As I was leaving the workout room tonight, I offered the remote to the very nice man who was on the elliptical.
“Sure, why not?” he replied. “Gonna watch the next female Vice-President of America.”
I smiled. “Oh, yeah, I bet that’s all they’re covering today.”
But the remote was not working too well from his angle, so I offered to do it for him.
“Um, what do you want, like, CNN or something?” Now, I grant you that I did not do a very good job connecting the dots between his first statement and his cable news choice, but, honestly, I’ll watch any pundits when I’m working out, because for me it’s just about the showmanship and the meta-text of the absurdity of what the media has become in this country. So to me it’s all the same. To him, it was not.
“How about FOX?!” he cried not without a hint of indignation.
“Oh, right, sure,” I giggled nervously, then spent 5 minutes going up and down the channels looking for it.
Now, this story could be about my inability to pick up social cues, or my unhealthy love for television punditry, but to me, it’s actually about something pretty serious. This guy, who is clearly already voting for John McCain, was appalled by the suggestion that he watch CNN. I was shocked by his preference for a news station so ridiculously biased toward what is already his disposition. I mean, with so many cable news networks and radio talk shows out there pandering to various political views in the guise of being actual “news” sources, people with strongly polarized views have the option of not only tuning out the stations that don’t tell them what they already believe, but actually looking down on those stations as inferior news sources, while upholding their pet station as the authoritative source. This not only makes the viewer feel better about the beliefs he already holds, but discourages him from considering that roughly half of our population believes otherwise, and in neither case could it possibly be that everyone in the half you’re tuning out is a) crazy or b) an idiot.
Another point along these lines. Many people have misconceptions about Barack Obama. Not a few still think he is Muslim, or that he was not born in the United States (which, if any of you people took your Constitution tests, you would know is impossible, and which also has Alexander Hamilton clawing his way out of his grave shouting the refrain “Me first, then!”). Pundits said that the Convention needed to “reintroduce” him to the American people, and show that he was just as much “substance” as “style”. But the people at the convention are already voting for him. And the people watching it on tv are either already voting for him or looking for yet another reason to hate him, which the post-mordem on FOX I’m sure supplied. I wouldn’t know, I was watching CNN.
But, then again, I also already know who I’m voting for.
