I've long ago stopped watching the Sunday political shows like Face the Nation or Meet the Press, along with any number of the other political round tables that fill the airwaves, usually though not exclusively, on the Lord's Day. It's mainly that I don't have the time to watch them, as opposed to abandoning them because I've lost faith in their veracity, like I have the national evening news. Opinion shows are exactly that, people giving their opinions: I know what I'm getting. More and more the network's hard news shows are anything but, delivering a sedative shot of human interest, celebrity gossip and freak weather pieces to lull the audience into a stupor so as not to alarm them with the real news happening in the world. I'm not even going to dip my toe into the whole debate as to whether the Main Stream Media (MSM) are fair and balanced. All I'll say is that hard news is not being reported on the "Big Three," making them apart of the bread and circuses or contemporary American life.
I say this as a way of setting up a clip I stumbled on to as I was surfing YouTube. I'm not sure what algorithm suggested this clip for me, but it's from a PBS News Hour broadcast that aired last week, after Donald Trump became the presumptive GOP nominee. The New Hour runs during the week, and is a hybrid of the evening news and a round table program. The clip below is of a regular segment featuring commentary from Mark Shields, a liberal columnist, and David Brooks, a moderate conservative who writes for The Times. In fairness, both are pretty moderate, or at least present them selves as such, in offering their perspective. Shields has been around forever, being a veteran of CNN's Capital Gang and The McLaughlin Group, among other shows. David Brooks has risen in prominence by positioning himself to be the thinking man's conservative in the mold of a William Safire. Both are canny, but conventional in their thinking, as is demonstrated by by their commentary here.
They are reasoned, reasonable, and stuck in 2004. They admit that they misread Trump, didn't think he would get the nomination, and underestimated the mood of discontent in the nation. They still don't believe he can win in November though: Trump is shallow, crude, and unprepared for the highest office in the land. For now the people, in their anger, will flirt with Trump but in the end they'll go with the safe choice: the conventional politician Hillary Clinton-or so they think.
They, and others in the MSM, can continue to think that way at their own peril. The prospect of a Trump victory is real: not certain, but very real. People understand that the political system is broke: that the republican mechanisms are jammed. The economic system might be even more impaired. If the economy falters going into the fall, and September-October seems to be the time, even in a non-recession year, when the market goes into a downward "correction," the people just might feel desperate enough to hand the nuclear code to someone who has never worked in government before.
Let me be clear, I'm not endorsing Donald Trump, or any candidate. But as one of my intellectual heroes, Marshall McLuhan, said about his otherwise detached observations on mass media: it's not that he liked it, but he wanted to know how it worked so he could figure out where the switch was and turn it off. We can criticize Mr. Trump all we want; we all know his defects. But a conventional way of approaching the issue isn't going to work at stopping him, if that's what you want to do. Hit pieces in the New York Times accusing him of misogyny or sensational, but tenuous, attempts to link him to the KKK are not going to work. Those methods worked in the past, on conventional politicians. We are beyond the conventional right now, and we'd best figure out how Trump is succeeding, not just bemoan the fact that he is.
Unfortunately Shields and Brooks, along with many of their fellow pundits are stuck on the ordinary. The ground is shifting under their feet, but have no idea what to do but wait for the shaking to stop and hope the house is still standing because it always has. They are like Bob Dylan's Mr. Jones with his pencil and pad watching the strange scene pass, but not really getting it. If this is the level of opinion being offered on the air maybe I haven't missed that much by skipping the political shows.
More on this later. But for now, enjoy:
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