WEDNESDAY, APRIL 29, 2026
...began making phone calls to C-Span: Under current circumstances, are "we the people" up to the challenge of creating "a more perfect union?"
Do we want President Lincoln's "mystical chords" to bind us together as friends? Or are we now engaged in a great civil war with our tribal enemies, Red America battling with Blue?
You're asking excellent questions! For the record, the current circumstances to which we refer include the disappearance of the gatekeepers—of the Walter Cronkites and the David Brinkleys—in the wake of the "democratization of media" over the past forty years.
That "democratization" was the fruit of a technological explosion which has replaced the Cronkites and the Brinkleys with such "opinion leaders" as Greg Gutfeld and Tyrus—and with the shaky judgment of our current crop of comedians and podcasters, a few of whom are referenced here:
The Man Show
The Man Show [was] an American sketch comedy television show on Comedy Central that aired from 1999 to 2004. It was created by its two original co-hosts, Adam Carolla and Jimmy Kimmel, and their executive producer Daniel Kellison. The pilot was originally paid for and pitched to ABC, which declined to pick up the show.
The Man Show simultaneously celebrated and lampooned the stereotypical loutish male perspective in a sexually charged, humorous light. The show consisted of a variety of recorded comedy sketches and live in-studio events, usually requiring audience participation. The Man Show was a career breakthrough for Kimmel.
The Man Show is particularly well known for its buxom female models, the Juggy Dance Squad, who would dance in themed, revealing costumes at the opening of every show, in the aisles of the audience just before The Man Show went to commercial break, and during the end segment "Girls on Trampolines".
[...]
In 2003, Kimmel and Carolla left The Man Show, with the hosting jobs passed down to comedians Joe Rogan and Doug Stanhope. The new pair hosted the show for two more seasons before it ceased production in 2004.
All in all, there it is. It was Kimmel and Rogan and the Juggy Dance Squad oh my!
Speaking from a Blue perspective, extremely poor judgment was on vivid display with this show. Today, Rogen is one of our failing nation's most prominent Cronkite Replacement Figures.
Kimmel is the latest in a long line of Tinseltown strivers who keep supplying the RNC, and today the Fox News Channel, with endless distractions and talking points.
For the record, Cronkite and Brinkley were serious, deeply experienced people. They were part of the generation of Americans to whom President Kennedy referred in his famous inaugural address:
PRESIDENT KENNEDY (1/20/61): Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed...
Cronkite and Brinkley had indeed been "tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace." They didn't arrive on the scene in the kinds of clown cars so common on this current American scene.
Back then, they were numbered among the nation's gatekeepers. Today, a sprawling network of former "wrestlers" and undisguised cable news nut-balls have taken their place as guardians of our flailing nation's increasingly clown-like imitation of public discourse, an imitation of life.
Today, the gatekeeper/guardians are largely gone, replaced by the class of people commonly known as influencers. Two of our current influencers got their start on The Man Show, where they displayed their lack of perfect judgment as they ogled the girls on trampolines—as they thrilled to the exploits of The Juggy Dancers.
(As they pretended, exactly as Greg Gutfeld currently does, that their unfortunate conduct was really a form of lampoon, of "satire.")
What's an abandoned people to do in the wake of this cultural breakdown? What's an abandoned people to do in the face of 24-hour, nut=ball messaging from overtly partisan corporate "news ogs?" But also from an array of overtly disordered podcaster / influencer types?
What are we the people to do as our mystical union descends into the current tribal war? Alas! We the people forced to fall back on our own imperfect powers, as people around the globe have always been forced to do.
This country is full of good, decent people—but we're also a nation of people people. We humans have never been a race of mental giants. That helps explain why viewers of Fox & Friends Weekend were weirdly told this, very early, at 6:09 a.m., this past Sunday morning, about what had happened, the night before, at the Correspondents Dinner:
CAMPOS-DUFFY (4/26/26): As everyone now knows, we saw a shooter outside of the venue, outside of the ballroom doors. He was trying to get through the magnetometers, and he was shot and killed as he was trying to rush into the ballroom, where the president, vice president, members of the cabinet were—about a thousand, over a thousand people, were at that dinner. Very dramatic events indeed.
Say what? The shooter was shot and killed as he tried to rush into the ballroom? Why in the world had Campos-Duffy said that?
Strange! It had become quite clear, on Saturday night, that the attempted assailant had not been shot and killed as he rushed toward the ballroom of the Washington Hilton that night. Indeed, here's what co-host Charlie Hurt had already said, eight minutes earlier, right at the start of that same Fox & Friends Weekend program:
HURT: The suspect was apprehended before he could get to the ballroom and hurt anyone else, and the takedown was caught on camera. He's now been identified as 31-year-old Cole Allen of Torrance, California, who's believed to have been a guest at the hotel. He's believed to have acted alone and reportedly told law enforcement that he wanted to shoot Trump administration officials.
That's what the other friend had accurately said. Reading from prompter, Campos-Duffy proceeded to say that he was "set to be arraigned tomorrow.
It was clear, by 6:02, that Allen had been taken into custody. That said, Campos-Duffy still seemed to have it in her head that he had been shot and killed.
Everybody makes mistakes—and what happened at the Hilton had been very upsetting to many people. It may have been so for Campos-Duffy, who had been present at the event with her husband, a cabinet member, and with her two co-hosts.
At any rate, Campos-Duffy mistakenly "let the word go forth [on Fox & Friends Weekend] to friend and foe alike." The shooter had been shot and killed, she now strangely said.
Everybody makes mistakes—and in this instance, cable news etiquette prevailed. Neither of her two co-hosts corrected her groaning misstatement. At 6:22, Campos-Duffy finally corrected herself, as you can see right here.
Everybody makes mistakes and shows imperfect judgment! Today, our cable news stars and our other gatekeepers are frequently highly fallible, to the extent that they're trying to be truthful at all.
We the people are left on our own. The results can be quite spotty:
At 7 o'clock that very morning, C-Span's Washington Journal began to take phone calls from us the people. Those phone calls were cause for substantial concern. The basic fact of the matter is this:
When we the people are left on our own—when reliable gatekeepers have been replaced—the ideas we the people generate can be cause for substantial concern.
We often get it very wrong. Under current arrangements—given the nature of the new technologies—our weird ideas quickly spread.
Tomorrow: What the callers said
I have seen it reported that Campos-Duffy was told by a security person that the shooter had been killed. She didn't make it up herself. That means it isn't HER mistake, as Somerby keeps saying.
ReplyDeleteWe all understand that the first reports of a breaking news event will be corrected by subsequent reports. In light of that understanding, Somerby is making way too big a deal over the correction of this particular first report.
"When we the people are left on our own—when reliable gatekeepers have been replaced—the ideas we the people generate can be cause for substantial concern."
ReplyDeleteEven Gutfeld doesn't consider himself any kind of "gatekeeper" much less a reliable one. He tells partisan jokes about Democrats. That makes him not a journalist or reporter at all. Why does Somerby offer him as a modern gatekeeper? Obviously, to put his thumb on the scales of his argument that there has been no one reliable since Brinkley and Cronkite. And why was Chet Huntley omitted as a reliable gatekeeper?
I do not understand why Somerby routinely omits the new gatekeepers in independent media from his carping. It isn't as if we voters were being abandoned by all media. As a case in point, this shooter was not ignorant about politics but was upset a Schumer and others in leadership positions because they were not dealing effectively with Trump. In other words, he is a highly informed voter, not like the ignorant assholes Somerbys seems to be planning to describe from C-SPAN call-in lines. Further, someone who knows about C-SPAN is already more informed than most voters, so I don't believe they are going to prove Somerby's point that we are not qualified to vote any more because we don't have a Cronkite telling us what to think.
Campos-Duffy reported the shooter had been killed during a Fox and Friends segment. She corrected that misinformation 22 minutes later. That isn't exactly malpractice, as Somerby claims.
ReplyDeleteI first learned the shooter had been killed from Kaitlin Collins and Brian Stelter on CNN. No mention of them here.
ReplyDelete"learned"
DeleteSomerby is an influencer but Kimmel is not. People are influenced by everything that happens to them, from gas prices to lack of day care to movies and sports. We don't call all of those influences "influencers" because their intent is not to change the political views of voters.
ReplyDeleteKimmel's intent is to be an entertainer. Somerby's is to modify the views of his readers. One could argue that Somerby's impact is negligible, but that doesn't change his motive here.
Somerby says: "We often get it very wrong."
ReplyDeleteThat statement implies that he thinks there is a right way to think that such callers are not exhibiting. But those callers would "get it very right" if they had the proper influences in the form of guys like Cronkite, Somerby croaks. Those past guys tried hard to be unbiased and to strictly report the news. There are people still doing that, but there are others who are trying to shift views, not report facts. One such in the old days was Paul Harvey, another was Joe Pine, a forerunner to Rush Limbaugh. In the old days we could tell who was doing what. We still can, but Somerby seems to think we've all gone blind to the difference between opinion and straight reporting. I don't think that's any more true today than it was in the 1950s. (Note that nostalgia for past, largely imaginary, golden times is a conservative trait.)
Before the current attacks on education, it was expected that our schools would teach students how to think critically to evaluate what they were asked to read. We also expected schools to teach history and civics. Some high schools even had political science classes, economics classes, and debate squads. Conservatives have worked very hard to remove such content from our schools, on the grounds that students were being indoctrinated, not taught how to think independently. Meanwhile, certain conservative schools do indoctrinate their students> This is perhaps what Somerby should be complaining about, not the bias found in explicitly right wing programming. The latter falls under First Amendment protections, whether Somerby considers it right or wrong thinking.
ReplyDeleteMost of us who are actually liberal or Democratic or progressive, believe in free speech more than we believe people everywhere should all be forced to think in a specified correct manner.
What does this distraction have to do with the Epstein Files?
ReplyDeleteWe can't know if Cole Allen is dead until we've consulted clinical psychologist Mary Trump.
ReplyDelete