They've Really Come Full Circle

I'm sitting here watching the Tweety Show and in between plugs for his Tonight Show appearance, he's brought on Stephen A. Smith. Who is a sportswriter. Not someone who used to be a sportswriter who writes news columns, but a sportswriter (actually the Philly Inquirer cancelled his column last year). Tweety brought on his guests as Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, Margaret Carlson of Time Magazine, and Stephen A. Smith of ESPN. Without a hint of irony.

Now, there's nothing wrong with someone who isn't a member of the political media holding a political opinion (for example, er, me), or even espousing that opinion on television. However, take a look at Stephen A.'s "comment" about last night's Democratic debate:

SMITH: I was totally bored, Chris, I was totally bored and I was disgusted. I thought Barack Obama took a significant step back. I think the race issue, the fact that he was being turned into the black candidate, per se, I think really affected him, and I think it showed. I thought he was entirely too deferential last night, deferring to Hillary Clinton on a number of occasions. He didn't seem to be himself. And the reason why it was even more conspicuous is that he had been gaining momentum over the last few weeks or so. You know, winning the Iowa caucuses, coming in second in New Hampshire, really making a statement that he was going to make a run for the Presidency. I thought that the momentum was favoring him tremendously, and he took a significant step back. Because I think that he was looking at his own community looking at him, and he started wondering about himself. And we saw some trepidation on his part for the first time.

MATTHEWS: That's interesting. Interesting assessment.

Now, I've seen enough editions of SportsCenter in my lifetime to know that you could have easily replaced Barack Obama's name with Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan or any other young phenom, and the above paragraph would have made the same amount of sense. Over the last few weeks, politics has devolved into the same subject matter as sports talk radio. And so a discussion between three individuals who want to lead the United States for the next four years is "boring" and devolves into freshman-year psychobabble about how one guy deferred to someone else and there weren't any "fireworks" and the momentum stalled and it's enough to make you "disgusted."

I have never seen Stephen A. utter a political thought on television in his entire life, but he fit right in because the analysis has sunk to the level of sports talk, not because he elevated anything on his own. Watch the sports metaphors fly in the segment right before his:

MATTHEWS: Dana, it seems to me that if they return to their corners, as they say in boxing, there's no fight going on. And if they are in their corners, each in their separate corner, why would anything change except Hillary leading out here in California by about 20 points and on to Super Tuesday where she takes it home to the bank?

MILBANK: Yes, conceivably that's how it could happen. I don't see how a debate in which they aren't sparring is going to be exciting to the voters or allow either of them to get any momentum whatsoever. I mean, I'm not sure, maybe they do care about Yucca Mountain out there in Nevada, but I think they do want to see these guys mixing it up. We want to see that kind of fratricidal battles going on on the Republican side.

MATTHEWS: (overtalk, mumbling something incoherent about Dr. Strangelove) What do you call, bodily fluids... What are they talking, Yucca Flats, Yucca Mountain, What are they talking about?

It's impossible to tell the sportswriter from the political reporter here. And yes, what the hell are those candidates talking about? Yucca Mountain? The safe and proper storage of nuclear waste? Who cares? Yell at each other about how the black guy did coke and the woman's a ball-buster! Throw a chair! Mix it up!

Is it any wonder that, in the world of political broadcast media, the one man who smokes everybody else was seen as one of the more thoughtful and intellectual sportscasters at ESPN?

The debate in this country is so dumbed-down that Stephen A. Smith's presence on Hardball actually represents a step up. At least he's used to ascribing emotional significance to performance in the field of play, in using the events as a metaphor, as sportswriters so often do. He doesn't know what the hell he's talking about, but that doesn't really put him out of place, either.

The reason those comments over race got more attention than, say, the candidates' competing economic stimulus packages is that the traditional media doesn't really want to understand them. They'll hide behind the argument that nuts and bolts issues don't post big ratings, but really, they don't have the expertise to engage them. More often it's rollodex analysis, where men and women from think tanks, almost all of them either center-right or certified wingnut, and all with very defined and specific agendas, are brought in to opine without resistance, when these shows pay any lip service to the issues at all. This is nothing new. I was reminded of this moment today.

KING: Okay. Were you impressed with this “fuzzy [math],” top 1 percent, 1.3 trillion, 1.9 trillion bit?

KOPPEL: You know, honestly, it turns my brains to mush. I can’t pretend for a minute that I’m really able to follow the argument of the debates. Parts of it, yes. Parts of it, I haven’t a clue what they’re talking about.

And Ted Koppel is arguably one of the most serious journalists on television.

Identity and personality is how we've been picking Presidents for a long time. Sometimes it works, sometimes you get George Bush. But I can't help but think that the malaise we all feel is part and parcel of a press corps that refuses to take serious matters seriously. They can't conceive of the real-world consequences behind numbers and facts and reality, preferring to discuss elections with the depth and penetrating insight of a Sweet Valley High novel or the local high school basketball game (an epic battle where two sides will mix it up!). So many of us are starving for a process that recognizes how much this all matters, how it's not a game played for the benefit of court jesters in ill-fitting suits, how the goal is not conflict, like a televised drama, but progress, which is too difficult for them to contemplate.

The media is getting the election they deserve. The problem is that we aren't.