What Ails Us 

“When television is good, nothing – not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers – nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse.” 

Newton Minow

It would be hard to overstate the influence Newton Minow had on how America was informed in the television age before cable’s limitless expansion of boob tube options. Fully committed to the idea that control of information conveyed from a platform that reached millions bestowed an awesome responsibility to serve the public interest and ensure truth is protected, Minow left a determinative mark on US communication policy.

Beginning when he took over the chairmanship of the Federal Communications Commission in 1961 as one of JFK’s “best and brightest,” Minow spent a career making sure the power of news and information remained a neutral commodity in service to the common goals of the democratic process. Everything from League of Women Voter Presidential debates to the existence of Sesame Street, indeed PBS itself, owes to Minow’s personal mission statement that democratic government bore an onus of preventing television from becoming what he labeled a “vast wasteland”. Minow understood before anyone else how dangerous information for profit was, and throughout his career he fought to build a wall between news and entertainment. To know and understand Newton Minow is to see clearly the fatal missteps America has taken and how far we have allowed his worst fears to be realized. 

Few entrusted to serve  as elected US officials have uttered more public stupidity than Marjorie Taylor Greene. Elected to Congress in 2020 by voters in a Georgia district who, as Lincoln Project cofounder Steve Schmidt very charitably puts it, aren’t “pulling their weight” as citizens, Greene decided from the outset her victory was a mandate for 24/7 Twitter activity.

Cursed with an inability to process initial brain impulses before presenting them as communication, Greene ruminates for public consumption as she breathes, literally more as a function of the anatomical nervous system than any organized thought patterns. An OG QAnon conspiracist, Greene traffics in everything ranging from the ridiculously inane – Hunter Biden as a sex trafficker – to cruel cowardice – stochastic terrorism toward the LBGT community – to overt sedition with one fictitious diatribe after another in service to Trump’s cult of the Big Lie and the actual rioters who attacked democracy on 1/6. While Democrats held sway in the House Greene was rightly sanctioned and marginalized on the Hill for her constant unhinged stream of consciousness. However, the GOP leadership not only abided her, but courted her, promising relevance when control shifted their way. 

In October of last year Fox’s media shill Howard Kurtz penned a column about how MTG had “positioned herself” to become a “power player” when Republicans took control of the House the following month. He pulled out all the stops gushing about the relevancy coming Greene’s way. 

Her Twitter gibberish became “blistering attacks on the Democrats,” responsible for Greene’s success in “building a national brand by becoming one of the party’s most controversial voices.” Of course, Kurtz dipped his ladle into the false equivalence well and likened Democrat Alexandra Ocasio Cortez to Greene, citing “similar groundless statements” that he failed to provide any example of. Finally, he proclaimed Greene’s own assessment of how her stature was set to skyrocket in return for support of Kevin McCarthy as money in the bank her stardom was nigh.

“…he’s going to give me a lot of power and a lot of leeway. And if he doesn’t, they’re going to be very unhappy about it” 

Indeed, nearly six months after McCarthy received the gavel in round 15, Greene is in fact far closer to the inner circle of House Republican leadership than the back benches of the chamber, despite frequent episodes of erratic behavior. With the catastrophe of debt default now seemingly a GOP priority, Greene just last week tweeted her feelings about reaching across the aisle: 

“We need to remember exactly who the Democrats are.

They would have loved to put all of us in jail.

They want to fundamentally change America.

Republicans should never forget the enemy we are dealing with. You can’t work with Communists.”

How did we reach this nadir in our governance? How could someone so wretched actually be re-elected to Congress? In the early 80s a similar incarnation may have harassed you in the airport for money, part of Lyndon LaRouche’s band of bizarre cultists. In the late 60s she may have found her way to Spahn Ranch in California and joined Charles Manson’s band of odious followers. Back then the US media landscape was shepherded by Newton Minow or Katherine Graham and Ben Bradley of the Washington Post, or Walter Cronkite – responsible people guided by a set of institutional standards. In that world she would have stayed where she rightly belonged… on the farthest fringes of American society, irrelevant to any but her fellow freaks, part of the affordable cost a free society pays for freedom. 

But that was before TV talk show producer turned GOP political operative Roger Ailes convinced an Australian multi-millionaire named Rupert Murdoch that a vast wasteland of US white grievance and resentment did exist, a “silent majority” of everyday Ozzie and Harrietts, many of whom grew up equally beholden to the stars and bars of the Confederacy as to Old Glory. From coast to coast, Ailes contended, millions chafed at the bit as they quietly endured the indignity of social and cultural progress they despised. The money to be made validating, even ennobling, their intolerance was uncountable. And so a “fair and balanced” information for profit operation was born. 

Ailes wasn’t the only one who recognized the opportunities this bloc of malcontents afforded. Rush Hudson Limbaugh III, a Midwest blowhard from a wealthy and deep-rooted Missouri family, who dropped out of college – according to his mother, “he just flunked everything… he was only interested in radio” – to become a DJ, was convinced there was an audience for his far-right monologues. 

Limbaugh began his “talk” format in 1984. What that actually meant until his death last year was that he did most all of the talking. From the start, his show’s content never changed, a relentless rehashing of themes meant mostly to vilify those responsible for “political correctness,” a label he has from the start conflated with a progressive “elite” and its sinister agenda to rain tyranny and persecution on the US heartland. Meanwhile, throughout the decades, Limbaugh would pioneer and perfect the art of manipulating his studio resources to make certain those who called in with opposing views never stood a chance. 

In 1987 he was given the “keys to the kingdom” when the FCC abolished perhaps one of Newton Minow’s most important legacies… the fairness doctrine. This now permitted AM radio stations, eager to reconfigure their profitability models around Limbaugh’s format, to air opinion without offering opposing viewpoints. Limbaugh would go to his grave lauding Ronald Reagan for, as one editorialist put it: “tearing down this wall” and freeing him “from the East Germany of liberal media domination.” 

Since then a devastating 24/7 symmetry has developed between daily right-wing AM radio extremists like Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Fox News, who long ago decided to do away with any pretense of separation between its audience and theirs, employing the very same provocateurs as nightly “news personalities.” 

It’s true Fox has always had a real news division comprised of genuine journalists obliged to actually report the news. However, as emails between Fox News executives and prime time lineup propagandists such as Tucker Carlson, Hannity and Laura Ingraham – made public as part of the discovery process during Dominion Voting Systems’ massive liability action against Fox – clarify, the network has never had much patience for facts that compromise audience share. The unearthed emails lay bare what anyone paying attention recognizes, that the news division’s principle purpose has long been to provide cover and credibility to the constant deluge of nihilist resentment its wretched core consumers demand. 

Fox/AM is now a multi-media colossus, stomping its massive footprint throughout the internet while subjugating one of America’s major political parties to its beck and call. While the gist of its grievance  narrative has never really changed, Fox’s inability to control the megalomania of the first President it created has forced it to cater to a cult of personality most of its audience are enraptured by.

Moreover, after decades of being the only game in town, Fox now faces competition from Newsmax and OAN, networks with no qualms about being unapologetic depots of Trumpist propaganda and conspiracy conjecture. Thus, the political class of MAGA nihilists enjoys unconditional Fox/AM credence. Creator or creation? Egg or chicken? It hardly matters at this point. 

Newton Minow died last week at the age of 97. He was one of the final remnants of a cadre of public servants energized by the common good emerging technology could foster, yet cognizant of the damage its power was capable of wrecking if allowed to be deployed by the unscrupulous. He did his best to protect us from ourselves. Nobody who watches Marjorie Taylor Greene earn her 164K salary can feel he succeeded. The price of freedom has become very difficult to afford. BC