if worst case the channel turned shrill and shallow, you would still want to watch them on the principle that millions—tens of millions—of people watch them every day and you need to know what’s going on in their brains.

Know thine enemy. Marash got closer than most.

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.

Charles Johnson of LGF documents the disappearance of Rev. Wright from Obama’s website:

As others have noted, however, it isn’t Wright’s support of Obama that’s the problem.

What those of us who like Obama want to know is how he reconciles his personal message of unity and post-racial harmony with the message of hatred that emanates from his bile-spewing spiritual mentor.

We may need a novelist like Richard Russo to try to explain it. Here, he takes a stab at trying to understand the enigma that is Eliot Spitzer. He starts by clarifying the real obstacle, however: our human need to believe in heroes [e.a.].

Back when I was teaching fiction writing, I used to pitch my students, especially the beginners, on complexity. They seemed to think that readers would be attracted to their characters’ virtue and would recognize shared humanity in their strength and courage; I argued — perversely they thought — that unrelenting virtue is not just unrealistic but uninteresting. …

For most people, mine is a losing argument, and one night recently, as I stayed up watching television coverage of Eliot Spitzer’s disgrace, I found myself losing it all over again as the media turned a complex drama into a simple story line: Now that he’s no longer their unsullied white knight, Spitzer must be a complete hypocrite.

Russo gets at the issue: the media’s storytelling reduces everything and everyone to a binary choice—Spitzer is either All Evil or All Saint, take your pick.

A similar dynamic is at play in the Reverend Wright scandal. Obama’s problem is that there isn’t a simple story line that can explain his 20-year affiliation with Wright and allow Obama at the same time to hold on to his own pacific, post-racial Magic Negro Healer image.

In order to keep believing that Obama is the Magic Negro, you’ve got to write off Wright as an inconvenient uncle. If you can’t bring yourself to believe that the bile-spewer is a harmless old fool, then you are left doubting the sincerity of the Magic Negro. He begins to look like just another cynical politician who makes alliances that will advance his career.

Either way, Obama loses (and we voters lose our illusions). And the blame can be laid directly at the feet of his “narrator,” David Axelrod, who manufactured a PRopaganda^TM image of Saint Barack Obama that no human being can live up to and thus put him inside a box from which he cannot escape.

Axelrod himself saw the dangers early in the campaign, as Ben Wallace-Wells noted in April 2007:

David Geffen gave an interview to Maureen Dowd, the Times columnist, in which he said that the Clintons lie “with such ease, it’s troubling.” The Clinton campaign immediately called on Obama’s team to repudiate the comments, but they refused, and afterward the two camps volleyed barbs back and forth for a day or so. It was one of those early campaign spats that get endlessly analyzed for who won some minor tactical advantage, but to Axelrod it was a mistake, a self-induced undermining of the transcendent character he spent so long helping to cultivate. The Geffen episode was “a good object lesson about how easy it is to slide into the morass,” he told me. “I’m mindful of the responsibility not to lose our way, not to disappoint, …”

Well, we’re at the point now where the PR-concocted images and ugly reality keep colliding. And Obama is bound to keep “disappointing” us (or those of us who believed that Obama really is the “transcendent character” that David Axelrod created for our benefit from the exotic strands of Obama’s life).

From now on, Obama and his advocates and surrogates will have to work really hard (though they’ll have the help of a favorably disposed media) to get us to keep our minds off the things that make us doubt him.

And we’ve got months and months and months and months to go.

While Jeff Jarvis and Nicholas Lemann think out loud about how to improve journalism going forward***, CNN makes a laughingstock out of such agonizing efforts by doing the thinking for its “journalists.” The other day, on-air talent received instructions to be sure to remember to praise Fidel in its Cuba coverage. (Allegedly, the email reprinted below is authentic; I have no way of verifying this): 

 From: Flexner, Allison
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2008 7:46 AM
To: *CNN Superdesk (TBS)
Cc: Neill, Morgan; Darlington, Shasta
Subject: Castro guidance

Some points on Castro – for adding to our anchor reads/reporting:

* Please say in our reporting that Castro stepped down in a letter he wrote to Granma (the communist party daily), as opposed to in a letter attributed to Fidel Castro. We have no reason to doubt he wrote his resignation letter, he has penned numerous articles over the past year and a half.

* Please note Fidel did bring social reforms to Cuba – namely free education and universal health care, and racial integration. in addition to being criticized for oppressing human rights and freedom of speech.

* Also the Cuban government blames a lot of Cuba’s economic problems on the US embargo, and while that has caused some difficulties, (far less so than the collapse of the Soviet Union) the bulk of Cuba’s economic problems are due to Cuba’s failed economic polices. Some analysts would say the US embargo was a benefit to Castro politically – something to blame problems on, by what the Cubans call “the imperialist,” meddling in their affairs.

* While despised by some, he is seen as a revolutionary hero, especially with leftist in Latin America, for standing up to the United States.

Any questions, please call the international desk.

Allison

I’ve got some questions: why is CNN so shy about blasting a decrepit monster who has kept his people half-starving and cut off from the rest of the world for 50 years? why must CNN be “balanced” when talking about a megalomaniac who ruined the lives of three generations (if not more) of Cubans?

Christiane Amanpour, a loyal company soldier for CNN and the queen of moral equivalency (aka “balance”), apparently got TPTB’s memo and did her duty:

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well as Morgan alluded to, look it is a desperate place for a lot of people there because it’s poor and it’s badly run if you like, in terms of people can’t afford to make ends meet. By and large, there are a lot of rationing going on in terms of food. But it’s never enough to allow them to meet their monthly requirements of food and medicine and the like.

So there’s a lot of difficulty in day-to-day living, not to mention the fact there’s plenty of political dissidents. There are journalists who are dissidents. There are people in jail just for wanting to write the truth or speak the truth or even to organize politically which they cannot.

So, that’s a fact of life in Cuba and it has been for the decades that Castro has been in power. And that offsets some of the genuine progress that he’s made in terms of education, health care. People have talked a lot about that. But day-to-day life for them is very decrepit and very hand to mouth and, obviously, they want change.

—————

*** It’s an effort I salute wholeheartedly. I come down on the side of wanting some kind of “expertise” from journos along with their journalism skills—and we might start with refresher courses in geopolitics, geography, and international relations for on-air “talent” NOW.

As for the future, every profession is becoming more specialized, and why should journalism be an exception? People will always want and need reliable, vetted up-to-the-minute information about the things that disrupt or intrude on (or threaten to) their daily lives (hard news). The news media is an extension of our (i.e., humans’) survival radar; it’s an early-warning system to alert us about those things we can’t see with our own eyes or hear with our own ears. That’s what journalism is for.

Those people who aspire to do long-form general-interest writing in periodicals like The New Yorker or The Atlantic, or who want to offer long-form commentary in political periodicals like The New Republic or The Nation, should be given a different title. It’s not that they don’t qualify as journalists. It’s that they serve a different function: Their function is to examine people or phenomena microscopically and to analyze them deeply, in the service of  a reader’s long-term knowledge.

The news, by contrast, serves a different demand: up-to-the minute information, along with instant “analysis” of what it might mean for the consumer. Being a good writer is not the same thing as being a good reporter.

I read Engram’s blog with great pleasure, because of his methodical and data-filled critical analysis (or, rather, dismemberment) of the “trends” cited unilaterally as such by the MSM, although these “trends” are oftentimes not supported by meaningful evidence.

Engram tracks reductive bite-size memes (such as, say, “the surge is a failure”) , providing data points on a month-by-month basis, thus providing meaningful evidence accumulated over a period of time, which in turn is something that can fairly and reasonably be claimed to assess the truth (or the lies or the empty speculation) behind such claims.  

As Engram repeatedly notes (and as should be obvious but often isn’t), this is the only objective way to track actual (as opposed to rhetorical) trends (aka change).***

His neutral approach to accumulating and reporting the data doesn’t mean that Engram doesn’t have a point of view, however, or attitude. 

I admit that I share his attitude today, about the NYT’s one-year-long ”reporting” about the “surge” being (first) doomed and (then) a failure. Engram writes [e.a.]:

But in their editorial [published] right after the testimony by Petraeus (in September of 2007), the editors [of the New York Times] adopted the standard liberal line according to which the whole purpose of the troop surge was give Iraqi politicians time to pass political benchmarks:

The chief objective of the surge was to reduce violence enough that political leaders in Iraq could learn to work together, build a viable government and make decisions to improve Iraqi society, including sharing oil resources.

This has become a standard liberal talking point even though it is factually inaccurate. The left switched to this talking point after their prediction that the troop surge would not reduce violence in Iraq was proven wrong. Instead of acknowledging how wrong they were about that, they seamlessly invented a new story about the “real” purpose of the surge. It is a story that exists in the liberal brain but is nowhere to be found in Bush’s speech to the nation in which he explained the purpose of the troop surge (which the New York Times criticized for not focusing on political reconciliation in Baghdad).

In any case, as the horrid news of greatly reduced violence in Iraq becomes increasingly inescapable even to those who are so blind that they cannot see that we are fighting al Qaeda in Iraq, talk of political reconciliation (and attendant pessimism about that) has become standard on the left (in the New York Times as well). Unfortunately, more horrid news of political reconciliation in Iraq is starting to pile up, so much so that the editors had to painfully acknowledge that fact in their editorial today:

Making (Some) Progress in Iraq

Good news is rare in Iraq. But after months of bitter feuding, Iraq’s Parliament has finally approved a budget, outlined the scope of provincial powers, set an Oct. 1 date for provincial elections and voted a general amnesty for detainees.

Of course, the same editors who declared that Iraq was a failure, that the troop surge would be of no help, and that General Petraeus was lying about a massive reduction in violence are now somewhat pessimistic that these laws will be effectively implemented. Gee, that’s significant. After all, these crack journalists have proven time and again that they know what they are talking about, haven’t they?

No, “these [New York Times] journalists” often don’t know what they are talking about. They are not any better-informed than many dozens of well-informed members of the public who have created opinion platforms for themselves in the blogosphere. They are often peddling a narrative line.

Some of “these journalists” give the impression of being humiliatingly ill-informed. (Although I’ll admit there’s a silver lining in Alessandra Stanley’s inability to remember which cable “news” outlet it is that boasts, probably dozens of times in every 24-hour-period, that it has ”the best political team on television.” Propaganda is only successful if it sticks.)

—————- 

*** I would add this: Everything else is speculation or deliberate manipulation, aimed at influencing public opinion—aka propaganda. And McLuhan was right: the medium is the message.

The NYT’s David Carr delivers grim news to “creatives”:

I’ve got some bad news for striking Hollywood writers: Election 2008 is a breakaway hit.

January was supposed to be the month when the writers’ strike took its toll, subjecting viewers to a menu of desiccated repeats and cheesy reality shows. Instead, the primary season is serving as the backdrop for one of the most compelling runs of event television in years, creating the kind of chatter network marketers would kill for and spectacular ratings for cable news.

Carr repeatedly tries to suggest that it’s the absence of appealing alternatives (like sports, late-night comedy, and scripted shows, for example) that accounts for the huge gains in audience numbers for “cable news” since 2004.

The Times’s Bill Keller disagrees:

“I think the level of interest in the presidential race would be intense even if writers were still churning out episodes of ‘24’ and ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ ” he wrote. “It’s a defining race for both parties, with a cast of fascinating candidates, some of whom fall into the breakthrough category. There also seems to be a visceral national yearning to turn the page.”

Perhaps. But I’m more inclined to accept the explanation of Brian Grazer, who is not a gazillionaire producer for nothing [e.a.]:

“There is a new episode on almost every night,” said Brian Grazer, a Hollywood producer who is in what is left of the Oscar hunt with “American Gangster.” “It is very human to be constantly searching for new stories, and now that the traditional outlets of those stories are shutting down, people are finding their drama in these unfolding events.”

So, yes, I agree with Grazer and with Keller. But neither one of them will come out and say the bleeding obvious: that it is the manner of coverage of politics that is drawing in the audiences. The “drama” is being manufactured by the cable “news” networks. (In this case, it is helped along by the wide-open nature of the political race, but that only makes it easier for the networks to churn out stories with unpredictable endings.)

It is not news. It is infotainment—in other words, information (none of which is necessarily true) packaged as entertainment.  

Now do you believe me when I say that Infotainment Rules? Here’s what I wrote:

Television, however, delivers what sells, and what sells is entertainment—or stuff that is packaged like entertainment. Infotainment doesn’t have to be bad or stupid or crass. High-quality infotainment may in fact be superior to dry “news” as a vehicle for delivering information to audiences.

Once again: I do not endorse the hideous devolution of TV “news” into infotainment. I am merely trying to get people to understand that what they’re getting on TV is not “news.” It’s entertainment, and the goal of its producers is to get you to watch their channel.

They do it by hooking you on stories. If the stories are exciting and the ending isn’t known to anyone in advance (as in an election, or a sensational kidnapping, or some violent flare-up somewhere, for example), people tune in. That’s why cable “news” is addicted to horse-race coverage of the U.S. election that is ten months away and can barely turn away to give any attention to the visit of our president to the Middle East.

If you want to know the news, take advantage of the vast amount of information available on the Internet and read widely.

If you want fictional rather than reality-based (and reality-bending) entertainment on TV and you want our political process to be a little more serious and less unseemly … I don’t know how to advise you. All I do is call ‘em how I see ‘em.

Before they can get our vote, presidential hopefuls must get our attention. Hillary did that, intentionally or not (I think her tearing up wasn’t intentional but that she immediately recognized that she could make it work for her and that she seized the moment), and it worked. The other day, the New York Times, describing the desultory state of Rudy Giuliani’s campaign, said [e.a.]:

Mr. Giuliani’s campaign has been marginalized in recent weeks. Efforts to inject itself into the news cycle - including the release of a television commercial featuring Osama bin Laden and the smoldering wreckage of the World Trade Center - have had mixed results and been largely overshadowed by the contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The real contest is for our attention.

Giuliani shouldn’t feel too bad. As I write, our president is in the Middle East trying to suggest that he’s making peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians (a burning issue for 60 years), and even he can’t get any press.

The Archbishop of Canterbury is in a truthtelling mood, and he sounds indistinguishable from Christopher Hitchens!

Archbishop says nativity ‘a legend’

The Archbishop of Canterbury said yesterday that the Christmas story of the Three Wise Men was nothing but a ‘legend’.

Dr Rowan Williams has claimed there was little evidence that the Magi even existed and there was certainly nothing to prove there were three of them or that they were kings.

Leaving no stone unturned:

He argued that Christmas cards which showed the Virgin Mary cradling the baby Jesus, flanked by shepherds and wise men, were misleading. As for the scenes that depicted snow falling in Bethlehem, the Archbishop said the chance of this was “very unlikely”.

In a final blow to the traditional nativity story, Dr Williams concluded that Jesus was probably not born in December at all. He said: “Christmas was when it was because it fitted well with the winter festival.”

These comments were in response to a “challenge” from comedian Ricky Gervais, the Telegraph reports.

Sounds like a “War on Christmas” to me! Let’s see how it goes over in the UK.

[updated to add a link, and to fix garbled syntax]

By now it’s hard to deny that the situation in Iraq seems improved, which is why the New York Times fronts a story about the Democratic candidates’ change of “tone.”

Change of tone? They’re all going to be spinning like tops soon enough.

But that doesn’t mean that the usual suspects aren’t trying to downplay the importance of the decline in violence, the reports of inter-ethnic and inter-confessional cooperation, the stories about Iraqis moving back home, Osama bin Laden’s declaration of defeat for al Qaeda in Iraq (and/or Mesopotamia), the Mahdi Army’s cooperation with the U.S., the Anbar Awakening, and all the other successes and lucky breaks for the counterinsurgency being conducted under the leadership of General David Petraeus (aka the New Jesus).

None of this matters, of course. It’s only political benchmarks that should concern us—that’s all that has ever mattered, according to Ilan Goldenberg at DemocracyArsenal:

I have to agree with Kevin Drum. There really hasn’t been a major shift in tones. The Democrats and critics of the war have always made political progress the number one issue. The argument all summer over the benchmarks ultimately revolved around political progress. There has been no shift in tone. …

[D]espite the drop in violence, all the polls show that opposition to the war is at an all time high at almost 70%.

A commenter responds:

Both the Bush administration and the war’s critics have a paper trail to support the idea that they have always thought the core issue was political progress in Iraq. Both the Bush administration and the war’s critics also know that for the American public the core issue is the level of American casualties, as well as the overall level of violence, in Iraq. If American casualties are down and stay down, and the overall level of violence is down and stays down, the intensity of public feeling about the war should be expected to decline, even if large majorities continue to feel the war was a bad idea. [e.a.]

This sounds right to me. The public responds to what it sees or hears on the news. Public feeling about the war will start to decline also in response to the drop in “news” coverage of the war.

Out of sight, out of mind.

And Iraq is out of sight on the MSM because there aren’t any dramatic pictures to show—simple as that. No carnage and blood and gore and fire and ash and wailing Iraqis to put into heavy rotation 24/7. Fairly or not—even if Iraq is a huge mess for a long time, people will start to get the idea that things must be better—because it isn’t on their TV screens.

So the mewlings of the partisan Democrats who are now heavily invested in bad news emanating from Iraq—and, as the charming Nancy Pelosi might say, branded as “defeatocrats” to boot. And no one’s in the—will not find much of a market for their wares, I’m afraid.

For what it’s worth, I think Hillary is obviously the best positioned to take advantage of a turn of fortune for America’s adventure in Iraq.

————-

*** Nancy Pelosi to Matt Bai, quoted in the New York Times Magazine:

”We branded them with privatization, and they can’t sell that brand anywhere,” Pelosi bragged when I spoke with her in May.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy was in town this week. Did you hear? No? Me neither.

However, I did hear a few weeks ago that Sarkozy had walked out on a 60 Minutes interview with Leslie Stahl in the first few minutes of taping. At the HuffPo, they thought his rudeness was stunning.

Watch French President Sarkozy walk out of a 60 Minutes interview he called “stupid” and a “big mistake.”

Steve Boriss has an altogether different view:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy walked-out of an interview with 60 Minutes’ Leslie Stahl when she asked about his troubled marriage. His last words were “If I had to say something about Cécilia, I would certainly not do so here.” Well, that certainly seems reasonable. So the question that must be asked is not why Sarkozy would act the way he did, but why a seasoned American reporter like CBS’ Stahl felt she could act the way she did, by asking such a personal, inappropriate, and disrespectful question.

I dunno. While I was in Europe earlier this fall, I watched the BBC when I had access to satellite TV. Its anchors ask very rude questions, and they are pitbulls—which I’ve complained about enough in the past. But I was reminded that this is also useful and necessary behavior when those same anchors are confronting apologists for, say, genocide in Darfur—and the anchors on the BBC World Service routinely do confront representatives of the world’s “bad actors” on television.

Their “evenhanded” approach to Israel (which is expressed in constant strong disapproval) buys them permission to criticize “other” bad actors, too, see? That kind of relativism is how we achieve “balance” on the scales of political correctness, which, in the early 21st century, seems to have replaced the political principle of human dignity as the thing we civilized Westerners are most committed to. But that’s a discussion for another day.

Rudeness goes with the territory of journalism, not to mention the territory of American democracy and French republicanism. No one forced Sarkozy to seek power and fame and fortune, or a place on the world stage. And he is not made of glass.

Of course the 60 Minutes incident upset the applecart for him, PR-wise. It was obviously meant to be the beginning of a rollout, leading up to Sarkozy’s visit with his buddy Bush and his speech to Congress. Instead, he managed to alienate the MSM so badly that TV coverage was scant. For those of you who blinked and missed it, here’s CNN’s coverage.

By contrast, here’s how the UK’s Guardian narrated the event:

Sarkozy gets rapturous welcome as he mends relations with US

The long years of animosity between the US and France formally ended just after 11am yesterday when the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, entered the House of Representatives to applause and yelps of approval. Congressmen gave him a standing ovation and queued to shake his hand.

What accounted for the “rapturous” welcome? Sarkozy’s rousing image of America the Good:

On behalf of my generation, which did not experience war but knows how much it owes to their courage and their sacrifice; on behalf of our children, who must never forget; to all the veterans who are here today and, notably the seven I had the honor to decorate yesterday evening, one of whom, Senator Inouye, belongs to your Congress, I want to express the deep, sincere gratitude of the French people. I want to tell you that whenever an American soldier falls somewhere in the world, I think of what the American army did for France. I think of them and I am sad, as one is sad to lose a member of one’s family.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The men and women of my generation remember the Marshall Plan that allowed their fathers to rebuild a devastated Europe. They remember the Cold War, during which America again stood as the bulwark of the Free World against the threat of new tyranny.

I remember the Berlin crisis and Kennedy who unhesitatingly risked engaging the United States in the most destructive of wars so that Europe could preserve the freedom for which the American people had already sacrificed so much. No one has the right to forget. Forgetting, for a person of my generation, would be tantamount to self-denial.

But my generation did not love America only because she had defended freedom. We also loved her because for us, she embodied what was most audacious about the human adventure; for us, she embodied the spirit of conquest. We loved America because for us, America was a new frontier that was continuously pushed back—a constantly renewed challenge to the inventiveness of the human spirit.

My generation shared all the American dreams. Our imaginations were fueled by the winning of the West and Hollywood. By Elvis Presley, Duke Ellington, Hemingway. By John Wayne, Charlton Heston, Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayworth. And by Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, fulfilling mankind’s oldest dream.

What was so extraordinary for us was that through her literature, her cinema and her music, America always seemed to emerge from adversity even greater and stronger; that instead of causing America to doubt herself, such ordeals only strengthened her belief in her values.

What makes America strong is the strength of this ideal that is shared by all Americans and by all those who love her because they love freedom.

America’s strength is not only a material strength, it is first and foremost a spiritual and moral strength. No one expressed this better than a black pastor who asked just one thing of America: that she be true to the ideal in whose name he—the grandson of a slave—felt so deeply American. His name was Martin Luther King. He made America a universal role model.

The world still remembers his words—words of love, dignity and justice. America heard those words and America changed. And the men and women who had doubted America because they no longer recognized her began loving her again.

Fundamentally, what are those who love America asking of her, if not to remain forever true to her founding values? [e.a.]

Indeed. Politicians should take note of Sarkozy’s tone and vision. The one who can adapt it for today’s audience will capture the White House. That’s my bold prediction.

Also, Hollywood, which is still busy presenting an evil and redemption-free image of America to movie audiences—and paying the price—should pay attention.

update: Gawker is wondering why the dearth of Owen coverage on TMZ. Good Question! Meanwhile, Mickey Kaus is wondering why all the focus is on Kate’s tragedy. ‘Cause, Mickey, if she’s all sad about it, that makes her a good person rather than the slut she appeared to be in the rumors that were published about her at the time of Owen’s little accident.

Last week, amid the instantaneous global release of the most intimate details surrounding the presumed suicide attempt of the actor Owen Wilson, I wondered what had happened to Hollywood that there wasn’t even one layer of PR protection around this highly bankable star when the ravenous celebrity press got hold of the details.

Today, it looks like—finally—somebody is at home, even if what follows sounds like a fairy tale called “Owen Wilson’s Wonderful Recovery”:

Wes Anderson: Owen Wilson “Doing Very Well”

Actor Owen Wilson is in surprisingly good spirits after attempting to commit suicide on August 26, according to his friend, director Wes Anderson.

“Obviously he has been through a lot this week,” said Anderson, who directed the actor in his latest film The Darjeeling Limited.

“I can tell you he has been doing very well, he has been making us laugh.”

Let us agree from the outset that in the real world where we all live, Owen Wilson cannot possibly be doing “very well.” He was abusing various drugs and alcohol and was reportedly despondent or enraged shortly before he attempted to take his life a week or so ago. Only on another planet—let’s call it Bizarro Hollywood World—could this man be doing “very well.” He is human, after all. Right?

Wrong! He’s a star. Of course he’s doing well! In Bizarro Hollywood World, suicides get better overnight, with the help of their loving friends, family, and business partners.

So this news of Owen Wilson’s fabulous recovery is what I often refer to as PRopaganda ^TM: “dramatic realities” or “dramatic narratives” spun (by PR meisters) from a few legitimate details of a given celebrity’s autobiography and then embroidered with fan-pleasing details. The story-weavers get a peg to hang a plausible tale on (in Wilson’s case, he’s a comic actor, so when he’s being normal and not suicidal, we would expect him to be making people laugh) and run with it, till those of us who want to believe it, ’cause we loooove Owen, actually believe it.

[There's an entire academic and non-academic literature about this stuff, if you're interested. Start with Joshua Gamson's Claims to Fame---a fascinating read. But read it at your own risk: You will never love a celebrity in quite the same way again after you finish it, 'cause you'll know that you've been deliberately seduced. You've been had.]

Helpfully, in today’s WaPo, Shankar Vedantam tells us all about the stubborn human propensity to believe “myths” over reality:

The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.

You should read the whole thing, but here’s the most fascinating bit:

[T]he mind’s bias does affect many people, especially those who want to believe the myth for their own reasons, or those who are only peripherally interested and are less likely to invest the time and effort needed to firmly grasp the facts.

Have favorite myths (e.g., good triumphs over evil)? Not likely to invest the time and effort need to grasp the facts? That would describe most of us, except when the subject matter is our passionate interest and/or hobby. We’re too busy to pay minute attention. Which is what gives marketers of all stripes—not to mention potential propagandists—their opening:

Clever manipulators can take advantage of this tendency.

Yes indeed. They most certainly can.This is where clever public relations comes in—in order to fight a damaged reputation, you’ve got to try to avoid repeating the claims made against you. Vedantam explains the paradox:

“If someone says, ‘I did not harass her,’ I associate the idea of harassment with this person,” said Mayo, explaining why people who are accused of something but are later proved innocent find their reputations remain tarnished. “Even if he is innocent, this is what is activated when I hear this person’s name again.

So how to you refute a false claim or reclaim a damaged reputation?

[R]ather than deny a false claim, it is better to make a completely new assertion that makes no reference to the original myth. Rather than say, as Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) recently did during a marathon congressional debate, that “Saddam Hussein did not attack the United States; Osama bin Laden did,” Mayo said it would be better to say something like, “Osama bin Laden was the only person responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks” — and not mention Hussein at all.

Edward Bernays, the “father of PR”, recommended this tactic. Don’t refute. Fight PR with more PR. This stuff is all around us—in every corner of public life—all the time. Observe, and you’ll see.

By the way, the New York Post has a ways to go to catch up with the rosy picture quoted above about Wilson’s recovery. According to the Post, Wilson is “on the mend.” But he looks like shit.

Now, that’s more like it—slow and easy. Extend the life of the story, give it more room for endless ups and downs (for the next ten years, if Wilson is really unlucky).

The Post, of course, is the undisputed master of PRopaganda ^TM.

Class dismissed.

Shadi Hamid thinks the Dems need one.

Ezra Klein thinks they don’t—they already have one:

Globalization and its attendant economic forces have destabilized the working class and the corporate welfare state they relied on, so the government should step into the breach and guarantee what employers no longer can.

Welp, back in the day, that was known as socialism. Today, it’s known as statism or, somewhat less politely, the nanny state. And somehow I just don’t think it will do as a successful pitch—it’s more like a rallying cry for Republicans to do what they do best: build a massive wall of resistance against “tax and spend” Dems and then bury them.

A more somewhat more contemplative discussion of the subject appears in the comments to Hamid’s post. I particularly liked this one by SteveB, who gets the concept of a narrative—i.e., a simple story (not unlike a fairy tale) that relies on popular prejudices (for example: the past was better) and that pits the good guys on your side against the bad guys on the other:

[All] narratives require a narrative arc, and the easiest way to get that arc is to build on the “virtuous past, corrupt present” theme. Thus “Government was efficient until Bush and his cronies screwed it up”, or “The poor were thrifty and virtuous until welfare made them lazy and dangerous.” This sort of narrative naturally comes easier to a conservative who wants to turn back the clock than to a progressive who wants, you know, progress.

But there are ways to turn this theme to a progressive purpose. For example, here’s a narrative promoting national health care:

“Once, health care was about helping people, and not about getting rich. Sure, the local doctor was better off than most, but not outrageously so, and most hospitals were local and non-profit. The for-profit hospital chains, the HMO’s, and the pharmaceutical companies changed all that, and now we pay considerably more per-person that other countries do, and get less for it. We need to get back to the idea that our health care system should be about providing care to anyone who needs it, and get greed out of the system.”

That’s good storytelling—and, yes, the Dems need it. But not more than they need a credible candidate who’s got the “vision thing” and can deploy it consistently, as Bill Clinton did. Obama’s got it (we worship an awesome God in the purple states), but he can’t get traction for it. Edwards (two Americas) is trying. Hillary has nothing except the “responsibility gene” (and the entire Democratic establishment backing her).

Unfortunately for the Dems, Rudy is the one to beat. Folks trying desperately to poke holes in his Mr. 9/11 image are barking up the wrong tree. Rudy’s narrative is powerful because he has spent a lifetime building it, and believing in it. He was, let’s not forget, a Kennedy Democrat once upon a time. That will be a fearsome weapon to wield against his Democratic opponent, once he gets the nod from his party (which I believe he will, and which I predicted a year ago that he would).

Democratic storytellers, unite! You’ve got your work cut out for you.

Somehow the AP manages to make this sound like bad news:

One in four adults read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday.

To me, it sounds like an improvement over the situation a few years ago:

In 2004, a National Endowment for the Arts report titled “Reading at Risk” found only 57 percent of American adults had read a book in 2002, a 4 percentage point drop in a decade.

Yet the AP goes on to thunder:

Who are the 27 percent of people the AP-Ipsos poll found hadn’t read a single book this year?

The derision is misplaced. Some fifteen years ago, in 1993, Philip Roth, crying the same tune, nevertheless gave this argument (that readers are superior to non-readers) nuance and heft—not by sneering at the dolts who don’t bother to read at all but by praising “serious” readers above all others:

“There’s been a drastic decline, even a disappearance, of a serious readership. That’s inescapable. We can’t fail to see it. It’s also inescapable, given the pressures in the society. That’s a tragedy. By readers, I don’t mean people who pick up a book, once in a while. By readers, I mean people who when they are at work during the day think that after dinner tonight and after the kids are in bed, I’m going to read for two hours. That’s what I mean. No. 2, these people do it three or four nights a week for two and half, three hours, and while they do it they don’t watch television or answer the phone.

“So if that’s what readers are, how many of them are there? We are down to a gulag archipelago of readers. Of the sort of readers I’ve described, there are 176 of them in Nashville, 432 in Atlanta, 4,011 in Chicago, 3,017 in Los Angeles and 7,000 in New York. It adds up to 60,000 people. I assure you there are no more. We would be foolish to add a zero. Maybe there are 120,000. But that’s it, and that is bizarre.”

Roth was joking, of course. … Or was he?

One thing’s for sure: Times have changed. You would never see Roth’s kind of elitism in the pages of today’s New York Times Book Review.

Though you do, of course, see some astonishing things.

Such as, for example, Howard Zinn asserting that there is no moral distinction between terrorism (the intent to kill innocent civilians) and the inadvertent killing of innocent civilians during war:

The terrorism of the suicide bomber and the terrorism of aerial bombardment are indeed morally equivalent. To say otherwise (as either side might) is to give one moral superiority over the other, and thus serve to perpetuate the horrors of our time.

Or, for example, a “reviewer” extolling the poetry that has emerged (with the blessing of the U.S. Army) from the hideous torture chambers of Guantanamo and, for good measure, claiming that it is completely unfair to, you know, criticize the poetry:

The poems — some by accomplished writers, others by first-time poets — suffer “some flaws,” as the book’s editor, Marc Falkoff, himself a lawyer for 17 detainees, puts it. It is hard to imagine a reader so hardhearted as to bring aesthetic judgment to bear on a book written by men in prison without legal recourse, several of them held in solitary confinement, some of them likely subjected to practices that many disinterested parties have called torture.

See, criticism is beside the point coming from a book critic. This book is beyond criticism. It’s your moral duty as an American to read it.

You don’t read this book for pleasure; you read it for evidence. And if you are an American citizen you read it for evidence of the violence your government is doing to total strangers in a distant place, some of whom (perhaps all of whom, since without due process how are we to tell?) are as innocent of crimes against our nation as you are.

And guess what? Despite this nonsense, I still love to read—not only books but even the New York Times Book Review.

Reading is here to stay for a good long while. But our narrative forms are changing, and our human craving for narrative—for stories—can be satisfied in many different ways, through many different gadgets and many media channels. Why, maybe we’re evolving. Fancy that!

Every few years someone comes along to bemoan the death of the novel. Usually and unsurprisingly, the villain is determined to be Hollywood*** or Televisionland. Now, with the mass public mourning over the end of the beloved (except by me) Sopranos, someone adds a little nuance to the argument:

More and more Americans spend their day waking up, checking their email, travelling to work, clicking through their Blackberries, sitting at cubicles, staring into a monitor, and the coming home, to look - once again - at a screen: the television. The eye has been trained to scan, and to receive, and less and less to read.

It feels somewhat ungrateful to complain in today’s television environment, with so many well-written, superbly acted shows available, that the screen is destroying the page. But it’s true, especially if you pause to consider that reading fiction is something that requires time, time away from a screen. More and more, though, Americans don’t have the time to think, let alone to read. … In this environment, there is no better delivery system than the image for themes which transport - because that’s how our eyes work the rest of the day. The Sopranos does the imagining; our eyes need only follow.

Well, his argument doesn’t explain the specific appeal of The Sopranos—which I’d put down to the storytelling skills of David Chase and the aching desire of audiences in the HBO demo for compelling storytelling … regardless of the form in which it’s delivered.

Reading stories in print delivers one kind of experience. Watching a story unfold delivers a different kind of experience. If they’re great, sprawling stories well told, what’s the difference to the consumer of the story?

Nothing. Nevertheless, this author too is “troubled” by the falling numbers of people who read novels.

America’s most powerful myth-making muse long ago moved in to Hollywood (and the White House press room), so the ascendancy of The Sopranos to the level of quasi-literary art should have been expected. Indeed, this wouldn’t be troubling were Americans reading other, actual novels. But they’re not - at least not in the numbers they once did. An alarming study released in 2004 by the National Endowment for the Arts noted that in the last two decades the US has experienced a 10% drop-off in the reading of literature - which they define as just one novel, story or play per year - and a 28% drop in the key 18-24 age group.

As a devoted book lover, I find it regrettable that young people aren’t indulging in this uniquely gratifying form of storytelling, but I don’t find it alarming that in an image-soaked, plugged-in-24/7 world people are seeking to get their story fixes elsewhere than in books.

Our storytelling forms are evolving, and so are our story-hearing preferences. The book is only a container for a certain kind of narrative, the novel, which itself has only been around for a few hundred years. Before there were books, there was verse, spoken and later written in meter.

The world is changing. Deal with it.

—————

*** In 1999 Hollywood was also accused of killing off—excuse me: of having “conquered”—reality itself by Neal Gabler in Life: the Movie.

Nicholas Lemann summarized Gabler’s argument in The Atlantic:

Gabler’s argument here is an interesting, even an arresting one. He says that entertainment, the subject of his previous two books (and of his next one, a biography of Walt Disney), has become increasingly important, and not just because it is a big industry and a leading exporter; its logic and rhythm have become the controlling ones in American life. “Karl Marx and Joseph Schumpeter both seem to have been wrong,” Gabler writes. “It is not any ism but entertainment that is arguably the most pervasive, powerful and ineluctable force of our time — a force so overwhelming that it has finally metastasized into life.”

The basic means by which we now organize experience, Gabler says, is the creation of “life movies,” or (a great neologism) “lifies,” about public figures and about ourselves. These have a structure borrowed from popular entertainment, movies in particular. There has to be a strong central character, a plot line, and a play on the emotions. We are far more absorbed by lifies than by the facts of any situation.

Gabler rolls out dozens of examples of the transmogrification of life into stock drama, as entertainment techniques have relentlessly leached into non-entertainment venues. In politics the quadrennial political conventions have changed from real dramas to pageants staged for the purpose of winning the votes of television viewers. Ronald Reagan turned the presidency itself into a procession of scripts and images. The docudrama and the novelistic lead are ubiquitous in journalism. The self-dramatizing memoir has taken over book publishing. Donald Trump became a tycoon by making himself a celebrity first. Ordinary people have turned from religion to the worship of celebrities (Gabler points out that the Air Jordan logo resembles a crucifix), and have also become the dramaturges of their own lives …

Lemann also poked a big whole in Gabler’s thesis:

It’s mesmerizing to have the surreal dramas that make up so much of the on-rushing stream of American life — the Washington feeding frenzies and the Diana-keenings and the star-chamber trash-TV interview shows — presented all together. The nearly unavoidable first reaction is that Gabler is on to a real change, up there in significance with urbanization or post-industrialism. Reality is fading away as the governing principle in human affairs. The manipulation of perceptions is replacing it. …

It isn’t too much to say that narrative and visual imagery are the basic means by which people process experience. … Gabler’s evidence, however, could be marshaled in support of the idea that we’re seeing a development less earth-shattering than the trumping of reality by perception in the conduct of human affairs. That development would be an expansion in the breadth and visibility of popular culture.

Even in our supersaturated plugged-in-24/7 media universe, where most stories whiz by at Feiler Faster speed, sometimes a very simple narrative can grab hold of the masses and transfix them.

Case in point: In Portugal, a little girl is abducted from her bed in the villa where her Scottish family is vacationing. She vanishes without a trace. Two weeks later, with still no word of the four-year-old’s fate, all of Britain is in thrall to this suspense story,

The FA Cup crowd fell silent as haunting images of missing Madeleine McCann were broadcast on a big screen.

Dozens of pictures of the little blonde girl, who turned four a week ago, were shown to 90,000 football fans. …

Her pretty face filled the screens at either end of the pitch - each one the size of 600 domestic TV sets - and dominated the ground.

The short two-minute video, set to the soundtrack of the Simple Minds hit Don’t You Forget About Me, was shown at both half time and before the game.

It received a round of applause from fans of the two teams which both have close ties with Portugal, where the toddler was abducted while on holiday in the seaside village of Praia da Luz.

Chelsea captain John Terry and team-mate Paulo Ferreira have recorded appeals as has Manchester United star Cristiano Ronaldo. [whoa! --ed.]

Um, can we talk? Don’t worry. This is not going to be a “whatever happened to that British stiff upper lip?” tirade.

For 15 days, the wide eyes and waiflike features of a child of 4 have stared out at Britons from television screens and newspaper front pages, T-shirts and posters with a simple message: find me.

That message has been relayed across Britain — on television and in cyberspace — by sports stars, celebrities and politicians, including the prime minister-designate, Gordon Brown. The outpouring has been likened, hyperbolically, to the national grief that erupted over the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. [e.a.] …

In Britain, the upwelling of grief has stirred debate about the country’s recourse to cloying sentimentality in the face of loss that has melted the characteristic stiff upper lip.

And I’m not going to lecture you about how trivial this one abducted child is compared to the other abducted people in the news that we could be concerned about—such as BBC correspondent Alan Johnston,

who turned forty-five in captivity in Gaza this past week;

or the three American soldiers seized by al Qaeda in Iraq:

Spc. Alex R. Jimenez, 25, of Lawrence, Mass.

Pfc. Joseph J. Anzack Jr., 20, of Torrance, Calif.

Pvt. Byron W. Fouty, 19, of Waterford, Mich.

or Ingrid Betancourt,

a former Colombian presidential candidate who is being held hostage by FARC rebels and is, according to a report from a fellow hostage who escaped, chained by the neck to other prisoners, sometimes up to 24 hours a day, to prevent her attempting to escape, which apparently she is given to trying again and again.

or the seizure and jailing by Iranian authorities of the