Media Criticism

I am clearly behind the ball in responding to Wednesday’s CNN/YouTube debate with the Republican presidential candidates. I spent Thursday and Friday taking care of other topics that arose and I felt that a few full viewings of the debates would clear my head. I watched the debate twice in its entirety and feel that this endeavor may have taken a few years off my life. I am just hoping those are the bad years at the end of my life.

CNN got hundreds of YouTube questions and could have chosen a diverse range of topics to cover. The good people at CNN chose to pick questions asking how many guns the candidates own and addressing specific questions to candidates (I am thinking of the Mike Huckabee question about the death penalty). The most egregious error by CNN was focusing almost a third of the time on questions of immigration. My problem is not over the debate on immigration as the issue of guest workers and border security are worthwhile questions. I object to the Tancredo effort on each of the candidates and the tone of the conversation.

My problem with the YouTube debates for both parties is that technology is thought to equal full democracy. In the end, however, a major media outlet like CNN was able to reign in full democracy with its usually cock-eyed filter. Anderson Cooper spoke at the top of the debate about which YouTube videos would NOT be featured in the debate. CNN is guilty of vetting questions in the same way that candidates are guilty of packing their public events with supporters. Accessible democracy through technology should not mean an effort at purposeful mediocrity.

The winners and losers in the CNN/YouTube debate are pretty clear. Media darling Mike Huckabee was thoughtful in his answers in the midst of chaos and CNN got the ratings it so clearly wanted from this debacle. The losers were the American public and supposed frontrunners Rudy Giuliani Mitt Romney. I cannot believe I spent this long thinking about this debate but it is part of my job as a media critic.

The website TMZ has been renowned for its ability to muckrake the dirty deeds of B list celebrities and has-beens over the last year. The Michael Richards racist tirade at LA’s Laugh Factory and Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic comments to police show the type of journalism engages in. Indeed, TMZ is so successful at this work that their web links are picked up by the mainstream media and disseminated with the TMZ logo to millions of people.

I hate to say that TMZ does a service because I think the lives of celebrities are none of my concern. When I pay to see a movie, I pay to see actors at work and I am not entitled to know about their private lives unless they become a hazard to the public. I will say that TMZ uses the type of journalism that major newspapers and cable news networks are beginning to use to pursue leads. The reason this website is able to accomplish successful (gasp) journalism is the topic matter is interesting to a voyeuristic public.

The in-your-face celebrity entertainment of TMZ is now on television. I question the necessity of another crass TV show about celebrity news though my local TV station runs it at 11:05 pm when no one is watching. I will not watch TMZ on TV because a) I think celebrity news is a waste of time and b) It will no doubt get homogenized and decrease its Web credibility with a few months in television no man’s land. If I had to choose between TMZ and, let’s say, Cavemen, I would be really hard pressed to make a decision. Harvey Levin may accidentally give me a laugh while he talks about TMZ’s latest search for celebrity dirt.

By now, you have seen the hot “buzz� video of August 27th. Miss South Carolina gets a question, A.C. Slater holds the microphone and tries not to laugh and the young lady proceeds to mess up about as bad as you possibly can. She refers to Americans as “U.S. Americans� and mixes up South America and South Africa. At least I think she does, I have no idea what she is talking about.

It is appropriate that she got a question stating that most American students cannot identify the United States on a map. I think this irony is self evident but Miss South Carolina may have accidentally done a major service to public education. I just wish this happened as the YouTube debates took place among the Democrats. A user could have just played this clip and let the Democrats speak to public education issues.

I hate to pile on people and she clearly was flustered and rehearsed something that she was unfamiliar with. I do think that the tone of the press coverage was more “take a look at this…� with a smirk than actual news which is only designed to increase the snark factor that the public seems to enjoy. In the end, her inability to put together a cohesive argument and properly identify people may have given public education proponents enough material to spring back to the fore.

As you have no doubt heard, Sen. Barack Obama has responded to the popular video series “Obama Girl� with a combination of disdain and annoyance. In a variety of interviews including Yahoo News, Obama has said that video bloggers and others who create these types of Internet products need to show more responsibility. His children have inquired about the nature of the videos and his wife has expressed frustration with having to deal with this as an issue.

The criticisms from Senators Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd have been that Barack Obama lacks sophistication in his approach to foreign policy. I think he lacks sophistication in his approach to the media. Obama participated in the YouTube debate, for God’s sake. If you can take a question from a snow man on the prospects for environmental legislation, you can suck it up and take a little ribbing about “Obama Girl.�

Barack Obama should be worried about other issues on the campaign trail. “Obama Girl� and other videos on the Web are supporting his campaign while being entertaining. Obama’s candidacy may be tripped up by an established senator ahead of him in the Democratic primaries, questions about his experience and the inevitable smear machine that comes with a two-party system. He will also deal with that insidious elephant in the room that is racism. Barack Obama has a lot of ridiculous obstacles to face in his race to the presidency without creating his own. The senator needs to relax because the people he is criticizing-namely, bloggers and activists-appreciate a little humor with their politics.

The following video from YouTube apparently was shot by Virginia Tech students today from their dorm or apartment as a number of police cars screamed to campus.

Home video and camera phone video has once again helped to tell the story of a tragedy.

Cross posted to Media Criticism.