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TV tonight: Trump, Comey and how not to sack your FBI director
Brendan Gleeson and Jeff Daniels go head to head as the US president and his FBI boss. Plus: India from Above. Here’s what to watch this evening More
Reporting on a defamation trial brought against Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Business Insider notes a rare but significant crack in the facade of contemporary media that could, if we were to pay attention, help to deconstruct the reigning hyperreality that has in recent decades overwhelmed public discourse in the US.
To maintain its control not just of our lives but of our perception of the environment and culture in which we live, the political class as a whole, in connivance with the media, has created the illusion that when people speak in public — and especially on TV or radio — they are essentially engaged in delivering their sincere opinion and sharing their understanding of the world. They may be mistaken or even wrong about what they claim, but the public has been taught to give any articulate American credit for standing up for what they believe.
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We have been told that this respect for public personalities’ freedom of expression serves a democratic purpose. It allows for productive debate to develop, as different interpretations vie and eventually converge to establish a truth that legitimately supports variable faces and facets. Though they generally try to avoid it, when Americans happen to hear the opinion or the analysis of a person they don’t agree with, they may simply oppose that point of view rather than listen to it, but they also tend to feel sorry for that person’s inability to construe reality correctly.
In other words, the default position concerning freedom of speech has traditionally maintained that a person’s discourse may be wrong, biased or misinformed, but only in exceptional cases should the sincerity of the speaker be called into question. For this very reason, US President Donald Trump’s supporters may think that many of the things he says could be erroneous, but they assume that their hero is at least being sincere. They even consider that when his ravings contradict the science or reasoning of other informed voices, his insistence is proof of his sincerity. They admire him for it.
In contrast, Trump’s enemies want us to believe he is unique and the opposite of the truthtellers on their side. But Trump is far from alone. He just pushes the trend of exaggerating the truth and developing unfounded arguments further than his opponents or even his friends. And because he shakes off all challenges, his fans see him as that much more authentic and sincere than everyone else.
And so the hyperreal system maintains itself without the need of resorting to objective reality. That may explain why the ruling of the judge in favor of Carlson seems to jar with the rules of the hyperreal game. A former Playboy model accused Carlson of defamation. Here is how Business Insider framed the case: “A federal judge on Wednesday [September 23] dismissed a lawsuit against Fox News after lawyers for the network argued that no ‘reasonable viewer’ takes the primetime host Tucker Carlson seriously.” In the judge’s words, “given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer ‘arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism’ about the statements he makes.”
Here is today’s 3D definition:
Reasonable viewer:
An imaginary human being considered to be capable of critical thinking when sitting in front of an American news broadcast on television, contradicting all empirical evidence that shows no such person has ever existed
Contextual Note
The idea of a “reasonable viewer” is similar to the equally nonexistent “homo economicus,” a concept dear to economists who want the public to believe that markets represent the ultimate expression of human rationality. They imagine a world in which all people do nothing other than pursue their enlightened and informed self-interest.
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The judge in the Carlson case is one of those rare Americans who understand that all the news — and Fox News par excellence — is entertainment. But what he fails to acknowledge is that broadcast “news” has become a consciously tendentious form of entertainment that privileges emotion over reason and has an insidious impact on people’s civic behavior.
Whether it’s Fox News, MSNBC or CNN, no complex story exists that cannot be reduced to the kind of binary conflict its viewers expect to hear about and resonate to. That means nothing could be more unreasonable than to believe there is such a thing as a “reasonable viewer,” especially one who refuses to take Carlson “seriously.”
In other words, the judge is right to highlight the fundamental triviality — or, worse, the hyperreal character of most TV news and Carlson in particular — but wrong to think it appeals to “reasonable” viewers or that reasonable viewers, if they exist at all, are even aware of it.
Historical Note
Throughout the history of the US in the 20th century, media fluctuated between a sense of vocation in reporting fundamentally factual stories and one of serving the needs of propaganda either of the government or of political parties. There has long been a distinction between “liberal” and “conservative” newspapers, though throughout the 20th century, the distinction applied more to the editorial pages in which columnists had the liberty to express their particular bias than to reporting of the news itself.
Quentin Fottrell, in an article for Market Watch published in 2019, described the process by which, in his words, “U.S. news has shifted to opinion-based content that appeals to emotion.” He sums up the findings of a study by the Rand Corporation in these terms: “Journalism in the U.S. has become more subjective and consists less of the detailed event- or context-based reporting that used to characterize news coverage.”
Significantly, the Rand study found that the very language used in reporting had evolved: “Before 2000, broadcast news segments were more likely to include relatively complex academic and precise language, as well as complex reasoning.” This points to the core issue in the shift that has taken place. Over the past 20 years, “broadcast news became more focused on-air personalities and talking heads debating the news.” This indicates a deliberate intention of news media to appeal to emotion rather than reason, even to the exclusion of any form of critical thinking.
Fottrell notes the significance of the year 2000, a moment at which “ratings of all three major cable networks in the U.S. began to increase dramatically.” When the focus turns to ratings — the unique key to corporate income — the traditional vocation of informing the public takes a back seat. He quotes a patent attorney who studied media bias and found that the “extreme sources play on people’s worst instincts, like fear and tribalism, and take advantage of people’s confirmation biases.”
The “worst instincts” are also known as the lowest common denominator. According to the logic of monopoly that guides all big corporations in the US, the standard strategy for a news outlet is to identify a broad target audience and then seek to develop a message that stretches from the high-profile minority who have an economic or professional interest in the political agenda to the dimmest and least discerning of a consumer public who are moved by “fear and tribalism.”
It’s a winning formula because the elite segment of the target audience, a tiny minority of interested parties who are capable of understanding the issues and the stakes, willingly participate in the dumbing down of the news with the goal of using emotion to attract the least discerning to the causes they identify with and profit from economically and politically.
Just as the average Fox News viewer has no objective interest in Donald Trump’s tax cuts for the rich or his permanent campaign to gut health care but will be easily incited to see the president as the champion of their lifestyle, the average MSNBC viewer will endorse the Wall Street bias of establishment Democrats always intent on eschewing serious reforms, citing the fact that they are too expensive. They do so only because MSNBC has excited their emotions against the arch-villain Trump.
It isn’t as if reasonable viewers didn’t exist. The news networks have banished them to pursue their interests on the internet or simply replaced anything that resembles reason by pure emotion.
*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
Dwayne Johnson (The Rock)
The actor has posted his support on social media for the Democratic candidates, including an interview with both More
Interview
Haroon Siddique
Public Enemy
Interview
Public Enemy’s Chuck D: ‘Trump is a half-baked celebrity real estate hypocrite’
Haroon Siddique
As Fight the Power is reworked for the age of Black Lives Matter, rap’s elder statesman gives his message for the US election – and explains the ‘hoax’ firing of Flavor Flav More
Michael Spicer has been trying – mostly failing – to make it as a comedian for the best part of two decades. As a teenager, Spicer amassed enough rejection letters to wallpaper the spare bedroom of his family home. (He was a precocious teenager.) Spicer kept plugging away at comedy writing throughout his 20s and 30s, pitching to TV commissioners but receiving unending rejections. “A lot of the stuff I wrote wasn’t quite good enough,” he admits. It wasn’t that Spicer wasn’t getting anywhere at all – “I would always touch the surface of success,” he says – but he certainly wasn’t getting anywhere fast.Parts in BBC satirical comedy The Mash Report, hosted by Nish Kumar, and the Diane Morgan sitcom Mandy were promising, but they weren’t enough to make ends meet, so Spicer took a job writing copy for a shipping company. His mother couldn’t understand why his career never seemed to take off.“She’d say to me,” Spicer chuckles, “‘but there’s so much rubbish on TV. How can there not be room for you?’” He watched his comedy peers, like Morgan and Kumar, break through into the mainstream. “They became household names,” he says, “while I was playing characters like ‘Tosser Number 1’, or ‘Man on the Street’. It was hard in a way, although I felt nothing but good things for them, because I knew how talented they were.”And then, in June 2019, Spicer was scrolling through Twitter while at work at the shipping firm. He saw a viral clip of Boris Johnson being interviewed by Talk Radio during the Tory leadership race. The interviewer asked Johnson what he did to relax. “You could see that he was really struggling for an answer,” Spicer says. “The two sides of his brain were literally fighting each other: do I tell the truth, or lie?” As Johnson stared into the distance, stalling for time, Spicer observed that it looked like he was waiting for advice to be fed into his ear.When Spicer got home that evening, he filmed a minute-long video in which he pretended to be Johnson’s adviser, feeding him lines through a headpiece. “Say something, you vase of wank!” Spicer urges, sitting behind a pile of box-binders and notes. The video cuts back to Johnson being interviewed. “Buses…I make models of buses,” says Johnson. Spicer uploaded the video to Twitter around 10pm, then went to bed. He woke up to find that his social media feed had exploded. The video changed everything for him. “It was completely surreal,” he says. “It felt like a fever dream.”Since that day, Spicer has spun off his harried political aide character into series The Room Next Door, which features the comedian attempting to avert some of the most unbelievable moments in recent political discourse. (There have been many.) Such is the success of The Room Next Door – which he uploads to Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, and has amassed 50m views – that Spicer has appeared on James Corden’s The Late Late Show, has a 10-date live tour booked for next year, and a book coming out in October. (The Secret Political Adviser is a collection of emails, texts, memos and documents collated by Spicer’s fictitious political adviser spanning the period 2016-2020 – ie when everything started going wrong in the world.)Spicer is 43. All the doors he’s been knocking on for years have suddenly swung open; suited attendants wait to take his coat and offer him a drink. The career he’s been working towards since he was a teenager is finally here. “It would have been nice to have a career in comedy without this constant narrative of horror behind it,” he observes. “But here we are.”Spicer represents the new vanguard of comedians satirising the political quagmire we’ve become embroiled in since the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump. We are living in the age of political gaffes: there are so many of them, and they come so thick and fast, that what would once have led the news agenda for 24 hours gets forgotten in minutes. Trump regularly says things so extreme that they are barely legal – in 2020 alone, he has touted bleach injections as a cure for coronavirus, encouraged police to shoot civilians, defended armed vigilantes, and suggested that he won’t accept the election result – and yet the world keeps turning. Outrage can only sustain itself for so long.In this age of howlers so big you can see them from outer space – the gulf of guff, the ocean of lies – the role of the comedian is to remind us that the times we are living in are not normal, no matter how desensitised we have become to the cringing failures and mendacious distortions of our elected leaders.“Usually, the writers of political satire would impersonate a president and do scripted lines,” says Dr Dannagal Young, a political humour expert at the University of Delaware. “Their role is to reframe situations or digest them down to their most absurd. But what’s different about this new wave of comedy is that the words being satirised are the actual words being spoken by elites, and the role that’s played by someone like Michael Spicer is to be the foil: the person who comes in and highlights the ridiculousness of everything being said.” More
Observer book of the week
Autobiography and memoir
Disloyal: A Memoir by Michael Cohen review – disgraced Trump lawyer’s kiss and tell
An account of a decade at the president’s side offers gossipy insights into Russian influence, Trump’s dangerous allure and the ‘pee tape’ More
Anyone familiar with the ritual called the State of the Union is also familiar with the fact it invariably ends with the exhortation “God bless America.” Few are probably aware of the fact that the first president to utter it was none other than Richard Nixon, who “dropped the phrase during an attempt at damage control for the burgeoning Watergate scandal on April 30, 1973.” God did bless America at the time, if only by ridding the country of “Tricky Dick.”
Yet it is probably fitting that it was Nixon who first came up with this phrase. Nixon represents something that is fundamental to the human condition, at least in its American form: the drive to succeed, no matter what, the force of self-delusion (“I’m not a crook”) and the fundamental hypocrisy that is central to the American experience.
Nixon marks the origins of much of what is wrong today in the United States. It was his so-called Southern strategy — the appeal to the worst racist animus of white voters in the South — that not only won him the election, twice, but which marked the Republican Party for decades to come. Donald Trump owes his victory in the presidential election of 2016 to a large extent to Richard Nixon — a victory that has poisoned the country beyond repair.
How MAGA Sunk the United States
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Trump’s callous response to some of the worst calamities in recent history, from the disastrous impact of COVID-19 to the hellish wildfire inferno engulfing the western states, suggests that God has been looking less than kindly on his “city upon a hill” envisioned to represent a model of Christian charity, as John Winthrop put it in 1630. In fact, one might even suspect that God has come to hate it — that he hates it so much, in fact, that he allowed for the election of Donald Trump, the worthy heir to Richard Nixon.
Nixon, of course, was a crook. But compared to Trump, he was one of Woody Allen’s “smalltime crooks,” little more than a minor league player. At the same time, however, he prepared the ground and paved the way for the current president who has made the appeal to white anxiety and resentment central to his administration. Trump, of course, has gone out of his way to invoke God’s blessing, waving the Bible (albeit upside down) in front of a church “he rarely attends and whose leaders and congregation work against the policies he trumpets,” in a craven attempt to play to his base: the dwindling number of fundamentalist Christians who consider him their last bulwark against an increasingly discombobulating, if not threatening, reality.
Walking With Dinosaurs
Donald Trump is the epitome of the stereotypical American, boisterous and narrowminded (“still the greatest country in the world”), hypocritical to the max (waving a Bible while boasting that he can grab any woman by her private parts and get away with it), and completely oblivious to how the rest of the world regards the US these days (“we should have more people from Norway” at a time when no Norwegian in his or her right mind would want to move to a “shithole country” like the US). At the same time, he is reminiscent of the playground bully who runs away crying, like Scut Farkus’ toadie, Grover Dill, in “A Christmas Story” (“I’m gonna tell my dad”) — when somebody dares to stand up to him, particularly if it is a woman.
The United States is still the most (practicing) Christian nation among advanced Western democracies. In the most recent Pew survey on religion in America, around two-thirds identified as Christians. To be sure, this was substantially lower than just a decade ago. Yet compared to Western Europe, it is a remarkably high level. This, however, is only part of the story. What is considerably more important is the fact that a substantial number of Americans insist on taking the Bible literally, as the absolute Truth, even if that truth runs against not only science but even common sense (who in their right mind would believe that Jesus walked with dinosaurs?).
Now, one would expect that those who profess to be genuinely dedicated Christians would follow what the good book teaches. Basic exhortations such as don’t lie, don’t cheat, be kind, compassionate and merciful toward your fellow sister and brother, independent of their ethnic background, economic circumstances or sexual orientation. And, above all, be humble and don’t take the moral high ground with that smug self-righteousness, which is particularly irritating in the eyes of the Lord, whom America’s dedicated Christians claim as their ultimate authority.
As is written in Isaiah 64:6, “all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags.” Or as Jesus once put it, “Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven” (Luke 6:37). For the self-righteous, such sentiments are alien. The self-righteous are hypocrites who condemn others in order to show that they are morally superior. The Pharisees are a prime example of this kind of smug self-righteousness, which Jesus condemns in the most scathing terms.
In the United States, the equivalent are TV “evangelists” such as Pat Robertson, the host of the “700 Club,” a Christian news and TV program with an audience going into the millions. Or there are Christian “leaders” such as Jerry Falwell Jr., the disgraced former president of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, whose sexual shenanigans were too much even for evangelicals who have no qualms supporting a president who has boasted of getting away with … see above.
And there are TV and radio commentators such as Tucker Carson at Fox News, who is still trying to figure out how to find his way out of Trump’s backside, and Rush Limbaugh, famous for dismissing COVID-19 as nothing more than the common flu and, later on, after tens of thousands of Americans had died from the respiratory disease, charging that following medical experts and wearing masks was “un-American” and nothing “compared to the way we have overcome enemies and obstacles in our past.”
It would be easy to dismiss the likes of Robertson, Falwell Jr. and Limbaugh as somewhat picturesque if unhinged cranks were it not for the fact that their impact on ordinary people has been, and continues to be, far more pernicious than COVID-19 could ever achieve. There are good reasons to suspect that the Trump administration’s position on COVID-19, global warming and climate change, and white-on-black racism derives from a common root: the belief that the end is near. I am not referring to the end of COVID-19, or the end of the American empire, but of the end of humanity — the end of the world as we know it.
Fulfillment of Prophecy
In my former life, I had the opportunity to spend a year as an exchange student with a “fundamentalist” Christian family in Texas. They were some of the most generous people I have ever had the opportunity to encounter. They lived their faith, and it showed. The also introduced me, a Bavarian Catholic who had spent the past eight years of his life in a Catholic boarding school, to a world largely informed by the scripture’s teachings.
For the first time, I was confronted not only with some of the major Old Testament prophets such as Daniel, but also with the Book of Revelations and its exegesis. Here, the most important book at the time, at least among true believers, was Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth,” which sold millions of copies. The book was very much informed by the Cold War. In Lindsey’s exegesis of the Revelations, Gog and Magog, the “forces” from the north threatening Israel, is the Soviet Union attacking Israel with Mi-24 helicopters (John’s giant locusts). After Gog and Magog’s annihilation, there will be a war “between the Western powers and the Chinese, which will culminate in the end of the world in a thermonuclear blast.” So much for Hal Lindsey.
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Nevertheless, the book was turned into a film, with Orson Welles, of all people, serving as the narrator. Both book and movie are based on John’s Apocalypse, which tells of the tribulations visited upon humanity heralding in the end of the world, the last judgment. True believers, of course, most of them Americans, were spared the pain. They were snatched from the earth in a process of divine kidnapping that swept them up into heaven from where they could gloat — the rapture. Evangelical writers, always eager to make a buck from the gullibility of true believers, turned the narrative into a series of books, “Left Behind,” which scared the daylights out of lukewarm believers and turned the authors into millionaires. This might sound funny, ludicrous, kooky, off the deep end were it not for the fact that it appears to inform major figures in Trump’s inner circle.
One of the central dogmas among those who believe in the truth as revealed by John in the Apocalypse is that the end of history — and the return of Christ — is contingent on the Jews rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem. For a long time, this was inconceivable, given the fact that the site of the temple is occupied by two of Islam’s holiest shrines, the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque.
Until Trump, American presidents have shied away from sanctioning Israel’s claim to all of Jerusalem. Diehard evangelicals have lobbied for decades that the American government do whatever possible to hasten the process. Presumably, this would allow the Jews to rebuild the temple. This, presumably, would entail destroying the Muslim shrines, which, in all probability, would trigger an all-out confrontation with the Muslim world.
But in the self-contained world of American “dispensationalism,” Trump’s 2017 decision to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem was therefore widely seen as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Trump himself acknowledged that the move was largely “for evangelicals” rather than Jews who appeared to be rather unenthusiastic about it. But then why would they, given the fate that according to evangelicals awaits many of them during the time of tribulations? Hint: a large number will be “purged out and removed” — a euphemism, I guess, for saying they will go straight to hell.
Apocalyptic Tales
With Donald Trump, staunch believers in this kind of apocalyptic tales have assumed influential positions in the administration, above all Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Housing Secretary Ben Carson, who is a Seventh-day Adventist, a Christian sect that holds that “almost all evangelical Christians will soon join with Satan to oppose Jesus Christ.” It stands to reason that their views on history and reality have had some influence on policy. Take, for instance, the environment. According to “rapture theologists,” the earth was given to humanity for its use. Therefore, environmentalism is nothing but “blasphemy.”
According to one of the most influential “theological” voices in the White House, humans will not destroy the planet because God will “continually renew the face of the earth until He forms a new heaven and a new earth in the end times.” In any case, given the imminent approach of the end of the world, the destruction of the natural environment is hardly of vital concern.
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In a similar vein, Trump’s lackluster response to the coronavirus pandemic might have something to do with the fact that among evangelicals, COVID-19 has been seen as a boon. As a leading contributor to the Trump campaign has put it, “The kingdom of God advances through a series of glorious victories, cleverly disguised as disasters.” In response to the pandemic, “millions of Americans” were turning to Jesus Christ, in the process augmenting the pool of likely Trump voters.
In less than two months, the American electorate is going to vote for the country’s leader. Evangelicals will be a major force; so will be other Christians, including Latino Catholics. As it stands now, there is a chance that Trump will get reelected as a result. Evangelicals will be voting for Trump, but not because they believe that he is model Christian. Quite the opposite. They will vote for him because they believe that he is “God’s tool.” In the aftermath of the 2016 election, polls revealed substantial numbers of white Protestants believing that Trump was “anointed by God.” They also revealed that only a very small minority thought he was elected because God approved of his policies.
Given what the Gospels have to say about Christ’s positions, it is fairly unlikely that God would approve of Trump’s “big, beautiful wall” or his more or less tacit support of racists and conspiracy theorists. This leaves only one alternative: God chose Trump to punish America for its blatant hybris, hypocrisy and self-righteousness. The Gospel tells us that God “so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Today, it seems that God hates America so much that he brought Donald Trump down upon it so that it understands the full extent of his wrath. Forget about God blessing America. He has better things to do.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
The Oscars were an ordeal for Sufjan Stevens. “Honestly, one of the most traumatising experiences of my entire life,” the songwriter half-laughs, half-groans. The event was, he says, “a horrifying Scientology end-of-year prom” representative of “everything I hate about America and popular culture”.He had never paid much attention to them before being nominated in 2018. Mystery of Love – his bittersweet folk ballad, written for Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name – was up for best original song and Stevens had been invited to perform. His devoted fans celebrated this appearance as a moment of long-overdue mainstream recognition for the spotlight-shy then-42-year-old; 26 million viewers were watching at home, after all. But for the artist himself, shrinking into his pink-and-black striped blazer as Hollywood A-listers schmoozed around him, there was not much to celebrate. “I didn’t want to have anything to do with that world and that culture,” he says. “I don’t want to be part of any room full of adults hemming and hawing over plastic trophies.”Stevens has spent his career adjusting his work to help avoid such rooms. The Detroit-born composer is an indie household name, with St Vincent, Moses Sumney (both of whom joined him onstage at the Oscars) and the National among his peers. He has fans in hip-hop, too: Kendrick Lamar and Mac Miller have both sampled him, while in 2011, Donald Glover proclaimed himself “the only black kid at the Sufjan concert” in a verse from Fire Fly telegraphing his sensitivity. More
