June 4, 2018--Barr & Bee

Of course Samantha Bee has the First Amendment right on her TV show to call Ivanka Trump a "feckless cunt."

And of course Rosanne Barr has the same constitutional right on Twitter to refer to African-American Valerie Jarrett as an "ape."

The First Amendment also protects their right to be stupid, and worse. They both for me are on the "worse" end of the scale.

But freedom of speech and other freedoms can have consequences.

For example, many on the left applauded the ABC network when it moved swiftly to cancel Barr's top-rated show. While many on the right are calling on Bee's network, TBS, to do the same thing. Not firing her they see to be evidence of liberal bias in the media. Minimally, evidence of a double standard.

Clearly what Barr and Bee did was not equivalent. 

Bee made her stupid comments as part of stand-up schtick. In other words what she spewed was an example of a joke gone wrong. Terribly wrong. 

But comedians are given dispensation to push the limits in their acts (think Lenny Bruce and Joan Rivers). In fact, they are encouraged to do so. They are often seen as speaking truth to power under the cover of comedy. Like Shakespeare's fools (think Lear's Fool or Puck in Midsummer Night's Dream).

Barr exposed her racism on Twitter, as a private citizen (who has the same First Amendment rights as Rosanne the actor), expressing her views, not in character, while off the air. Also, she claimed, as an alibi, that what she tweeted was a clumsy joke that misfired.

So an initial issue involves the fact that Barr was fired while Bee wasn't. At least not yet. The double-standards business claimed by Republicans. Though let's see what TBS does when more of her sponsors dump her, as some already have.

TBS may be able to allow Bee to remain on the air until that inevitably happens because her show is broadcast on cable where standards about what is acceptable are more permissive than what traditional networks allow, especially, as in ABC's case, if the network is owned by PG-rated Disney.

Now, let's deal with the politics beyond the hypocrisy on both the right and left.

The right at the moment has the political upper hand--Barr was fired while Bee wasn't. As good as progressives are at explaining things away, rationalizing them (as they have been struggling to do for days now on MSNBC) it is hard to make the case that it's OK, after an apology, to say about Ivanka what Bee said even though it was uttered under the sanction of comedy, where anything goes, and was directed at an employee of the White House (fair game) who also happens to be our reprehensible president's daughter. A president who has contributed immeasurably to the coarsening of discourse that has led to this. A president who has said much worse things than Samantha Bee or, for that matter, Rosanne Barr.

Again politically, progressives occupied the moral high ground while Barr's tweets were the sole subject of outrage. Then Bee stepped in it and changed the focus of the political struggle. Now everyone is talking and agitating about Samantha Bee. Rosanne Barr is relegated to a sidebar.

Here's my take--

I hate what both of them said. But both of them are or should be protected to say almost anything. (Not "Fire!" in a crowded theater.) That's the easy part. It's my view that they are pretty much equally culpable. Many on the left disagree. Fine.

I wouldn't fire either of them. We don't want to intimidate our comedians, our fools. During these times we need them more than ever. We need to hear their versions of the truth. We need them to be funny while subversive. How so many of us can't wait for the latest episode of Saturday Night Live. There is already so much fear that chilling difficult discourse more than it already is is dangerous to our survival as a democracy.

As a partisan, as someone who wants to see Trump weakend, humbled, and thereby rendered less effective, I want those on the left, who are essential to helping to bring this about, to be smarter than they currently are. We can't retreat from the fray and focus on our lifestyles (I have written about this ad nauseam) but must fight back even harder. Though smarter. 

Samantha Bee's rights are constitutionally protected (at least for now), but wasting them by wounding oneself while being stupid, and the rationalizations I am hearing from those I otherwise admire, is helping boost Trump's approval ratings and will interfere with progressives' prospects in November.

I am sorry if this pragmatic focus does not elevate our dialogue but until after the midterms my mantra is going to continue to be obsessively practical. 

I want us to be smart, less self-righteous, and above all win. Then we can go back to being nuanced and subtle. 

April 22, 2015--That's the Way It Was

Little remembered, Roone Arledge did more to shape contemporary TV network sports and news than anyone better known.

From 1968 through 1986 he was president of ABC Sports. In that role, to personalize coverage, especially for women, he was responsible for adding "up-close-and-personal" packages to ABC's airing of the Olympics games and, for an almost broader audience turned ABC's Wide World of Sports into a mega-hit that weekly featured everything even quasi-sports-like, including barrel jumping from various hotels' ice rinks in the Borscht Belt, cliff diving from Acapulco, and demolition derbies.

With all that success ABC executives in 1977 made him the network's president for news and the rest is history.

Up to that point on places such as the Tiffany Network (CBS) the news was presented as serious business--wars, famines, revolutions, presidential nominating conventions (wall-to-wall coverage was the norm), and the occasional natural disaster. With the understanding that to deserve air time the disasters had to measure at least 7.0 on the Richter Scale. No mudslides in Malibu could pass the Walter-Cronkite test.

So when Cronkite signed off each night with, "And that's the way it is," that was the way it was.

Cut to 2015.

We live in a very different news universe where what is "reported" weeknights on the three network news shows is no longer that much about news. And no longer appeals to a mass audience. Particularly does not appeal to young viewers. Thus all the Lavitra commercials.

Almost as many get their news from Jon Stewart on the Daily Show as from Scott Pelley on CBS. And many more than that get their news on line via so-called mobile devices.

Network news mavens have figured out that all day long people with smart phones check their favorite websites to see what's happening and when doing that tend to click on things that offer more visual than written content.

So, last week there was a lot of exciting footage, mainly shot by bystanders with iPhones, of out-of-control police that went viral. From video of a policeman in Arizona careening intentionally onto the sidewalk to run down someone fleeing from the police and other repeatable footage of a 73-year-old police volunteer in Oklahoma who shot and killed an alleged suspect with what he thought was his taser, mistaking his service revolver for it.

And just the other day there were vivid images of a young black man being subdued, shackled, and tossed into a police van by three white cops where he may or may not have had his spine snapped, which in turn led to his death.

Knowing all these images, and thus "stories," had been in wide circulation long before 6:30 P.M. and knowing that their residual Baby-Boomer audiences do not search the Web all day seeking the amusing and lurid, the networks began their broadcasts and filled half their time with these videos. In effect to help their aging, tech-phobe viewers catch up with what the more wired had been looking in on through the day.

So this is what network news has devolved to--showcases for viral videos for the unplugged.

On ABC, where news as entertainment was invented and reached its apotheosis, where no distinction is made between fun, the grotesque, or the urgent, David Muir is the least credentialed, most unabashedly hunky, blow-dried "anchor" of all time. On his show one day last week (and "show" it is), though Barack Obama was meeting in Panama City with other North and South American leaders, we saw the police videos over and over again--in slower-and-slower slow motion and closer-and-closer detail (including the pop shot--the police cruiser slamming into the fleeing suspect) there was literally no mention of the historic meeting between Obama and Cuban president Raul Castro.

February 11, 2105--Built On Lies

The problem at NBC is not that Brian Williams is a lier.

He admits now that he sexed up a 2003 report about a foreign-correspondant-trip of his to war-ravaged Iraq--that his helicopter was hit by incoming enemy fire. And there may be evidence that he did a version of the same thing while reporting about Hurricane Katrina from New Orleans (he claimed then that he saw bodies floating by his hotel though there was apparently no significant flooding where his hotel was located); and, who knows, he may have stretched things in a similar self-aggrandizing way during the other assignment that put him on the map, reporting knee-deep in water from South Asia about the tsunami of 2004.

The problem is that the real lie is that he and his anchor colleagues are no longer reporters and that the shows they star in are not about the news. They are exhorbitantly-paid news readers. Reading the script like the actors they are and blow-dried to attract viewers, especially those from coveted demographic groups, all to keep sponsors happy and buying commercials.

All the anchors, with rather thin journalistic backgrounds, but telegenic, Brian Williams, extra-youthful David Muir at ABC, Scott Pelley at CBS, Anderson Cooper at CNN, Megyn Kelly of Fox, and who knows who at MSNBC, all are more in the entertainment business than the news business. Thus their favorite things are to report on events that will garner the highest ratings--natural disasters (hurricanes, blizzards, and tsunamis), terrorist activities (if there is video of beheadings to accompany their reports), and plane crashes. How many hours and days and weeks did CNN devote to the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight 307?

Now in paroxysms of schadenfreude, TV colleagues, print journalists, and people calling in to talk shows are asking for William's head. (Not literally of course. But who know.) And as of last night they at least had a taste of blood--NBC suspended him without pay for six months.

Some rue the "fact" that he isn't Tom Brokaw or, even more distressing by comparison, "the most trusted man in America," Walter Cronkite, both of whom presided over TV news when it was still news, not profit centers. Neither Tom nor old Walter, I have been reading in the blogs, ever would have participated in such unprofessional behavior. What is not noted is that Cronkite and Brokaw did not live and work in a world so pervaded by social networks and Internet sites where hyper-scrutiny of anyone famous' missteps go viral and thus magnified beyond proportion.

I cannot claim for certain that Tom and Walter were on the full up-and-up. Can anyone?

When Roone Arledge, who headed ABC's remarkably successful sports operation was asked to also take on responsibility for the network's news division, it was with the assumption that he would turn what had been the Tiffany Network's unprofitable news division into a profit center. He managed to do so by softening up the reporting, getting the hard news out of the way in the first few minutes and then turning to the up-close-and-personal stuff that had been his signature in ABC's Olympics coverage.

The rest is history. Now even NBC's fading Today Show and widely-watched CBS's 60 Minutes make hundreds of millions and are those networks' most profitable shows. And Brian Williams spends more time on the Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live than he does in Syria.

But this TV news environment also contributes to the success of so-called "fake-news," with entertainment and fun unabashedly at the heart of Jon Stewart's Daily Show and the Colbert Report. More young people who even bother to watch TV get their "news" there than on the three networks and cable news outlets. And often that news is real news.

Meanwhile, desperate, isn't it the Today Show that is now raising a puppy on the set?