Since I wrote “The Television Presidency,” I have been noticing more examples of several points made in the essay. This is normal—it’s just the well-known cognitive phenomenon of the evoked set at work. Nearly everyone experiences this from time to time. Learn a new word or become familiar with a new pop-culture datum, for example, and suddenly you see them all over the place. But the point I’ve noticed most concerns the propensity of the TV- and screen-addled to fail to distinguish between mediated (and often manipulated images) and images from unmediated wide-awake reality—and to fall rather easily into some strange ways of thinking based on that apparently spreading propensity.
So first, just hours after I finished writing and probably before the essay was even posted, came President Trump’s wild claims about bad things happening in Sweden because of rampaging criminal immigrants. Anne Applebaum’s Washington Post column this morning—“The odd case of Sweden’s fake crisis”—is the most insightful telling and interpretation of the incident I’ve seen. Her interpretation amounts to a warning of recursive lawyers of falsehood folding in on themselves to a point that the distinction, as far as the body politic as a whole is concerned, between what is real and what is fictive and false disappears.
Trump apparently based his “Sweden” comment on false claims made by a filmmaker named Ami Horowitz in an interview conducted by Tucker Carlson on Fox News. Similarly, it seems, Trump’s more recent accusation that President Obama ordered Trump wiretapped during the election seems to have been based on a cable-show claim by a conservative conspiracy theorist named Mark Levin. Yet again political life imitates very bad art.
Second, just a day or so later, I saw an SNL sketch in which Melissa McCarthy, playing Sean Spicer, answers a reporter’s question about what the President intends to do about court injunctions against the Administration’s Muslim travel ban by claiming that the President will take the courts to court. “What court?” asks the reporter. “The people’s court,” replies McCarthy cum Spicer, who adds that it’s real because it says so on the show.
Obviously, people who work in television are sensitive to the point (not that I ever claimed in my essay to be the only one to have noticed the phenomenon, but some who claim interest in the question apparently have not1). So far the most popular response of our TV professional types has been to generate comedy from what has been going on; or, perhaps more accurately, comedy in the special form of satire. Lenny Bruce would be proud, just as soon as he stopped being appalled over the kind and abundance of raw materials from which contemporary satirists are able to work from.
Alas, the hay day of political satire in which we now find ourselves bears it own appalling aspect. In today’s New York Times, an article entitled “Liberals Tune In to TV Again, in Search of Communal Solace” quotes a 58-year old retiree from Louisville, Kentucky named Jerry Brumleve, who loves Rachel Maddow’s show and thinks Trevor Noah has “hit his stride” on The Daily Show, as saying: “With Trump in office, I really feel the need to stay more informed. You just don’t know what the hell this guy is going to do.”
“What the hell” is right, Jerry. You don’t know the difference between political satire and news? You think you can stay informed by listening to jokes? If that’s really your view, then your likely smug self-assurance that the Trumpenproletariat is far more vulnerable to “fake” news than you and your friends are needs some serious reconsideration.
The obviously print-media authors of the article, Michael M. Grynbaum and John Koblin, manage to get through well more than a dozen additional column inches of story without even so much as hinting at such questions. Does that in itself indicate some kind of problem, perhaps, in which print media’s obligation to be accurate is now trumped (no pun intended) by the obligation of electronic media to be obligingly amusing above and beyond informative? I’m not sure.
I am sure that at moments like these I cannot shake from my head some by-now-nearly memorized lines from an already aged, pre-internet news Michael Crichton novel—Timeline, from 1999:
What is the dominant mode of experience at the end of the twentieth century? How do people see things, how do they expect to see things? The answer is simple. In every field, from business to politics to marketing to education, the dominant mode has become entertainment. . . .
Today, everybody expects to be entertained, and they expect to be entertained all the time. Business meetings must be snappy, with bullet lists and animated graphics, so executives aren’t bored. Malls and stores must be engaging, so they amuse as well as sell us. Politicians must have pleasing video personalities and tell us only what we want to hear. Schools must be careful not to bore young minds that expect the speed and complexity of television. Students must be amused—everyone must be amused, or they will switch: switch brands, switch channels, switch parties, switch loyalties. This is the intellectual reality of Western society at the end of the century.
In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century, they want to be entertained. The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom. A sense of time is on our hands, a sense of nothing to do. A sense that we are not amused.
I wonder what Crichton would think were he still with us today. Liberals, at least, are highly amused—they are, indeed, quite voluminously entertained, as today’s NYT article documents. And hardly anyone is bored. Would he perhaps have wanted to mention that, whatever else it is and does, television is highly isolating and politically demobilizing, leading many people to feel that by joining in an emotion-laden opinion served up without requiring any effort of their own, they have actually done something? Well, I suppose we’ll never know.
1See Philip Fernbach and Steven Sloman, “Why We Believe Obvious Untruths” in the March 3 New York Times Sunday Review. In their effort to get arms around “collective delusions” of both rightwing and leftwing varieties, they fail to mention that mediated images compose a perfect delivery system for the rise of alternative, non-credentialed and untrustworthy sources of trust.