The Press and Political Bullshit
First, watch this important news report.
One way that people use humor is to mitigate pain. That’s partly why satire is funny–it points out the source of pain and attempts to make it not-so-painful by making a joke of it. The best satire, then, is deadly serious. That’s what makes Jon Stewart et. al. so funny and so popular.
This “news” report makes an excellent satirical point about how the press influences political messages by what it chooses to cover. If you focus on bullshit, then bullshit is what becomes important. And if bullshit is important, then politicians are going to bullshit you.
Both the press and politicians can be the source of bullshit. But to beat back the rising tide of bovine do-do requires that the a press be unwilling to create it or spread it.
I’d like to see political journalists start calling out their colleagues and politicians for spreading bullshit. How might they accomplish this? Three ways to start: 1) Accept that bullshit is not news, and 2) start a rhetoric beat, and 3) tell a different story.
The hard part is finding some news organization that will decide its tired of creating and spreading bullshit. As profit-driven businesses (in which the advertiser is the customer and the news consumer is the product), most news organizations are not interested in being different from the competition. And this means most political reporters are not interested in being different from the competition, except as they compete for the best bullshit.
I suggest reading Harry G. Frankfurt’s essay On Bullshit to learn more.
(hat tip: busplunge)
