When Politicians Became Famous
The worst consequence of our 24-hour news cycle online click-bait world
One of the worst things that ever happened to our country was politicians became famous.
I’m not talking about the President. I’m talking about all the other insignificant-not-from-my state-why-do-I-know-their-names?-Washington-hack-politicians who seem to be endlessly parading across my television and telephone screens spouting off bad lines in even worse performances that wouldn’t rate in a cheaply produced Bulgarian soap opera.
Matt Gaetz
AOC
Rashida Talib
Lindsay Graham
Adam Schiff
Megan Whitmer
Ted Cruz
Marjorie Taylor Greene
“The Tennessee Three”
To say nothing of the useless Majority and Minority “leaders” in Congress.
These knuckleheads are not worth knowing.
Yet we do know them.
Why?
Because they somehow got famous (and rich) working in Washington DC, home to the Tracy Flicks of the world. Not exactly the people you hang posters of on your wall, or follow on social media like some online groupie.
And yet…
We all know the names, and they seem to be everywhere. From the Met Gala to CNN Townhalls, to our social media feeds, these C-list politicians masquerading as D-list celebrities are now seemingly everywhere.
I’ll take “how screwed are we as a country for a thousand, Alec.” (And yes, I still picture Alec Trebek as the host of “Jeopardy” in my sarcasm.)
When Ted Turner first came up with the concept of 24-hour news and launched CNN I was far too young to be paying attention, however by the time of CNN’s coverage of the Gulf War in 1991 I was watching wide-eyed as the 24 hour cable news network’s purpose became clear. By providing a window into a war in a way it had never been seen before by audiences watching at home, CNN changed the way we think of news.
I think like most other Americans at the time I viewed 24-hour news as a very good thing. I felt that it brought a level of transparency to how our government ran, and how we as a country worked and lived together, all by filming and reporting continuously for 24 hours a day on what was happening in the world.
Boy, was I was wrong.
We all were.
The 24-hour news cycle has been a disaster.
And the biggest evidence of how disastrous is we live in a world of famous politicians.
Part of the problem is when there isn’t a war to cover everyday, you have ti find “news” to report on So, you stretch elections out to two years. You cover everything as a world-threatening crisis, and when they don’t exist you manufacture them. Then you trot out this clown car of second-rate politicians and third-rate personalities to shout about it all.
Wag the Dog.
The proof is in the parade of meaningless overblown and underreported “newsworthy” stories, or the “gotcha journalism” that leads to repeated headlines trumpeting “bombshell” “breaking news” pieces with Chicken Little regularity that are anything but bombshells and barely qualify as news, let alone news that needs to be break into regularly scheduled programming.
The repellent byproduct of this churn is that steal-a-lollipo-from-a-baby-politicians now think of themselves as tv and social media stars.
“Im not a Senator, I just play one on tv…”
We know these politicians like they were movie stars, rock stars, or famous athletes.
How did we get here?
Well, since the Gulf War and earliest days of CNN, a lot has happened. Fox happened. MNBC. Yahoo News. Facebook. Twitter. Social media.
In that time, I went to work in Hollywood, a part of the media complex; the entertainment industry. When I began my career, it used to be that entertainment and news were separate. How they were made, distributed, and consumed were inherently different.
My first job ever was at The Maury Povich Show. It was everything you might imagine that job to be (and then some), but the idea that it was ever a serious show or a serious format wasn’t fooling anybody.
For the producers (all higher up than me) who worked at these talk shows, like Maury, and Sally-Jesse, and the late jerry Springer, not to mention Oprah and Katie and Wendy Williams, the brass ring was to leave the talk show circuit and get a job working for one of the morning news programs. Where one could wash off the muck of the talk show circuit and gain some shine and respectability by becoming a member of the vaunted Fourth Estate. Sure, you were TV news, not a Pulitzer Prize winning NY Times journalist, but it was a still marked step-up.
No longer.
Now, it’s hard to tell the difference between a Jerry Springer episode, a cable news panel discussion, and a session of Congress.
I left Maury after a year and moved to Hollywood where I’ve spent the bulk of my career working in scripted original televisions. I’ve been an executive, a producer, and a screenwriter.
We’re the folks that make shit up for a living.
We used to be the only ones.
But now, everyone does it.
The newspapers, the cable news, and literally everyone on twitter (all 2% of the country). They all make stuff up. They do it for the clicks baby. If you want to see where that’s led the media industry, check out this article from Joe Nocera in Bari Weiss’s “The Free Press” substack.
One thing being around Hollywood movie and tv sets taught me was what happens when you put someone on camera. The answer is: they act different.
Most of us get nervous. A few can perform. Some, the camera loves. Others not so much. The movie Broadcast News in its contrasts between William Hurt’s camera-ready but dimwitted news anchor, “Tom,” and Albert Brook’s intellectual sharp, but flop-sweat suffering news producer, “Aaron,” demonstrates this brilliantly in high-comedic fashion. One belongs in front of the camera and the other behind it.James Brooks gives Paddy Chayefsky a run for his money here as prescient predictor of things to come. Holly Hunter’s warnings about the news business in Broadcast News certainly ring true today, (She might have warned against the “Mao Tse Tung Hour” as hosted by AOC.) As does the scene of William Hurt’s news anchor crying on cue to manipulate audience reaction to an interview. At least we haven’t hit “The Running Man’s” “Climbing for Dollars” territory yet. Still, it’s hard to watch Succession’s “ATN news tailgating party scene where media executives and businessmen pick the next President of the United States by backstabbing one another in backroom deals (granted, the backroom now is in a multi-million dollar New York City apartment) and not be cynical about the whole process and these people.
The problem when is when entertainment and news are indistinguishable, you end up with infotainment. This blending of the lines between entertainment and news creates celebrities out of news anchors and reporters is bad, but is maybe nothing new. However, the merging of entertainment and politics has made celebrities out of cosplaying politicians and it’s consequences have been pretty terrible.
For starters, politicians no longer govern. They are in perennial campaign mode with every controversial tweet and television appearance a chance to fundraiser for their campaigns. Worse, the so-called “news medias” provides a thinly veiled sheen of legitimacy to what these so-called political servants are saying and doing. It’s true. Politicians are now little more than wannabe celebrities with neither the looks nor the talent to write, sing, or dance..so they turned to performance art. Their subjects: themselves. Their stage: the campaign trail. The primetime news show, and of course, the United State Congress. They’ve transformed the floor of the United States Congress into a glorified television set.
How ironic that a job which is in its very definition meant to be one of public service, is now one in which the public serves the politician. How else to explain how these empty suits, only some of whom believe in science, and even fewer of whom have read or understand the Constitution and the laws they are meant to write, uphold and amend, can enter office with average net worths and leave decades later with millions to their name.
When you get right down to it, really how different are these folks from the characters in House of Cards or Succession? Not much. Except they’re uglier and more insidious. What’s so galling is the air of elitism with which they carry themselves. Kinda like celebrities.
How did this happen?
The world of clicks, streamers, unfulfilled promises of profitability, and the race to the bottom.
Journalists and reporters are no different than actors or actresses, or politicians when you put a camera on them, the act different. They say things they would never if they didn’t have a camera at them. Want proof? Go play clips of Don Lemon on his show ten years ago, and now. Contrast the things he’s saying then with now (before he got fired I mean). It seems hard to chalk this up to a legitimate change of heart and values. More likely, a better script was given to him. One that produced more eyeballs, higher ratings, and more clicks, comments, and shares. Same goes for Joe Biden or Donald Trump. I doubt very much there is a politician these days whose first consultation on any matter isn’t their media guru. Politicians today are not merely media-savvy, they are media manipulative.
They are helped in this manipulation by their cohorts at the networks themselves. Because like anyone else who's ever been on camera and who lives and dies by the ratings, which the anchors on CNN, MSNBC, Fox surely do, they are going to put on the person – in this case the politician – who gets them the most eyeballs.
The problem becomes is the 24 hour news cycle is driven by ratings and by clicks so what occurs is the politicians who got the most airtime are not the ones who are saying the most intelligent things or doing what is best for their constituents and their countrymen. No. It’s the politician saying the most outrageous thing. Even if what they are saying is garbage. Because it makes for good video soundbites.
And forget the politicians being asked any tough questions by any reporters who might hold them accountable to the public they serve. No, instead they prop them up, preview questions for them, and generally act in the manner in which flutters do during the making of a porno. It’s pretty gross to watch.
Meanwhile, any challenges to these people are deflected, denied, or outright shut down by the media the way you would expect a phalanx of PR mavens to shut down a reporter who asked their celebrity client about an off-limits relationship. So, now we live in a world of media messaging crafted and massaged by the very media meant to check these politicians.
“Experts” are brought on to censor anyone who might disagree with these political celebrities and their onerous policies, say during an ineffective countrywide shutdown of businesses and school.
Politicians are asked softball questions by fawning “reporters” then spend minutes vomiting up a word salads of meaningless euphemisms, campaign slogans, and scripted deflections. In the end, they make about as much sense as the adults in a Charlie Brown special.
Wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah…
And what of supposed journalistic ethics?
Don’t make me laugh.
These “journalists” sold out their ethics and principles a long time ago. The reporters, like late night talk show hosts, shill away for the nonsense coming from the mouths of our elected representatives.
Why? So they could go be professional click-baiters.
And because they can’t afford to upset the stars of their little shows. The politicians.
It’s Game of Thrones — tuning in to see who will live and who will die —and all the reporters are Little Fingers manipulating the story off-camera behind the scenes. All of it designed to prevent these so-called leaders from ever being held accountable for saying something on camera that might derail the narrative or upend the soap opera being put on by these aging networks and their bros at the Big Tech Co’s. The D.C. instead of The O.C. Only it’s a lot more pornographic and we’re the ones getting screwed
The problem is, unlike Game of Thrones or The OC, where the only suffering is as viewers who expected a good ending and had to learn to live with disappointment, when it comes to politicians as celebrities, it is The People who suffer. Meanwhile, backstage in the green room, the political celebrities and their media counterparts are all splitting bagels and laughing at the rest of us. (The green room looks a lot like The French Laundry #iykyk )
Why? Because they wanna be pals. Everyone wants to be an insider. And if that means that they have to toss journalistic ethics to give cover to a politician who in return is going give them special access later on, then open the window and out those ethics go.
It’s pathetic. They’re pathetic.
But we let them get away with it.
How?
By tuning in. By tweeting their bullshit.
I’m guilty of it. I wish I wasn’t. But after the last few elections, and of course covid, I am done with the lies endorsed by and covered up by the mainstream media at the expense of this country, and all of us living in it.
I don’t mind an inherent bias in a news org. Provided they’re upfront about it. But, even within your own political camp, how about you actually do your job and question the politicians you do support as to just what the hell they are doing with our tax dollars which do in fact pay their salaries. Aside from their grift they earn on the side, you know, from insider trading and influence peddling. I’d be willing to bet dollar to donuts that payments to “the big guy” is an arrangement familiar to most politicians.
Think not?
I remember when an executive I worked with at AMC called in a favor from a politician. At the time we were the kings of television at AMC with Mad Men and Breaking Bad. This particular executive had a boyfriend with a passport problem. Namely, he was European and didn’t have a current one and thus couldn’t get into the US legally at the time, in time to attend a premiere party. This executive called Tom Ridge, then the Head of Homeland Security, so she could expedite a passport for her European boyfriend. Sure enough, the passport arrived within days, free of charge, and if memory serves, Tommy-boy was on the guest list for our next Mad Men premiere party.
Quid pro quo.
That was nearly 20 years ago. Early days. The world has changed much since then.
Now, in the era of big tech’s incestuous relationship with traditional (mainstream) media entities, that kind of blending of the lines between news and entertainment, fact and fiction, truth and “my truth” has led to a world where the job of Press Secretary to the President of the United States of America is really just an audition for a job as an anchor at one of the big three cable networks. I’m looking at you, George, Sean, and Jen. Or more recently YouTube and perhaps with the announcement by Tucker Carlson the other day, Twitter.
Then again, count me skeptical about the days we get our news from Twitter. Because we’ve already seen how that failed enterprise goes.
I’ll take censorship for a thousand, Alec.
24 hour cable news cycles, social media click-bait, and the celebrity politician class these innovations have given us are slowly pulling apart the fabric of our society by obliterating any notion of intelligent, thoughtful, tolerant, discussion.
Because of course, everyone is in on the act. Everyone desperate for their fifteen minutes.
In a great clip from couple decades ago now when Bill O'Reilly then the most popular cable news anchor went on David Letterman for an interview. O'Reilly style was being belligerent, bellicose, and cutting people off who he generally disagreed with was when after Letterman about some policy or another the presidents bushes for some culture war issue probably the war in Iraq that he and Letterman were on opposite sides of the issue on, clearly. In the interview however O'Reilly, the guest, said repeatedly to Letterman after posing his question about whether he agreed with the policy something to be effective come on Dave why don't you think that why can't you just acknowledge that,? Essentially the rating him into agreeing and the way Letterman responded was well Bill it's not that easy because I'm thoughtful.”
One doubts that we’d see that kind of exchange on late-night television nowadays. Instead, we get Stephen Colbert apparently too stupid or corrupt to make the connection between Coronovirus and the Wuhan lab, even after his former boss Jon Stewart thunked him on the head with that obviousness. Never mind any kind of intelligent discourse between the cackling hens on The View and a politician they disagree with.
Even more sad and twisted is the worship by A-list Hollywood movie star celebrities of these D-list reality star politicians. Blech. Talk about the shoe being on the wrong foot. Is there any doubt that the biggest Hollywood celebrity from 2008 until 2016 was Barack Obama?
It wasn’t the superhero movie that killed that the movie star. They killed themselves when they lived up to Norma Desmond’s classic line in Sunset Boulevard when she said, “it’s the pictures that got small.”
She was right.
After all, where do you watch most of your “content” these days? On your phone, right?
Which might explain why we are okay giving so much of our attention to talentless people like Ted Cruz and Adam Schiff and Marjorie Taylor Green and AOC, and all their friends and shills in the media. It’s gotten to be you can’t even tell the difference between the “journalists” and the politicians. They’re all the saying the same lines.
So, we stop listening and we all retreat to our respective echo chambers and cheer on the celebrity-politicians we like and bash the ones we don’t. Is it any surprise then that these D-listers masquerading as politicians are as vapid, venal, and vain as the worst Hollywood celebrities?
To what do we owe our thanks for this cluster-fuck?: The 24 hour news cycle and the celebrity politicians they’ve made for us. But really, what’s the harm. So tune in, click on, and drop out, man. Watch your Fox, your CNN or MSNBC, click on your “context needed” Facebook link to The NY Times, the Washington Post, and get yourself a daily dose of The most trusted names in…all the news that’s fit to censor…unfair and imbalanced….where democracy dies in darkness…and we’ll be right back after this word from our sponsor…
Pfizer.
Maybe it’s time to turn this bad soap opera off and go read a book or talk to a neighbor.
Or maybe I’m just old fashioned like that.