Flag Pin Reporting

My all-time favorite cable news segment is Jon Stewart’s October 2004 appearance on Crossfire:




During the segment, Stewart admonishes hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala for “hurting America” with their predictable, partisan perspectives. “See, the thing is, we need your help,” Stewart pleads. “Right now, you're helping the politicians and the corporations…You're not too rough on them. You're part of their strategies.”

Fast forward four years. The Iraq War saps a billion dollars from the Treasury every three days, a sixth of the nation doesn’t have health insurance, energy prices are soaring, the economy is troubled and the dollar has tanked. If I was a reporter, I wouldn’t know what to investigate first.

But the television news media’s focus on the irrelevant only continues to sharpen. Since 1996, Bill O’Reilly has demonstrated how to blur the line between news and commentary for a cable news audience. The secret of O’Reilly’s success is his knack for overstating the importance of those topics that get his viewers’ blood boiling. There’s no war on Christmas, nor are kids being kidnapped from bus stops each morning, but watching O’Reilly’s show, you wouldn’t know it. O’Reilly plays his part perfectly: David Letterman once asked him: “You’re doing it because you know it will be entertaining, right?” For a split second, O’Reilly couldn’t help but crack a smile.

While I do find lectures on Christian values from a married man who settled a sexual harassment suit entertaining, what troubles me is that O’Reilly’s show (and his offspring on other news channels) is increasingly being passed off as reporting. O’Reilly calls himself a journalist. But reporting that the greeter at the Paramus Best Buy says “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” isn’t reporting. It’s repeating. More specifically, repeating the irrelevant.

And the slide towards stupid hardly began with O’Reilly: In 1958, Edward R. Murrow told a gathering of news directors that:

“Television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live. If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to read: Look now, pay later.”

But rather than let O’Reilly make his money and have his fun, the rest of the media is also playing to the lowest common denominator. Flag Pin Reporting, to coin a phrase. In this world, the trivial is elevated to the central, simply because it’s easiest to report. Is Obama an elitist? Is McCain too old? Was Hillary under sniper fire? Meanwhile, in the richest country in the world, millions of citizens continue to toil under a system that would instantly bankrupt them if were unlucky enough to fall seriously ill.

So to Bill, Keith, Wolf and the rest of the gang: while you’ve focused on the irrelevant, we’ve elected a comically incompetent President (twice!), suffer under a spineless Congress, and have no idea how to escape a war we were misled into. Don’t think for a moment that politicians don’t see a golden opportunity to sell their wares through you as you gladhandle them to maintain access. Recall the memo written by a former Cheney communications director that answered why her boss loved to visit with Tim Russert on Meet the Press: to “control [the] message,” she coldly and candidly typed.

So by all means, milk the Reverends Wright and Robertson outrage machine for all it’s worth. But occasionally, take the time to ask the tough questions, those questions that don’t neatly fit into the two-minute, left vs. right paradigm. How do we guarantee a basic level of healthcare for all Americans at a reasonable cost? How do we address the root causes that drive Arabs to kill themselves to kill us? How do we reduce our dependence on foreign oil? Reinforce the value of education in our kids? Pay to maintain and upgrade the tracks and bridges that our grandparents built for us?

Now that would be looking out for us.