Merchants of Trivia
Jan 16th, 2008 at 12:43 pm by Susie
Matt Taibbi on the media coverage of the primary races:
And while it’s tempting to blame the candidates, deep in my black journalist’s heart I know it isn’t all their fault.
We did this. The press. America tried to give us a real race, and we turned it into a bag of shit, just in the nick of time.
EVERY reporter who spends any real time on the campaign trail gets wrapped up in the horse race. It’s inevitable. You tell me how you can spend nearly two years watching the dullest speeches known to man and not spend most of your time wondering about the one surefire interesting moment the whole thing has to offer: the ending.
Stripped of its prognosticating element, most campaign journalism is essentially a clerical job, and not a particularly noble one at that. On the trail, we reporters aren’t watching politics in action: The real stuff happens behind closed doors, where armies of faceless fund-raising pros are glad-handing equally faceless members of the political donor class, collecting hundreds of millions of dollars that will be paid off in very specific favors over the course of the next four years. That’s the real high-stakes poker game in this business, and we don’t get to sit at that table.
Instead, we get to be herded day after day into one completely controlled environment after another, where we listen to an array of ideologically similar politicians deliver professionally crafted advertising messages that we, in turn, have the privilege of delivering to the public free of charge. We rarely get to ask the candidates real questions, and even when we do, they almost never answer.
If you could train a chimpanzee to sit still through a Joe Biden speech, it could probably do the job. The only thing that elevates this work above monkey level is that we get to guess who wins.
For most of us, this is a guilty pleasure. But some of us get so used to being asked who should be running the world that our brains start to ferment. I’ve seen it happen. The first few times a newbie comes on the campaign trail, he’s watching all the flag-waving and the soldier-humping and he’s writing it all down with this stunned expression, as if to say, “Jesus, I went to college for this?” Two months later, he’s doing six hits a day on MSNBC as a Senior Political Analyst and he’s got this weirdly pissed-off look on his face, like he’s mad that the world woke up and forgot to kiss his ass that morning. This same meek rookie you saw bent over a steno book just months ago is suddenly talking about how Hillary Clinton needs to do this, Barack Obama needs to do that — and he’s serious! He’s not kidding! Next thing you know, he’s got an eight-figure book deal and a ten-foot pole up his crack, and he’s wearing a tie and loafers to bed. In other words, he’s Jonathan Alter.
ADD SOME EXCITEMENT to this election cycle, call Nancy Pelosi @1-202-225-0100 and DEMAND IMPEACHMENT. DC business hours only, call often and spread it around. (give those journalist SOMETHING to write about)
Good one Susie- thanks for digging this up and posting it. Can’t agree more- all they talk about is who has the campaign funds, how much they got, spent and have left. I call it lazy, this guy Matt views it as on-the-job indoctrination.
I shouldn’t be this bored this early in the election process. Oh wait, it’s been going on over a year now, hasn’t it?!
If only Matt Taibbi would don a gorilla suit and start throwing pies at the candidates (as he is rumored to have done in the past), maybe I could snap out of my boredom.
Until then, I’ll have to be content with Matt’s columns, the wonderful writing of a few of my favorite bloggers *wink* and the snarky, delightful comments (real or imagined) I occasionally deposit on comment threads for their humor value.
Oh yeah, the all-too-infrequent bitchslaps given to people like Jonathan Alter continue to delight. Let’s have more of that Matt, continuing on with Chris Matthews and all of the “journalists” he has on his show, exluding your father, of course.
This is not the world I was born to live in. zzzzzzzzzzzzz