By Tom Robotham
Kamala Harris has been subjected to a lot attacks since she became the Democratic nominee for president: She’s a communist; she’s not really Black; she’s morally suspect because she never gave birth; she laughs too much.
They’re all so idiotic that it’s easy for any thinking person to dismiss them out of hand. One common criticism, however, is more insidious, since, on its face, it sounds reasonable: The charge that Harris didn’t offer enough specifics on policy during the debate.
The fact that MAGA cult members have repeated this complaint ad nauseum over the last month or so is not surprising. They’ve always been dutiful about memorizing FOX-approved talking points—never mind that when asked about health care, their dear leader could only mutter that he had a “concept of a plan.” What’s disturbing is that many pundits on CNN and other news networks have taken the criticism seriously.
I’ve not heard a single commentator, in fact, point out how ridiculous this claim is, given the absurdly narrow parameters of the debate format: essentially, two minutes to answer a question and one minute to rebut an opponent’s comments.
To put this in perspective, I turned to Neil Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. I’ve mentioned it before in this space—and many times elsewhere—but I don’t believe that its value can be overstated. Forty years after its publication, it is more relevant than ever.
Postman begins by noting that 1984 came and went without the fulfillment of Orwellian prophecies and argues that, as it turned out, we were preoccupied with the wrong dystopian novel. The more accurate vision was the one offered by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. In the former, Postman points out, Orwell warned of a dictatorship under which books would be banned. In Huxley’s imagined world, there would be no need to ban books because the masses would have no interest in them. Give the people an endless stream of distraction, and they’ll be pacified.
Postman blames the sapping of our intellectual vigor on the emergence of television as the dominant mass medium, and the corresponding marginalization of print. His argument is not with programming decisions. It’s with the nature of the medium itself, which, he argues, is fundamentally incapable of conducting and shaping serious public discourse.
For one thing, it is, first and foremost, a visual medium, which places the focus on images rather than ideas. Hence, the hatred of Harris in some quarters because of the way she laughs—or, to use a more subtle example from decades past, why people recoiled at Michael Dukakis’ response to a question about the death penalty. If they’d read the response in print, they would have simply agreed or disagreed. But it wasn’t the content of his response that mattered; it was the fact that he looked and sounded cold while saying it.
Moreover, the medium—by design—places few if any demands on the viewer. It is built on the briefest of segments—almost all unrelated to one another—and has therefore eroded our attention spans over time.
In stark contrast, he offers an account of the Lincoln-Douglas debates during their 1858 campaign against each other for a U.S. Senate seat. In the first of the series, it was agreed that Douglas would speak first, for an hour; Lincoln would then have an hour and a half to respond and Douglas another half hour to rebut Lincoln’s reply. Postman goes on to note that this was much briefer than some of their other public exchanges.
Today, it would be possible to broadcast such a debate on television. But it’s fair to say that hardly anyone would watch it. Certainly not if the speakers delved deeply into policy positions.
The medium, as it has evolved, demands that everything must be entertaining. Thus, presidential debates are often promoted ahead of time with all the inflated melodrama of a WWE match, and formatted in such a way as to maximize the potential for bite-size zingers and attention-getting nonsense. Trump understands and embraces this better than most, which is why he didn’t hesitate to say, “they’re eating the dogs; they’re eating the cats.” It didn’t matter that the story had already been debunked. It sounded shocking, and the shock value was reinforced by the close-up of Trump’s faux-angry facial expressions. It’s also why Trump, at his rallies, says very little about policy and opts instead to talk about such things as the comparative horrors of getting eaten by a shark, versus being electrocuted.
Suffice it to say, Harris is far more sophisticated, but she remains confined by the medium, which favors showmanship over the exchange of even the most superficial ideas. She knows this, which is why she opened the proceedings by walking into Trump’s space and extending her hand. It was a non-verbal stunt intended to convey the message, “I’m not afraid of you.”
That’s by no means a criticism of Harris. I was glad she did it. I’m merely pointing out that it exemplifies the ways in which politics and what passes for news coverage have long since devolved into mere entertainment.
I’ve met people who regard Postman’s book as outdated, since television—per se—no longer holds the power that it once did. Many people under 60, after all, don’t even watch it. They get their news and entertainment alike through alerts on their “smart” phones, viral videos, Tweets, and streaming services. All of these things, however, are simply the progeny of television. Turn on CNN, for example, and you won’t just see someone delivering a news report. More often than not, you’ll see a split screen, a colorful banner with text unrelated to what the newscaster is saying, a weather bug, a logo, and other distractions. Social media is has simply taken this clutter to greater extremes.
The insatiable hunger for distraction is reflected not just in just in our political coverage but in sports broadcasting. This was driven home to me while I was watching my beloved Mets take on the formidable Phillies in a crucial late-season game. When the Mets went to bat in the third-inning, ESPN reduced its shots of the game itself to small window and began conducting an interview with the Phillies’ designated hitter. This has become common. Many sports channels today even mic up players while they’re on the field, and interview them during play. They might as well begin the broadcast with a warning akin to those that flag “sexual content” and “language”: “We know baseball is boring. Therefore, this broadcast is formatted to relieve you of having to watch more than an inning without supplemental entertainment.”
But back to politics. The last time I heard a complaint that Harris hadn’t specified her plans for the economy, the immigration “crisis,” or any number of other issues, I went to her website and found that, lo and behold, she has laid them out in some detail. The content remains relatively superficial. But name me one candidate who’s been more specific since the dawn of the television age. To be more specific would be pointless because few people, save journalists and policy wonks, would bother to delve into that kind of minutiae. On the contrary, the only thing that would gain traction with the electorate would be snippets taken out of context and used on social media and pundit-TV for the purpose of spin.
If I have one criticism of Postman’s book, from the vantage point of 2024, it’s that he was too dismissive of the Orwellian threat. Trump and his MAGA cultists have made it clear that they desire a Big-Brother type society in which history books would be whitewashed, children’s books celebrating diversity would be banned, and women would be subjected to domination reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale. If Postman were still alive, I’m sure he’d agree.
His main point, however, remains more potent than ever: Our electronic and digital news media are layered with a veneer of seriousness but in reality, actively undermine our capacity for substantive discourse. This explains why Trump rose to power in the first place, and why he still has a shot at seizing power again. After all, for every one of us who can see him for what he is—a charlatan—there’s a person who says, “I don’t like his rhetoric, but he’ll save the economy. I mean, didn’t you watch The Apprentice?! He’s a financial genius!”
Much as I’m inclined to dismiss such people as morons, I kinda get it. Postman would argue, in fact, that reality television at least makes no bones about being junk—the tendency of some people to take it seriously notwithstanding. The greater threat lies in televised “debates” that are presented to us as if they were serious.
