Of good ends through rotten means
It's a rainy election day here in Temple. Drizzly and overcast, but pleasant. It's one of those days where clouds cover the sky but the light is still strong, and it's one of those windless storms where the drops falling off the eaves are much bigger than those falling from the sky.
I voted today, really, for the first time. I voted once before in last year's local election. I somehow missed the 2002 mid-term elections. I remember, in 2000, walking by the UGL, UT's voting location, and thinking that I was too busy and that it wouldn't matter anyways.
My polling location today, a VFW post a few hundred yards from my apartment complex, was nearly empty when I got there at 11 a.m. They said they expected things to really pick up around noon.
The four or five voting booths to my right looked like overgrown filing cabinets with curtains, and as soon as I had pulled the heavy metal crank that shut the curtain behind me, I wished that I had paid closer attention to the candidates for local offices, like sheriff or any of the lower courts. After all, these are where my vote actually counts the most, and of course where I know the least.
I've spent the rest of the afternoon at my apartment doing laundry. At one point I found myself over at Talking Points Memo, where he was debunking a scurrilous accusation of irregularities with voting machines in Philadelphia. Actually, he was quoting an AP story that quoted voting officials there that said the charges had absolutely no factual basis. Similarly, CNN was reporting that so far it seems like the GOP vote "challengers" in Ohio are not causing huge delays at the polls, so let's hope that is true and continues through the day.
Either way, just as I was sitting here thinking of all the good reporting the mainstream press does, and which blogs can only suckle off of, CNN had some douche up on the screen talking for nearly five minutes about what John Kerry had for lunch today. Now I remember why I hate cable news.
(Hey! CNN just had a clip of our favorite post-racial congressional candidate out of Illinois! Man, that was Obama. If they'd had a sound bite, it would've Baracked.)
Well, anyways, sitting here thinking about some stuff that I read last night, I started to wonder why some bloggers (on both sides) and journalists view each other as kind of natural enemies. Competition for scarce political junkies, I suppose.
But I think one of the reasons that the media and the blogosphere are both so obsessed with politics — and here I'm talking about politics as it is nearly separate from policy: the left-right dichotomy, the rallying cries of social equity or family values, the focus on scandals and soundbites rather than facts — is that both are inherently democratic institutions.
In all of the discussions of, to put it simply, "media bias," I don't think it's often noted that newspapers and TV shows are not out there forging their own path in righteous pursuit of truth. No, they're looking for ratings, just as a blogger is looking for readers, just as a politician is looking for votes. And in that sense, what often works best in arena that appeals to the public as a whole is to appeal to the worst qualities in people: our obsession with gossip, our desire to oversimplify to comfort our assumptions, our interest in trivia over substance, our need to create or exagerate enemies so that we have something to crusade against. As one former victim of Karl Rove put it to Josh Green in The Atlantic, he was defeated by "how Rove appealed to the worst elements of human nature." But power of this tactis is also evident in how a political consultant from Texas can be seen by about half the country as the devil incarnate, running our country from his lair.
Strangest of all, in both cases, the institutions claim to work in pursuit of some higher ideals such as, say, truth, or the "goodness" of America. E. B. White once said that it is only by fiction that we are able to make it through the day, and I think that is okay. We are swayed by our baser elements, and we are prone to delusion to grant ourselves some grand purpose — which is not to say that these defects do not deserve close scrutiny. But I did vote for several Democratic candidates I knew nothing about. And seeing Barack Obama on CNN did make me happy, like I'd seen a celebrity walking down the street. If it weren't so, the spell of the story would be broken, and the fantasies we created in its place would likely be far more violent and oppressive than our current rosy tale.
*Cleaned up at 5.28 p.m.
I voted today, really, for the first time. I voted once before in last year's local election. I somehow missed the 2002 mid-term elections. I remember, in 2000, walking by the UGL, UT's voting location, and thinking that I was too busy and that it wouldn't matter anyways.
My polling location today, a VFW post a few hundred yards from my apartment complex, was nearly empty when I got there at 11 a.m. They said they expected things to really pick up around noon.
The four or five voting booths to my right looked like overgrown filing cabinets with curtains, and as soon as I had pulled the heavy metal crank that shut the curtain behind me, I wished that I had paid closer attention to the candidates for local offices, like sheriff or any of the lower courts. After all, these are where my vote actually counts the most, and of course where I know the least.
I've spent the rest of the afternoon at my apartment doing laundry. At one point I found myself over at Talking Points Memo, where he was debunking a scurrilous accusation of irregularities with voting machines in Philadelphia. Actually, he was quoting an AP story that quoted voting officials there that said the charges had absolutely no factual basis. Similarly, CNN was reporting that so far it seems like the GOP vote "challengers" in Ohio are not causing huge delays at the polls, so let's hope that is true and continues through the day.
Either way, just as I was sitting here thinking of all the good reporting the mainstream press does, and which blogs can only suckle off of, CNN had some douche up on the screen talking for nearly five minutes about what John Kerry had for lunch today. Now I remember why I hate cable news.
(Hey! CNN just had a clip of our favorite post-racial congressional candidate out of Illinois! Man, that was Obama. If they'd had a sound bite, it would've Baracked.)
Well, anyways, sitting here thinking about some stuff that I read last night, I started to wonder why some bloggers (on both sides) and journalists view each other as kind of natural enemies. Competition for scarce political junkies, I suppose.
But I think one of the reasons that the media and the blogosphere are both so obsessed with politics — and here I'm talking about politics as it is nearly separate from policy: the left-right dichotomy, the rallying cries of social equity or family values, the focus on scandals and soundbites rather than facts — is that both are inherently democratic institutions.
In all of the discussions of, to put it simply, "media bias," I don't think it's often noted that newspapers and TV shows are not out there forging their own path in righteous pursuit of truth. No, they're looking for ratings, just as a blogger is looking for readers, just as a politician is looking for votes. And in that sense, what often works best in arena that appeals to the public as a whole is to appeal to the worst qualities in people: our obsession with gossip, our desire to oversimplify to comfort our assumptions, our interest in trivia over substance, our need to create or exagerate enemies so that we have something to crusade against. As one former victim of Karl Rove put it to Josh Green in The Atlantic, he was defeated by "how Rove appealed to the worst elements of human nature." But power of this tactis is also evident in how a political consultant from Texas can be seen by about half the country as the devil incarnate, running our country from his lair.
Strangest of all, in both cases, the institutions claim to work in pursuit of some higher ideals such as, say, truth, or the "goodness" of America. E. B. White once said that it is only by fiction that we are able to make it through the day, and I think that is okay. We are swayed by our baser elements, and we are prone to delusion to grant ourselves some grand purpose — which is not to say that these defects do not deserve close scrutiny. But I did vote for several Democratic candidates I knew nothing about. And seeing Barack Obama on CNN did make me happy, like I'd seen a celebrity walking down the street. If it weren't so, the spell of the story would be broken, and the fantasies we created in its place would likely be far more violent and oppressive than our current rosy tale.
*Cleaned up at 5.28 p.m.
posted by Matt at 1:14 PM
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