This President is No
Cable Guy
By Walter Shapiro
Bill Clinton, whose
operatic second term
coincided with the
creation of Fox News and
the rise of stentorian
TV talkers like Chris
Matthews, was the
nation's first true
cable news president.
George W. Bush was a
uniter not a divider in
one important way — his
polarizing presidency
united the conservatives
in front of Fox while
the beleaguered liberals
clicked their way over
to MSNBC.
Barack Obama, of course,
is a TV natural who
understands the first
lesson of visual
politics: If you want to
make friends with
Washington
photographers, get a
dog. But at the same
time he is delivering a
camera friendly White
House, Obama is
simultaneously
positioning himself as
the first
anti-cable-news
president. An
under-appreciated theme
of Obama's first 14
weeks on Pennsylvania
Avenue is his obvious
distaste for the
bickering and snickering
that characterizes cable
news across the
ideological spectrum.
Yes, Obama can take his
shots at
Fox-in-the-chicken-coop
partisanship, as he did
Wednesday during a
Missouri town meeting
when he mocked "certain
news channels...on which
I am not very popular
and you see people
waving tea bags around."
But Obama is also
partial to a generalized
put-down phrase — "cable
chatter" and its close
variants — which he has
used at least five times
since becoming
president.
"The American
people...did not send us
here to get bogged down
with the same old delay,
the same old
distractions, the same
talking points, the same
cable chatter," the
president told House
Democrats in early
February. Speaking to a
DNC fundraiser in late
March, Obama declared,
"It can be easy,
especially in
Washington, to get
caught up in the
day-to-day chatter of
cable television, to be
distracted by the petty
and the trivial, and to
fall into the trap of
keeping score about
who's up and who's
down."
Lines like this might be
dismissed as a
speechwriter's tic, a
21st century synonym for
the shopworn "partisan
bickering," if Obama's
closest adviser David
Axelrod had not launched
a dead-on attack Monday
night on the divisive
and debilitating culture
of cable news. It should
have been an innocuous
occasion, a brief speech
honoring New York Times
columnist David Brooks,
who vies with Peggy
Noonan as the Democrats'
favorite conservative.
But Axelrod, who morphed
himself during the 1980s
from newspaper reporter
to political consultant,
went out of his way to
declare, "Cable
sometimes becomes the
forum for polar extremes
providing
entertainment...It's
become a carnival where
every day is Election
Day; where we're
consumed with who's up
and who's down; where we
book people on TV to do
nothing more than argue
with one another,
generating more heat
than light."
Presidents and their top
advisers have long gone
to war against specific
publications: John
Kennedy famously
canceled the White House
subscriptions to the
Republican-leaning New
York Herald Tribune.
Certainly the Clinton
years gave the
president's defenders
ample opportunity to
denounce "tabloid
trash." And for more
than 40 years
conservative audiences
have yelped with delight
at ritual denunciations
of the New York Times.
Even Spiro Agnew in his
1969 acid,
anti-establishment and
alliterative attacks on
the TV networks singled
out "a small group of
men, numbering no more
than a dozen anchorman,
commentators and
executive producers."
But Axelrod and, by
extension, Obama are not
claiming that cable news
has been unfair to the
administration during
the 100-day honeymoon.
Even Fox has been
semi-restrained compared
to the on-to-Armageddon
assault they would have
launched if, say,
Hillary Clinton had been
in residency in the Oval
Office. Rahm Emanuel,
Obama's chief of staff,
has even admitted that
the White House senior
staff regularly watches
Fox, though this may be
akin to the CIA's
scrutiny of Pravda back
in the days of the evil
empire.
The Axelrod-Obama
critique of cable news
is subtle, stalwart and,
yes, self-interested.
The underlying argument
is that the hyperactive
rhythms of cable
shout-a-thons foster a
corrosive sense of
politics that works
against the ability of
any president — Democrat
or Republican — to
govern. It certainly
goes against the grain
for a president to
attack a news medium
that 40 percent of
voters say they watch
regularly. (The
statistic, which lumps
all the cable news
networks together, is
drawn from the in-depth
2008 media usage survey
by the Pew Research
Center). But Obama is a
different-drummer
politician — and his
version of
bring-us-together
leadership requires cool
climes rather than the
white heat of cable
controversy.
Pollster Andy Kohut, the
president of the Pew
Research Center, relates
this skepticism about
cable news to the
fledgling president's
penchant for prime time
news conferences. "They
give Obama the
opportunity to get to
the voters who are the
most responsible for his
election – independents
and moderates," Kohut
said. "These are the
people who are not
watching Sean Hannity or
Rachel Maddow. They are
less engaged in politics
and are put off by the
contentiousness of cable
TV."
There is also a strong
generational component
to Obama's seeming
contempt for cable.
Veteran Democratic
strategist Morley
Winograd, the co-author
of "Millennial Makeover"
that shrewdly
anticipated Obama's
appeal to young voters,
points out, "Division
and confrontation are
not what the millennial
generation believes in.
They believe in social
networks, not cable
news. You don't shout on
social networks."
While it may be
difficult for younger
voters to believe,
television news did not
always resemble a rumble
minus the knives and zip
guns. Little more than a
quarter century ago,
"The McLaughlin Group"
helped pioneer the
notion that normally
mild-mannered reporters
could further their
careers and goose
ratings by bellowing and
interrupting each other
on camera. Of course,
compared to many current
cable shows (Bill
O'Reilly, please pick up
the white courtesy
phone), "The McLaughlin
Group" now represents
the good old days when
Walter Cronkite
personified TV news.
Obama may prove no more
able to reform the
ratings-grabbing rituals
of cable news than he
can change the culture
of Washington. But of
all the crusades mounted
by the new president,
this is one that could
theoretically unite both
liberals and
conservatives in a
high-minded battle to
bring civility back to
the public arena.
