May 5, 2008 3:47

TV Tonight: Party Like It's 1988

There's been plenty of debate in the political media lately about whether or not this election is likely to be—or already is—a rerun of 1988. (I.e., culture warring, flag burning, Willie Horton ads, etc.) If you want to relive the actual election of '88 for comparison purposes, you might want to watch PBS's American Experience: The Presidents documentary, George H.W. Bush. The first of two parts airs tonight, running from Bush's early years through that election and the early years of Bush's presidency. (Part 2, starting with the Gulf War, debuts tomorrow.) The biography is largely boilerplate and probably not especially surprising for political buffs, but it is worthwhile in the oh-yeah-I-forgot-about-that sense.

And there are the occasional weird archival moments, as when the film reproduces a handwritten note from Ronald Reagan to President-elect Bush, written on stationery with a cartoon of birds pecking on an elephant, and the caption: "Don't Let the Turkeys Get You Down." I believe Thomas Jefferson first wrote that.

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May 5, 2008 12:25

Not All the Bad News is for Katie

There's been a lot of attention, here and elsewhere, about the poor ratings and dismal prospects of the CBS Evening News and Katie Couric. But before we pin all the problems of TV news on Katie, it's worth noting that the numbers are bad, and getting worse, for all three networks collectively. Advertising Age surveys the state of the 6:30 news shows (subscription required) and notes that, for all three broadcasts, audiences are down around 1.2 million viewers over the past year. Any given week, the three shows draw just over 20 million viewers, down from close to 30 million several years back.

Now, if you're an exec at NBC or ABC, you'll note that that million-plus drop is roughly the amount of viewers that CBS has lost in the past year, and hope the story ends there. But the problem is not Katie's alone. After all, if she lost so many viewers, in a healthy market for the evening news, some competitor would be gaining. But they're not.

A lot of TV-biz reporting, which obsesses on the relative ratings horserace among the newscasts, ignores this bigger picture and has spun the loss for CBS as a "win" for Brian Williams or Charlie Gibson. Really, the story is the same as it's been for years, and there's no good news for anyone at 6:30 these days.

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May 5, 2008 11:04

Andersen on the Media on Obama

New York magazine columnist Kurt Andersen (who is like me a declared Obama voter) has had some great observations all this election season on the Democratic primary and how it reflects American culture. He has a new column this week about the "elitism" issue, in which he argues, among other points:

Certain journalistic stars these last few weeks (hello, George Stephanopoulos!), instead of copping to the “elitist” sensibilities they obviously share with [Obama] (and the Clintons and McCain)—we travel abroad and read books, we have healthy bank accounts and drink wine; so shoot us—reacted by parroting the Clinton campaign’s faux-populist talking points about Obama’s condescension toward the yokel class. But pandering to the yokels, pretending to share their tastes and POV? That goes pretty much unchallenged. If the wellborn New England Wasp George W. Bush (Andover ’64, Yale ’68, Harvard ’75) could be successfully refashioned as a down-home rustic, why shouldn’t Hillary Clinton (Wellesley ’69, Yale ’73) be talkin’ guns and drinkin’ Crown Royal shots and droppin’ all the g’s from her gerunds whenever she speaks extemporaneously these days? Naked disingenuousness apparently isn’t as off-putting as, say, failing to pin a tiny metal American flag to one’s lapel.

Leaving aside the obvious less-than-neutrality toward Clinton, there's a great general insight here about politics and the media's internalized anti-intellectualism. In American elections, [Update: in the eyes of the political press] it's fine to be Ivy-educated and extremely smart—but only if you're willing to show the requisite shame for it by recognizing, politically, that you must pretend to be regular folks. Being smart, successful and highly educated and not trying to hide it, though: that's snobby. You can have your big brain (and your big bank account) as long as you're willing to treat them as a liability.

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May 5, 2008 10:08

The Morning After: HD D.V.M.

My local cable despot, Time Warner, recently added a slew of new high-definition channels to the cable package here in Brooklyn, which means that I've been spending more time than usual surfing the higher digits of my cable dial. Let me tell you: until you have watched The Weather Channel in high definition, my friend, you have not seen the weather.

Last night I was patrolling my new channels when I landed on a Discovery Channel marathon of Dirty Jobs, the sneakily addicting show profiling careers even grodier and less appetizing than TV critic. And naturally the first scene I should land on involves a man whose job is to inseminate cattle, his arm up to his elbow in a cow's cervix. I'm not sure I want to see this in high definition. In fact, is there such a thing a low-definition TV?

I quickly switched the channel to Animal Planet HD where, on Maneaters, we had the much more pleasant spectacle of a re-enactment of a woman being attacked by a wolf. HD may not be flattering to certain humans—no offense, Alton Brown, but you're a little, ah, craggy on Food Network HD's Good Eats—but it's been a great career development for animals, and predators in particular. For the HDTV owners out there, are there certain channels or shows you've suddenly started watching more often because they're in high-def?

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May 5, 2008 8:36

BSG Watch: All Your Baseship Are Belong to Us

SCI FI Channel Photo: Carole Segal

SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, shave your head to indicate your deep emotional turmoil and watch the most recent Battlestar Galactica.

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