Flattered to deceive
It's no surprise that the less intelligent and the less informed you are, the more likely you are to get your news from local television. After all, you're not likely to learn much about the world from the constant repetition of crime, weather, sports and human interest.
Network TV news is a little better, although you can't expect to learn very much from a 10-second soundbite from a senator, much less the minute-long rebuttal cum explanation helpfully provided by the Capitol Hill correspondent.
At first glance, the 24-hour news offered by CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and CNBC theoretically provide the opportunity for genuine, in-depth coverage of events. Unfortunately, this opportunity has been as badly squandered as those originally offered by television itself, which was once seriously viewed by some early optimists as an educationally beneficial medium.
While I have no doubt that there are plenty of children learning new things every week from watching "Desperate Housewives," I don't think this was exactly what those academics had in mind.
Fox News is rightly the king of the cable news hill, as basic division predicted from the start. A product designed to present monopoly appeal to the more conservative 50 percent of the population is obviously going to outperform those products designed to split the more liberal 50 percent among PBS and the ABCNNBCBS cabal. Unfortunately, this worldview monopoly was not enough for Fox News producers, as the siren song of live-car chases, missing white women and celebrity trials proved impossible for them to resist.
For all their popularity, the editorial shows are not much better. Ann Coulter could be a guest on both the "O'Reilly Factor" and "Hannity & Colmes" every night for a year and one would not learn one-fourth as much from the experience as one would from reading one of her books. It is quite common, of course, for TV talking heads to write books these days, since publishers have discovered the concept of transmedia synergy, although this merely conceals the fact that very few of these TV pseudo-intellectuals have either expertise to share or anything significant to say.
This is why the Rush Limbaughs, Bill O'Reillys and Al Frankens, unlike the polemicists of yore, only write two or three books - often with a ghost writer - before discovering that they have run out of steam. While the TV audience never seems to tire of hearing variants on the "liberals bad, conservatives good" or the "conservatives bad, liberals good" theme, readers tend to be a bit more discerning. Or at least more easily bored.
There are a few exceptions, of course. Ann Coulter's books are not merely controversial, they are also substantive, even if her critics found it difficult to find the endnotes. I have been a steadfast critic of Michelle Malkin's book on internment, and yet I must give her credit for at least attempting to write a substantive work. It would have been much easier, after all, for a media personality of her appeal to simply hurl a random collection of polemical red meat to the carnivores. And Paul Krugman's pop econ books do educate the reader, even if the education is in an outdated and increasingly inaccurate theoretical model.
But I do not know if there has ever been a time when so many people have known so little while considering themselves so well-informed. Most people would agree, I think, that newspapers offer a generally more substantive medium than television, and yet on Saturday, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times complained that the new Iraqi government was being "ruled by men rooted in the sort of conservative Shiite religious politics that will not produce a new dawn of equality for Iraqi women."
In an effort to sound intellectual, she instead provided inadvertent hilarity:
The bad news: This is not an Iraqi government that will practice Athenian democracy ..."
Apparently it was unknown to Ms. Dowd that women were not permitted to vote or hold office in Athens, and I rather doubt she would be terribly upset should Iraqi democrats fail to pass death sentences on dangerous philosophers as did their Athenian forebears. Then again, one should probably not assume that Ms. Dowd is capable of distinguishing Socrates from Michael Stipe.
Journalists have a very dangerous tendency to assume that if one has heard about something, one knows and understands it. It seems to me that the second great evil of cable news - after the Cryptkeeper, formerly known as Larry King - is the transference of this illusion from the TV commentator to the viewer.
750 words such as these can't teach you anything of substance, but 750 pages can. And only after building a solid base of knowledge can one begin to make sense of the bits of information floating in the media stream around you. Tonight, why not consider turning off the low-wattage cable dialectic, and, in the words of Flavor Flav, read a book and learn your culture.
Only then can you begin to wake up.