It is easy to write long rants about the stupidity of American television news. Not now, though. My favorite political reporter died today. In fact, Meet the Press has been the only political news program that I could watch without getting annoyed. Tim Russert’s interviews were incisive and civil. He also had an amazing depth of knowledge and a fantastic ability to tell a story. Time ranked him recently as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.
Obama has just finished another victory speech. I might have missed some critical details because after about 10 minutes I pushed mute. It was relatively boring and I had to prepare for tomorrow’s lecture. The most dramatic event of the night actually happened before the speech.
In the middle of Hillary Clinton’s speech in Ohio, Obama jumped to the stage in Texas. Surely his campaign staff must have known that Hillary was talking at the same time. At the moment when he started to talk, all television networks switched from Hillary Clinton to Obama. I wonder if the Obama-campaign would have dared to pull off this move if Obama had not won so many states in a row. It would have been embarrassing for him if the television networks had stayed with Clinton.
Some suspect that Obama might not be prepared for a hard fought campaign with the Republicans because he is too courteous and mild-mannered. The way he brushed away Hillary Clinton tonight suggests something different. He seems ready.
The scene: Anderson Cooper 360° on CNN, four panel members, topic is the politics of race and gender.
The topic is extremely important so I was happy that they would discuss it. However, this is CNN, so my expectations were low. Most of the political discussion on CNN is shallow speculation without good data.
A funny part with news media (especially TV) is how little theoretical creativity they show. Since they clearly refuse to read research articles about race and gender, one would hope that they could compensate for this by giving some interesting explanations, some bold hypotheses about the whys in politics. But no. It was the usual horserace politics and speculation.
What made it interesting this time was the different panel members. Usually all panel members are employed media pundits. This time only three of them fit this category. The fourth member was a political scientist.
This was the conversation:
Media people: bla bla bla, McCain leads among this group, bla bla, Clinton will carry the Hispanic vote, bla bla
Political scientist: Well, Hispanic voters are heterogenous.
Media people: bla bla bla, being both female and black makes the choice in the Democratic primary difficult, bla bla bla
Political scientist: Well, the dynamics differ depending on state. There are a lot of things we don’t know at this stage.
So it goes. Media pundits refuse to listen to political scientists because if they would, the message would become too complicated. A lot of what is interesting in politics, as in life, can be found in the details. Sadly, media refuses to go there. What makes it even more frustrating is that social scientists have worked on these problems for a long time by theorizing, collecting data, and developing models to test the theories. After all this work some things are known. Yet none of this seems to have an impact on how news media approach race and gender in politics.
When Huckabee made his victory speech tonight, who stood behind him? Chuck Norris of course. Norris has been a part of the campaign for some time now. It is some contrast compared to Hillary Clinton’s speech; Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright stood behind her.
The speculation about the effects of the Iowa results is mind-numbing. How will this influence the vote in New Hampshire? Is it Huckabee against the rest now? Does this change Romney’s strategy? It is driving me insane. Except Meet the Press, I cannot watch politics on TV without getting upset.
Another thing that annoys me is that experts in media are so certain about cause and effect. For example, they say that caucus goers who want change predominantly vote for Obama. It seem equally plausible that people who like Obama report this message because it was available, because it has been reiterated a million times by the Obama campaign. In reality they might have chosen Obama long before.
About the only thing we know is that Chuck backs Huckabee.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjYv2YW6azE[/youtube]
Update: I just love the ♥ symbol so I had to put it in the title
The Late Show starts again tonight after the strike. I am sure there will be lots of hairy jokes. I generally prefer the Daily Show, but Letterman is great, no doubt about it.
Talking about the Daily Show. Studies show that those who watch the Daily Show are on average more confident about their abilities to judge politics. At the same time, these viewers become more negative about politics in general and about political candidates. This is after controlling for other factors such as political knowledge, education, age, etc.
| January 6, 2009, 11:56 pm | |
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