COMM 317: More debate reaction

Reaction to Wednesday's ABC-TV presidential debate has turned into a media "feeding frenzy" (the metaphor comes from the way fish thrash around when you feed them bread crumbs). So I'm not going to link to everything. It's frankly getting repetitious. But I will highlight some of the commentary that throws light in dark corners.

Joe Lauria, a freelance investigative reporter who has contributed to major U.S. and British periodicals, has an especially trenchant analysis of the television industry values and demographics behind the tone of the show. In it he quotes Paddy Chayefsky, a gifted dramatist who wrote for early network TV and later became a critic of the medium and said, "Entertainment divisions have virtually taken over news divisions at the networks." Money graf(s):

It's about ratings. You show advertisers better ratings; you get more money from them. ABC certainly got the ratings: more than ten million viewers. It was the most watched debate of the campaign.

Do you think ABC didn't know who their audience would be? Do you think this wasn't researched well in advance and that the questions fed Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos weren't geared to that audience?

This was not a debate on a Saturday night on MSNBC last summer when the audience would be vastly different: more political junkies with a serious interest in the process and the issues well before the lower-tiered candidates were weeded out.

This was a prime time audience on ABC on a Wednesday night that drew a larger, less sophisticated audience. They may have even been, dare I say it, a bit bitter about politicians.

ABC's market research apparently showed that keeping questions to the level of flag pins and what your pastor thinks would draw and keep an audience tuned in.

Hence, the worst debate ever.

Lauria's blog is definitely worth reading for its persepective on the TV industry. It appeared on The Huffington Post, which hosts a number of liberal bloggers. Also cited on Huffington is that noted social commentator Don Imus, who is quoted as saying Barack Obama is "almost a bigger pussy than [Hillary Clinton] is."

An editorial in The Nation, a liberal opinion magazine, said Obama "Obama made pop cultural history, miming the rapper Jay-Z's iconic hand signal to "brush the dirt" off his shoulders" after the debate. And the gesture was picked up on YouTube.

On Thursday night, YouTuber Bill3948 uploaded a one-minute mash-up of Jay-Z songs, Clinton attacks and Obama's inspired response. The sequence opens with clips of Clinton's cheap shots, accompanied by the Jay-Z ballad "Moment of Clarity," pivots to lowlights from the ABC debate, and then scores Obama's response with the original "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" track. While Obama brushes, graphics of Hillary, Bill and Charlie Gibson fly off his shoulders. Then he shakes off a kitchen sink -- a nod to Clinton's desperate strategy -- as Jay raps about hanging out "in the kitchen with soda." It's a fun, sharp extension of Obama's call to brush off some of the ridiculous attacks ...

Here's a link to the YouTube mashup, "titled Barack Gets that Dirt off His Shoulders."


Lynn Sweet, Washington-based political columnist for The Chicago Sun-Times is probably the best source of news on Obama and his campaign. (She was in the Sun-Times' statehouse bureau in Springfield, by the way, on her way to the big leagues.) She has Mayor Daley's reaction to questioning of Obama's link to William Ayers, a member of a radical anti-war protest group during the 1960s, and more recent background on Ayers and Obama's Hyde Park neighborhood in Chicago. Sweet also posted a complete transcript of the debate for those who want to read up on flag pins.

More on Ayers, an Associated Press fact check that analyzes the spin and the facts, is noteworthy because it was written by Chris Wills of the AP's statehouse bureau in Springfield.