DEBATES: Kilmeade opened the garbage can!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2024

A tale of two revolutions: In yesterday morning's print editions, the New York Times offered a front-page report concerning debate prep.

According to the Times report, Candidate Harris has gone all in, Candidate Trump a bit less:

Inside the Trump-Harris Debate Prep: Method Acting, Insults, Tough Questions

Vice President Kamala Harris is holed up for five days in a Pittsburgh hotel, doing highly choreographed debate practice sessions ahead of Tuesday night’s clash. There’s a stage and replica TV lighting and an adviser in full Lee Strasberg method-acting mode, not just playing Donald J. Trump but inhabiting him, wearing a boxy suit and a long tie.

The former president’s preparations are more improv. They are pointedly called not “debate prep” but “policy time,” meant to refresh him on his record. Nobody is playing Ms. Harris; sometimes his aides sit at a long table opposite him and bat questions back and forth, or other times he pulls up a chair closer to them. Mr. Trump has held just a handful of sessions so far, interrupting one at his Las Vegas hotel so he and his advisers could go up to his suite to watch Ms. Harris’s convention speech.

Candidate Harris has gone all in. As for Candidate Trump, let it be said that his "handful of sessions" dates back at least as far as Thursday night, August 23.

Whatever! Tomorrow evening's event stands at the end of a long and winding societal road. That road traces back to 1960—to the sudden emergence of a new communications medium.

All of a sudden, out of nowhere, the American people had television sets! Thus began the winding road which has taken us to the eve of tomorrow evening's event.

In The Making of The President 1960, Theodore White said that year's inaugural TV debates "confirmed a revolution in American Presidential politics." In a long and winding road of his own—attention spans may have been somewhat longer then—White described the spread of the new technology behind this revolution:

WHITE (page 279): ...Ten years earlier (in 1950) of America’s then 40,000,000 families only 11 per cent (or 4,400,000) enjoyed the pleasures of a television set. By 1960 the number of American families had grown to 44,000,000, and of these no less than 88 per cent, or 40,000,000, possessed a television set. The installation of this equipment had in some years of the previous decade partaken of the quality of stampede—and in the peak stampede years of 1954—1955—1956 no fewer than 10,000 American homes had each been installing a new television set for the first time every single day of the year. The change that came about with this stampede is almost immeasurable. 

We the people had new equipment—and White said the societal effects were substantial, even revolutionary.

Our TV sets now ruled the day. "Within a single decade the medium has exploded to a dimension in shaping the American mind that rivals that of America’s schools and churches," White wrote. He was speaking in the present tense—as the revolution occurred—and he offered this assessment:

WHITE: The blast effect of this explosion on American culture in the single decade of television’s passage from commercial experiment to social menace will remain a subject of independent study and controversy for years.

So the highly prescient author said! 

Theodore White's iconic book won a Pulitzer Prize in 1962. It had been published in July 1961, after being excerpted in an edition of Life magazine whose cover photo bore this title: 

A NEW LIFE FOR IKE DOWN ON THE FARM.

By clicking here, you can peruse every page of that edition of Life—and sure enough! Two months earlier, Newton Minow, the FCC chairman, had delivered a famous speech to television executives—the famous speech in which he denounced the product they were sending into American homes as "a vast wasteland."

For the record, Minow had been appointed to his post by a new president—by President John F. Kennedy! By common understanding, Kennedy's election may have been one of the fruits of the revolution White described in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book.

Now we're engaged in a great civil war—in another such technological revolution. Tomorrow evening's event will be taking place in the context of the "explosion on American culture" of that latest revolution—an explosion many of our traditional news orgs have gone to great lengths to ignore.

As of September 1960, television had burst on the scene and had entered American homes. As we noted in Saturday's report, Teddy White was appalled by the dumbing-down of American discourse which, or so he said, accompanied this event:

WHITE (page 291): ...[T]here certainly were real differences of philosophy and ideas between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon—yet rarely in American history has there been a political campaign that discussed issues less or clarified them less.

The TV debates, in retrospect, were the greatest opportunity ever for such discussion, but it was an opportunity missed. It is difficult to blame the form of the debates for this entirely; yet the form and the compulsions of the medium must certainly have been contributory. The nature of both TV and radio is that they abhor silence and “dead time.” All TV and radio discussion programs are compelled to snap question and answer back and forth as if the contestants were adversaries in an intellectual tennis match. Although every experienced newspaperman and inquirer knows that the most thoughtful and responsive answers to any difficult question come after long pause, and that the longer the pause the more illuminating the thought that follows it, nonetheless the electronic media cannot bear to suffer a pause of more than five seconds; a pause of thirty seconds of dead time on air seems interminable. Thus, snapping their two-and-a-half-minute answers back and forth, both candidates could only react for the cameras and the people, they could not think. And, since two and a half minutes permit only a snatch of naked thought and a spatter of raw facts, both candidates, whenever caught out on a limb with a thought too heavy for two-minute exploration, a thought seemingly too bold or fresh to be accepted by the conditioned American mind, hastily scuttled back toward center as soon as they had enunciated the thought. 

Theodore White was appalled by the "opportunity missed." In his view, this is what had happened:

In a bow to the very nature of "the electronic media," Candidates Kennedy and Nixon had been restricted to eight (8) minutes for their opening statements, then to a mere two and a half minutes for their answers to the questions they were asked.

White's assessment surely seems quaint today. "Two and a half minutes permit only a snatch of naked thought and a spatter of raw facts," he said in his famous book. That time limit—a concession to the demands of a new electronic medium—meant that the candidates had been unable to explore their ideas on various subjects in suitable detail. 

Tomorrow night's event will run on a different road. Stating the obvious, eight-minute opening statements would be viewed as unthinkable today. There will be no such opening statements at tomorrow evening's event.

Also this:

Tomorrow night, the candidates will be given two minutes to respond to questions. But in the June 27 Biden-Trump debate, the moderators frequently reminded the candidates that they had only used a small portion of their two-minute allotments in the "answers" they had provided to the questions they had been asked.

For the record, that was now—and White's book was written back then. Rightly or wrongly, he assessed the effects of the TV revolution in this manner:

WHITE (page 292): If there was to be any forum for issues, the TV debates should have provided such a forum. Yet they did not: every conceivable problem was raised by the probing imagination of the veteran correspondents who questioned the candidates. But all problems were answered in two-minute snatches, either with certain facts or with safe convictions. Neither man could pause to indulge in the slow reflection and rumination, the slow questioning of alternatives before decision, that is the inner quality of leadership.

White was describing the effects of one new communications medium. Almost surely, he couldn't have imagined the array of new media under which our failing discourse suffers today.

Tomorrow evening's event will suffer under the effects of a much broader "revolution." Theodore White, an erudite person—indeed, an egghead—could never have imagined the effects of this revolution. 

Most likely, he couldn't have imagined the two-hour "interview" with Candidate Trump staged by Mark Levin over Labor Day weekend on the Fox News Channel. 

We discussed that "interview" all last week. Could the highly erudite Theodore White have imagined some such thing?

Sadly, it gets even worse. Almost surely, White couldn't have imagined the garbage can Brian Kilmeade opened this past Saturday night as part of his weekly primetime show on that same "news channel." 

It's as we noted yesterday. Appearing on the type of podcast we discussed in Saturday's report, the retired "TV judge" Joe Brown had recently called Kamala Harris "a piece of shit." Beyond that, he had referred to Harris as the "humping hyena." 

This is one fruit of our new revolution. Also, that made Brown the perfect guest for Kilmeade's program on Fox, where one primetime star keeps asking if Hunter Biden has started "banging" or "f*cking" first lady Jill Biden yet.

(We've documented that astonishing conduct on three separate occasions. Elsewhere, it's nothing but silence.)

Theodore White was appalled by the alleged effects of one new medium—of the invasion of the TV set. Today, we labor under the strain of "cable news" and social media, and under the strain of the several other new media whose onset preceded the onset of those new media.

Kilmeade opened the garbage can Saturday night, as he so commonly does—as he is paid to do. Preparation for tomorrow's event takes place within the context of the astonishing culture these new "revolutions" have spawned.

The New York Times won't report or discuss that new, degraded political culture. (Neither will other cable news stars.) Could White have imagined that?

Tomorrow: Candidate Kennedy arose from a nap. Over at the Fox News Channel, it was time to hear from Joe Brown.