The stupefaction of America.

• Author: Douglas, Susan
• Position: Network TV political talk shows - Pundit Watch

Dan Rather has popped a cork. So has Janet Reno. So have Newsweek and ABC News. The source of their ire? The degenerative effects of TV entertainment, with its emphasis on violence, flash and trash, crudeness and stupidity. Beavis and Butt-head - cartoon characters! - have become headline news, epitomizing TV's celebration of bad taste, anti-intellectualism, and gratuitous violence. ABC News ran a week-long series on how TV violence causes real violence, and Newsweek gave its cover to TV's role in the stupefaction of America.

Now I'm as fed up as Janet Reno with the splattering of intestines that's meant to pass for entertainment in America. And I'm as disgusted as Newsweek by the nightly appearance of two monosyllabic pinheads primarily concerned with blowing up animals and passing gas. But we are witnessing, as we always do when this kind of media-bashing occurs, an age-old exercise of marking off what's deviant as a way to legitimate what's okay. Through this kind of media cartography, Beavis and Butt-head is out in the wilds, beyond the pale. It thus stands in an almost diametrically opposed relation to what allegedly occupies the high ground - political talk shows, where men in suits and ties solemnly discuss world events.

But if you watch these talk shows with a jaundiced eye, and keep Beavis and Butt-head in mind, you can see how the pundits play a less obvious, but equally pernicious, role in the stupefaction of America. These shows, too, seem predicated on the notion that the viewer's mental capacities are no greater than a twelve-year-old's, and that his or her political calculations cannot transcend the good guy/bad guy motif of Popeye and Bluto.

Let's consider the discussions about Somalia. This Week with David Brinkley devoted a show to this topic. The first thing to hit you like a two-by-four was the entire lack of black faces. Not one African politician, not one Africanist scholar or expert.

Instead, we heard from Admiral Jonathan Howe, U.N. envoy to Somalia who, according to Alexander Cockburn in The Nation, hides in his office praying and pees in a jar rather than venture outside to use the john, let alone ascertain what's really going on in Somalia. The others meant to educate us about the Horn of Africa were white men in Washington: Bill Bradley, Les Aspin, and George Will, who told us absolutely nothing about Somali politics. But they debated the merits of "staying in" or "pulling out," which, in only slightly altered...