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Seducing America: How Television Charms the Modern Voter
by Roderick P. Hart
Roderick P. Hart argues that television causes wrong “feelings” in viewers, feelings bad for individuals and nations alike, though viewers enjoy having these feelings. His broad definition of feelings includes general thoughts.
TV makes politics intimate in ways that it should not and creates a gap between being informed and feeling informed: “Television miseducates the citizenry but, worse, it makes that miseducation attractive.”
Television makes cynicism fun. Hart asks, “Why do [citizens] feel so righteous when not voting?” The retreat from the public realm is seen as virtue. The tube helps us enjoy talking about politics, but keeps us from valuable knowledge and a good political will.
Citizens think they lack time or energy for policy issues, but have time and energy to examine the personal lives of politicians. Personality politics begets “[c]harm begets adoration begets disappointment begets cynicism.” Personality politics builds enemies for the sake of having enemies, and creates enemies based on personality quirks. Politicians spend too much time fundraising, crafting images, and hyping trivial battles. Television politics is a world of nice, friendly, terrible people.
Studies suggest, writes Hart, the highly educated are more likely to choose candidates based on personality traits than others, little surprise considering the appalling state of American universities. Individuals with college degrees, thinking that smarts and credentials make them automatic truth and goodness finders, are easy to trick.
"Educated" experts fail. One study claims when 199 political experts were given either-or predictions, they were right only a little more than half the time. If their confidence in an answer was at or above 80 percent, they were right on a mere 45 percent of answers. As someone said, “[t]he narrow specialist—cowardly, arrogant, dull, pedantic, and whining—is certified to be sent forth as a professor.”
Then there are the educated pessimists. One scholarly book said something like “When I was younger, I had opinions on unimportant issues such as foreign policy. Now I’ve grown and don’t concern myself with such things.” Growing, apparently, comes from memorizing Kepler’s equations, writing biographies on lesser poets of 18th century Wales, or following a yogi.
Some guesswork reasons why the highly educated choose candidates for personality and vague, lofty rhetoric: They have not learned how to weigh arguments, and they do not care whether they learn. Laziness, heredity, group influences tug at them. So much psychobabble and mind reading fills the cultural landscape it becomes easy habit, passing for wisdom. Rhetoric, gossip, and psychoanalysis of candidates entertain better than policy. The highly educated are better insulated from consequences of faulty citizenship.
In the political landscape, Hart reports, interesting, marketable, and important are for practical purposes synonymous, a place where the perceived wrong is wrong spin. Ephemeral scandals garner more attention than fifty years of bad policies.
The moral expertise of many comes from popular media, which is worse than calling someone an automotive engineer because he reads the automotive section of newspapers.
Hart claims television encourages a laundry list of bads, including spectacle and escapism, melodrama and demoralization. Television discourages action, sacredness, and awareness of larger trends, keeping unwanted info out of the mind and unwanted thoughts from arising, especially unwanted thoughts about oneself. Imitation intimacy with the tube replaces intimacy with others.
Television wallows in, avoidance of anxiety, not to mention slogans and buzzwords. “That which appears is good.” Technophilia replaces love of the good. The great project of creating a self gets crowded out. Trivial factoids fill the airwaves. The petty historical--reruns of 20-year-old basketball games--replaces important history, a moral and pathos free history that instead concentrates on stories of wealth, fame, and power. Phony victimization beckons while real victimization gets ignored. Moral equivalence replaces accurate moral distinctions. Issues seemingly having only one or two sides dominate coverage, those issues giving some a high feeling of certainty. Undeserved feelings of righteousness lure the uninformed. The three C’s--creeps, crime, and collisions--are bastions of infotainment. Manufactured competitions emphasize who wins what over what is right. Horse race reporting keeps viewers wanting more right this instant. Other nowness habits are even more trivial. Skimpy coverage of issues leads to hasty conclusions, often from small and biased samples.
The TV viewer does not want claims that criticize the viewer, claims that require the viewer to act as a moral agent.
Seducing America is a far from great version of essentialism. Hart calls for a “New Puritanism” so dissimilar to the old Puritanism that he should use a different word. At the very least, he would avoid attacks that come with the word Puritan.
This New Puritanism, unfortunately, is not much of anything. Like TV, it is big on rhetoric, short on policy. His prescriptions will not change bad media habits. He recommends reading more newspapers? Why? Sports, weather, perfidious pundits—what type of vision is that? The chasm between important knowledge and newspapers is nearly as great as the chasm between important knowledge and television. Being played is common to most mass media. Most issues get sanitized for someone's protection.
TV land, Newspaper land, radio land, and magazine land are all on the same continent.
Seducing America matters, however, for some excellent ideas sprinkled within. Hart is best when quoting others. For example, Peter Sloterdijk: “The media are the descendants of both the encyclopedia and the circus.” Worth skimming. I reviewed the 1994 edition. 230p (H) 1998
—Book review article by JT Fournier, last updated July 25, 2009
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