Category: Society

What Do Celebrity Pundits Actually Do?

Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity – they sure make a lot of noise and get a lot of attention. But what is their impact? How do they affect the political process?

They don’t seem to change anyone’s votes, as David Brooks pointed out last week in his New York Times column. Reviewing the election campaigns of the past few years, he concludes: “It is a story of remarkable volume and utter weakness. It is the story of media mavens who claim to represent a hidden majority but who in fact represent a mere niche — even in the Republican Party. It is a story as old as ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ of grand illusions and small men behind the curtain.” (See “The Wizard of Beck.”)

It is understandable that the pundits themselves would get caught up in their own pretense of power. But they do have followers, and the stations that carry them do make money. Almost certainly, no one listens to them to help make up their minds. They may want a new horror story to retail or a catchy phrase to repeat, but they already know what they think. So why do they listen?

We might better think of these media phenomena as sports events or rock concerts. Sports fans don’t watch their favorite teams in order to make up their minds about continuing to root for them. The followers of rock stars aren’t there to consider buying their newest CDs. The crowd is pumped up, engaged, sharing a communal experience.

A closer analogy might be a political rally, where citizens come together to support a candidate or protest a government policy. They come to reaffirm what they already know. To be sure, inevitably there are speeches and ideas are expressed. It can look like a discussion or the presentation of a case, a chance to think, but really it is a form of communal enjoyment, a ritual, an immersion in a larger process.

On one level, then, these celebrity pundits are part of a larger development in our culture: news as entertainment. Less and less do people watch or read the news to be informed. They want to be excited, moved, horrified. They seek some form of emotional distraction or release. They want to enjoy themselves.

On another level, this represents a search for communal experience. As our real communities are increasingly broken and fragmented, we seek connection through mass media and virtual experience.

If we think of it that way, it is easier to understand that the celebrity pundits are not manipulating public opinion, as they would like to think, but actually they are themselves being manipulated to serve a demand and a need. They have to maintain the pace, find the new diversions, keep the entertainment coming. And, judging from their continuing celebrity, they do seem to succeed at that quite well.

It just bears an uncanny resemblance to politics.

The Evidence Mounts

I was relieved to read Tom Friedman’s column in this morning’s New York Times, not because he agreed with me so much as that he saw what I saw – and he spoke up.  When you are trying to track down pernicious unconscious ideas and impulses, you need as much help as you can get from other minds that can be either taken in and confused by what they are told, or wake up to see the anomalies and contradictions that don’t add up.  (See ”Where Did ‘We’ Go?”)

He also provided the very helpful association to Rabin’s assassination 14 years ago.  Moreover, his column provoked the additional benefit of drawing an overreaction from Michael Steele, Chairman of the National Republican Committee, who called him a “nut job” for being concerned about the Facebook poll.  Steele illustrated an astonishing lack of perspective about what is at stake, choosing to attack the messenger rather than think about those who promoted the idea of assassination as something one could just have an opinion about.

If I were more relaxed about this, I could be sympathetic to Steele.  He has a tough job, defending a rabid bunch of politicians saying increasingly outrageous things, congressmen who deny the humanity of the president or accuse him of lying in the middle of a speech to Congress.  And other bits of evidence accumulate about the increasingly virulent attitudes being expressed by the right.

For example, The Huffington Post reported today:  “Newsmax columnist John Perry wrote Tuesday that President Obama ‘is inviting a military coup’ and that it might not be such a bad thing: ‘Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars.’ (Newsmax appears to have taken the column down.)”

That’s not all:  “On the same day conservative talk-radio host Jim Quinn directly addressed U.S. troops, telling them that Obama is ‘gonna get you killed.’  Media Matters points out that the appeals to the military follow a wave of rhetoric from the right suggesting that civilian violence against the government might be justified. Chuck Norris has asked if people are ready for ‘a second American Revolution.’ RedState’s Erick Erickson has asked, ‘At what point do the people … march down to their state legislator’s house, pull him outside, and beat him to a bloody pulp?’ Radio host Michael Savage declared recently that ‘we’re going to have a revolution in this country.’” (See “Obama Coup Fantasized About By Right-Wing Fringe.”)

I want to express my deep appreciation to my colleague Todd Essig for also calling attention to this issue, and offering his own critique of Steels’s comments – while also noting my efforts to comment on the Facebook poll.  I don’t know how the mainstream media will respond.  Perhaps Friedman’s engagement will arouse more commentary, preventing this issue from persisting unchallenged in our social unconscious.

I deeply believe we have to speak out about it.

A Glimpse of Our Social Unconscious on Facebook

Maybe you didn’t see this:  a poll posted on Facebook Saturday asked, “Should Obama Be Killed.”  The poll was quickly removed, but not before 730 people responded.  According to the Huffington Post yesterday, the Secret Service is investigating. (See”Obama Facebook Poll: ‘Should Obama Be Killed’ Pulled from Site.”)

There is nothing about it in The New York Times today or The Wall Street Journal, and a quick survey of other blogs brought up very little — though apparently CNN noted it this morning and The Associated Press had a story.  The absence of corroboration makes one doubt oneself.  Was it a hoax?  Did I imagine it?

As a psychoanalyst, I have learned to take fleeting impressions and thoughts seriously.  They don’t tell us what a person is determined to do, but they do tell us what is buried in the mind – especially what people don’t want to know they know.  And the fragmentary record along with self-doubt and confusion are also hallmarks of an unconscious process – a process struggling to remain unconscious.  The Times and the Journal may think the Facebook poll isn’t really news, more of a prank.  They may also believe it would be irresponsible to report it, an indirect way to promote a heinous idea.  But my experience also tells me that ideas that are unacknowledged have an unfortunate tendency to live on.

What lends support to this thought is a host of recent corroborating events. Over the weekend, Trent Franks (R-Ariz) accused the president of being “an enemy of humanity.”  (See Politico, “Franks: Obama is the “enemy of humanity.”)  Two weeks ago, the House formally rebuked Joe Wilson (R-SC) for shouting “You lie” during the president’s address. Recently a US Census worker was brutally murdered.

I don’t worry about the president so much.  I think the Secret Service does not discount “cranks” as readily as we tend to do.  But I do worry about us, and the level of hatred and violence we are coming to accept.  Shortly after the election, many expressed their fear that Obama would be assassinated, as Martin Luther King had been, and John F. and then Robert Kennedy.  The idea of assassination is deeply embedded in our minds, a part of our political consciousness.

Fanatics may not get at the object of their hatred, but that does not stop them from getting at someone else, nearer to hand.  And the first step is often to see them as less than human, a different species.  That makes it easier to kill them.

Uncovering the Flaws in G.D.P.

We have gotten into the habit of measuring our prosperity by the size of our Gross Domestic Product, the sum total of the goods and services we produce.  It’s a kind of common sense index, analogous to how we use the height and weight of our children to measure how they are thriving.  It is one of those simple facts we take for granted.

But that is among the ideas the Great Recession is calling into question.  The inflated values of the real estate bubble not only were unstable, they actually ended up producing more misery for those forced to abandon their homes because they could not keep up mortgage payments.  And all those bonuses earned in the financial industry for devising sophisticated financial instruments that fueled the collapse – were they reliable signs of healthy growth?

Last week two Nobel prize-winning economists, Joseph Stiglitz and  Amartya Sen, unveiled a competing concept, commissioned by French President Sarkozy, for presentation to the G-20 in Pittsburg.  According to a story in The New York Times, Stiglitz said: “G.D.P. as a measure of how well we were doing . . . doesn’t tell us whether it’s sustainable. . . . What began as a measure of market performance has increasingly become a measure of social performance, and that’s wrong.”  Their plan concludes: “Instead of centering assessments on the goods and services an economy produces, policy makers would do better to focus on the material well-being of typical people by measuring income and consumption, along with the availability of health care and education.”  (See, “Emphasis on Growth is Called Misguided.”)

Last Spring, traveling in Bhutan, I encountered the concept of Gross National Happiness, introduced by their king, about 35 years ago.  Trying to find a middle way for his country’s economic development, the king began by rejecting the West’s common sense measure of growth.  It seemed quixotic, but since the concept was introduced there have been three international conferences devoted to exploring it.  GNH in Bhutan now includes measures of education, health, and environmental conservation.

France and Bhutan may not be the most promising sources for a new economic measure, but the important point here may be that, now, there is another crack in the pillar of economic fundamentalism.  It has become clearer that G.N.P. is a concept, a flawed construct, not a fact – and what we don’t know we know is how facts are often simply ideas that have become established.  If questioned, they can be changed.  Inevitably, they will be.

. . . and the Victims Get Blamed

With one-third of jobless Americans out of work for more than half a year, and with unemployment holding steady, we have a very, very long-term problem, a mental health problem – and a form of social discrimination as well.

The probability that a laid-off worker will find a job grows smaller the longer people have been out of work, according to studies in the 1980s by economists Lawrence Katz of Harvard University and Bruce Meyer of the University of Chicago. “Someone unemployed for six months is much less likely to find a job in the next month than someone unemployed for one month,” Mr. Katz says. (See “Long Term Slog: Out of Work, Out of Hope.”)  That is even more true today.

These are the statistics and probabilities, reported today in The Wall Street Journal.  But extending benefits is only part of the solution.  Even for those who stave off poverty, unemployment easily leads to hopelessness and depression.  Part of this is inactivity.  The unemployed person is deprived of the routine activities that help make him or her feel engaged with others, competent, useful.  Popular opinion to the contrary, self-esteem is not something that is securely possessed by some and lacking in others.  It is something that we all work at every day, usually without thinking about it.  It is the by-product of an active daily life.

But part of it also stems from the attitudes of others who blame the unemployed for their “failure.”  The unemployed often blame themselves, feeling embarrassed, ashamed, guilty.  We all have a tendency to see ourselves as the source of the problems we face – that is if we are not aggressively trying to place the blame elsewhere.  But that tendency to blame ourselves can be powerfully and subtly reinforced by what we see in the attitudes of others.

The Journal did a nice job in its coverage of those who are struggling with hopelessness and those trying to help them, but they make it clear that potential employers, recruiters, and even job counselors harbor doubts about whose fault it is.  Scott Thompson, president of a technology recruiting firm, said that employers he deals with don’t ever explicitly say they are less interested in people who have been out of work for an extended period, “but their actions tell me exactly that…. More often than not, the guy who has recent experience up to last month is the guy that gets the interview.”

It is a vicious cycle, and a large part of it is because those who can lend a helping hand don’t know they know this about themselves.  And those of us at a greater distance may gain some comfort from believing that the unemployed have only themselves to blame.