Total Flow

I decided long ago that I hated news trucks. I think it really came to a head during the huge non-event that was the Starr investigation/Lewinsky-Clinton impeachment fiasco. The news trucks sat down on Pennsylvania Avenue near the Judiciary Square area for months, their telescoping antennae looming ridiculously out of glorified panel vans, apparently waiting for something like a fire to break out in the hearing room.

This pattern is on endless repeat, from the Waco/Branch Davidian standoff to the Cindy Sherman vigil outside the idiot king's "ranch." This morning I saw it in action at George Washington University Hospital, where the vans were circled like vultures around the last known whereabouts of Dick Cheney.

It has been said that Dick Cheney's heart problems actually demonstrate that he does indeed have a heart. For my part, I believe it a clever ruse to treat a nonexistent organ.

The trucks are apparently waiting for news of Cheney's death. Each "reporter" down there would love to be the first on air, a background shot of GWU hospital framing their prepped face and hair, intoning solemnly, firmly, but slightly breathlessly that "Vice President Richard Cheney has suffered heart failure." Seriously, anything must be better to them than sitting around for a few hours to find out that after a checkup, the doctors sent the VP home. My friends, that doesn't move you from beat reporter for local TV to beat reporter for network news. Next week these jokers could be covering dog walkers in Glover Park.

But these omnipresent news trucks have the effect of reducing even the most mundane to a spectacle. What in fact is the use of having wall to wall news vans sitting outside a courthouse for months on end to cover of all things court proceedings? You measure this stuff with a sundial, not a stopwatch. There are actually two reasons for going to the expense of dedicating a van and its crew to something as fast-paced as a glacier, and these reasons are inter-related:

1. Background shots of the location make it more "real."
2. The news must be seen as an event unfolding quickly, almost too quickly, to be captured: blink and you'll miss it. The news as spectacle.

I think I've written before that there aren't 24 hours worth of news in a day. Given that fact, news channels find themselves filling the time not with broader coverage or even with more in-depth coverage, but with well-paid opinion jockeys endlessly arguing over the same 30 second clip of a press conference, a clip that itself will be played on endless loop throughout the day.

One might think that 24 hours of coverage of some event (Katrina, Clinton impeachment, etc.) might lend itself to in-depth reporting, but actually quite the opposite occurs. The facts -- the event -- as Nietzsche says of the French Revolution becomes lost under its interpretations. We are left instead with an interminable ideological war of attrition, of which the relatively recently cancelled "Crossfire" is only the most visible example. As Jon Stewart correctly surmised (here I extrapolate freely from Stewart's rightly famous attack on the show), no one actually learns anything watching these "news" programs -- these shows aren't about informing the public but rather about performance. They are tightly scripted acts in which each participant knows his or her (well, mainly his) role.

It's a ceaseless play of so-called "issues" of the day, which are really nothing more than the latest distraction from our lives: the runaway bride, Laci Peterson, Brad and Angelina, Merry Christmas v. Happy Holidays...Even the "serious" news can't be covered seriously and in fact is conveyed with the same even tones as the news above: Bush's spying, Cheney's heart ailments, Jack Abramoff's purchasing of Congress. More time on the airwaves will be spent with right-wing zealots espousing the themes of "everyone's corrupt" and "the Democrats are making this a political issue" than will be spent investigating and exposing the Representatives and Senators that Mr. Abramoff bought.

And so it goes.