Section 1

LITERATURE REVIEW

&

METHODOLOGY

It was initially difficult to find a serious text to support the view that important political debate in the United States has been relegated to the realm of entertainment. There are many books about Rush Limbaugh who is an entertainer who provides his listeners with ‘news’, but although Limbaugh’s popularity supports the view stated above, the books I had already read on him, The Way Things Aren’t and Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot: And Other Observations, are more about his inaccuracy as a source of news than the relevance of entertainment becoming people’s primary source of information.

One source that does show the relevance of entertainment and political humor as a news outlet is the documentary "But… Seriously" by Jeff Lieberman. The film is an un-narrated history on the development of American politics and culture from the 1960 presidential elections up to the inauguration of Bill Clinton. This 1994, Emmy-nominated documentary seamlessly explains American history over this period through combining archival footage of presidential speeches, news coverage and clips of political humor from comedians of each time period.

I realized that most of the time I would watch network news and read the newspaper as I was becoming an adult, like realizing what the world was all about, and I’d find myself screaming at the television or stuff that I was reading, say about the Vietnam War and things, and just saying, “Bullshit!” And I gravitated towards these guys that were doing stand up comedy that were, to me they were telling the truth, that I was screaming, “Why doesn’t the news say these things?”… So rather than what the common knowledge is today of what the truth is, it’s easy to say it now because you have the 20/20 hindsight of history, but what did they say at the time? What did the news say at the time? And what did these guys say at the time? And my premise was: The truth as we know it now came from those [comedians], not from the news. So in order to prove that…you have to get the news and you have to get what the comics said back then and juxtapose them, and you see it right for yourself. And you say, “Well, which one of these things ultimately turned out to be the truth?” Ninety-nine percent of the time it’s what came from these satirists or comics.(1)

Two serious texts that do address the topic of this dissertation are American Scream by Cynthia True and “Cable and Internet Loom Large in Fragmented Political News Universe: Perceptions of Partisan Bias Seen as Growing, Especially by Democrats” by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

The study by the Pew Research Center provided evidence to show that an increasing and significant number of Americans, mostly young adults, obtain their news about the world from entertainment sources. Namely among these sources are The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live as well as a plethora of internet sources.

American Scream is a biography of the groundbreaking comedian Bill Hicks. The book is an account of the subjects Hicks felt compelled to talk about and the obstacles he confronted in order to perform his act of primarily social and political commentary. Hicks toured endlessly across the U.S. and had a large cult following as well as being respected by those in the comedy business as one of the best performers in the country. Hicks played to massive audiences in Canada, Australia and the U.K., but was never able to reach a large audience in his own country due to censorship by network television.

American Scream, the study released by the Pew Research Center and the events unfolding in the news over Howard Stern being dropped from Clear Channel radio stations after he became critical of President George W. Bush show evidence that entertainment sources and political humor are incredibly relevant information outlets not only because the Pew study shows an increasing number get their news from these sources, but because there are rigid forms of censorship in place to prevent such social commentary and stronger punishments are being created by the government for broadcasting ‘indecency’, a term still lacking a clear definition from the FCC.

For first-hand information on how journalism has been corrupted by the rise of infotainment and its relevance as an information outlet, Patt Morrison of The Los Angeles Times, comedian and host of Comedy Central’s The Man Show, Doug Stanhope, and director of But… Seriously, Jeff Lieberman, were interviewed. The two professionals from the entertainment industry felt that political humor and entertainment were very important sources of information and analysis for people, but also shared a cynical view of its ability to shape public opinion. Columnist Patt Morrison felt that entertainment sources could work in an equally influential manner as traditional news media because both provide only samples of information on an issue and the responsibility to learn more is on the shoulders of the individual.

Research was then steered towards how journalism and politics have developed in the U.S. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky provided an explanation of how media serves as a tool for propaganda in an open society, but it is difficult to recognize by comparison to media in a country such as the Soviet Union. A competitive market degrades the press’s necessity to social responsibility. An audience becomes a product that is sold to advertisers and the huge media corporations needing to operate at minimal costs must rely heavily on official versions of stories passed down from government and corporate PR offices. This is done through Herman’s and Chomsky’s model which consists of five elements: profit-orientation of mass media firms, advertising as primary income, official sources, flak, and “anticommunism”.

The model Herman and Chomsky propose in the book is still accurate. “Anticommunism” has received new definition in the American zeitgeist following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites. But profit-orientation of mass media firms and advertising as primary income affecting content appears increasingly persuasive to editorial decision-making as ownership of media has been further deregulated to make media a strictly market-driven industry. This deregulation happened in between the last George Bush presidency and the current one when the Republican-led Congress sat down with the heads of the major telecommunications companies and decided not only to deregulate ownership restrictions, but to make the United States stand, “alone among 146 countries…in refusing to provide free television time to political candidates.”(2)

For another version of how the media developed in the decades of the Cold War, Culture, Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression by Robert I. Schiller was used to provide further support for the argument that journalism has become strictly compromised in the U.S. Schiller’s book also deals with the development of politics during the Cold War and how the right-wing was able to take over the political middle ground through evoking fear of Communism.

Both Manufacturing Consent and Culture, Inc. are phenomenal resources that provided a good foundation for understanding how media and deliberative democracy have been compromised over the course of the Cold War. Further background information on specific topics from 1945 to the fall of Communism were obtained from Wikipedia including the subjects of the Red Scare, the Cold War, Edward R. Murrow, the Hollywood ten, House Un-American Activities Committee, and Joseph McCarthy.

However, a large gap existed between the information supporting the relevance of entertainment and political humor as news sources and the information explaining the development of politics and how journalism was compromised by Communist fears during the Cold War.

The interview with Patt Morrison provided substantial perspective to fill in this gap. But the major body of research for this project was done to understand what happened in the ten plus years following the fall of Communism to cause the ability of journalism as public trust to become even more compromised than in the condition described by Herman, Chomsky and Schiller at the end of the 1980s.

The books used for this research were What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News, Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy, Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them) A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, Living Room Wars: Rethinking Audiences for a Postmodern World, Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq, and Reefer Madness and Other Tales from the American Underground. The essay “Politics and the English Language” from Inside the Whale and Other Essays by George Orwell also provided a simple way of viewing the complex problem of distraction media that David Brock discusses in The Republican Noise Machine and the concept of doublespeak forwarded in Weapons of Mass Deception.

The two texts by David Brock, former writer for the American Spectator and Sun Myung Moon’s The Washington Times, proved to be the most insightful and solid writings on the subject. This is because they are analyses of events that occurred in journalism and politics from the 1980s to the present, but more importantly they are historical accounts of the efforts by conservative politicians, ultra-conservative billionaires and the media entities these people controlled during this stretch of time.

Blinded by the Right illustrates how members of the right-wing funded elaborate smear campaigns against Anita Hill and the Clintons, the roots of the neoconservative movement and how these people succeeded in perpetuating and reinventing the Cold War to gain power by playing on Americans’ fears and paranoia. This book in particular is useful as it is Brock’s account as a writer for decidedly conservative publications, his reasons for developing a conservative political perspective, his rationalizations for continuing to work as a GOP bulldog and his reasons for finally breaking ranks. Brock’s experience of shifting political allegiance can be viewed, optimistically, as a microcosm of the shifting consensus view of the American public.

Blinded by the Right is the book that clearly explains the genesis of the neoconservative movement, its thinkers, objectives and tactics. It illustrates the allegiances neoconservatives make with conservative religious leaders to build a following after anti-Communism is no longer an effective glue for a political movement.

The Republican Noise Machine, Lies, What Liberal Media? and Weapons of Mass Deception are the texts that provided the mass of information to explain the political and media developments since the fall of Communism. In essence, this is the source of information for article two.

Article two was the most difficult piece to construct. It is the bridge over the debatable history of recent events to prop the view that the opportunities for Americans to experience and participate in democratic debate have become so few and ineffectual through the outlets of previous generations that entertainment and political humor is now a bastion for free speech and debate.

1. Lieberman 2004, interview, Appendix C: 67
2. Alterman, 2004, p. 26.