As Humble As Mussolini

I thought of David Crosby’s quote about Joni Mitchell immediately after I read this rant from Michael Smerconish at The Huffington Post yesterday. He’s all in a state over the fact that, apparently, his gig as guest host on “Scarborough Country” didn’t generate the ratings he had hoped for.

Smerconish, for my money, is smarter than your typical Repug barking head. I’ve read some good columns from him, actually. However, I just had to “sit back right easy and laugh” (to quote The Boss also) after this one.

His hostility to his audience is almost refreshing in its honesty. He chastises them for not tuning into the segments of the show that he favors (only 90,000 for the "Joe Schmoe" award, where Smerconish wanted to nominate Donovan McNabb and no doubt resurrect the entire "'black on black' crime" remark related to Terrell Owens), while all the while he seems to pay more attention to the statistical data of who is and isn’t tuning in to him than the actual content of his program.

This quote in particular stood out for me:

My point is that even in the context of a hard news cable program like Scarborough Country, the nation has more of an appetite for (American) Idol than a mom who drowns her five kids, or the Muslim world ablaze over a cartoon with religious implications.

"Scarborough Country" is hard news? That's the funniest remark I've heard all week! Besides, if he's going to chastise his audience, it should be because the market for in-depth reporting (such as "Frontline" or "CBS Reports"...going way back, I know) apparently doesn't exist to the degree that it did years ago (based solely on ratings). The Andrea Yates story and the Muslim cartoon violence stories, in and of themselves, are practically "trash TV" anyway.

Well, to me this all is called “cause and effect.” Smerconish and his ilk perennially support Republican candidates who have consistently screamed about “deregulating” the electronic communications industry for years, eliminating the “fairness doctrine” and enabling corporate mergers of media companies that ensured that “the voice” that represented the largest market share would be heard above all others. Combine that with the gradual scaling back or outright elimination of social studies programs in schools dependent to one degree or another on public funding, along with the periodic, full-throated cry by David Horowitz and other Repug lackeys of “liberal bias” in arts and humanities curricula (as well as episodes such as the one with the Dover, PA school board and the "intelligent design" debacle) and what you eventually get is what you have now. That is, for the most part, an audience of historically challenged, rationality-impaired media junkies who would sooner try to shove a copy of “Poor Richard’s Almanac” by Ben Franklin, for example, into the tray of their PC’s DVD read-write device than actually try to read it and find out how to better their lives ("A book? What’s that? How many gigs does it have?").

And OF COURSE these people are going to tune you out and watch “American Idol,” “Lost,” “24,” and the Super Bowl, obsessing on which new commercial was good and which one wasn’t. I mean, why not? Do you think they would actually try to BETTER THEIR LIVES THROUGH ACTUAL KNOWLEDGE or something?

From the sound of it, it sounds like you should be standing up and taking a bow (“Mission Accomplished”) instead of braying like a brat over it. Give yourself a good slap in the face and count your blessings, because I’m sure you’ll never run out of real or imagined liberal foibles that you can exploit to your full-throated, haranguing gain.

(I know, I know, ultra-snarky for a Friday…the weather people around here have us nuts over the possibility of a foot of snow over the weekend, and I’m particularly keyed up – I crave your indulgence).