Punditocracy, Heal Thyself

David Broder in the WaPo yesterday (here), “calls on politicians to think about their role as educators of the public and on the public to demand straight talk from those who would be president.”

No word on accountability for Broder and his fellow shills in the Beltway media, of course…

Complaints about vacuous official rhetoric and the "dumbing-down" of presidential speeches, news conferences and interviews are standard fare. (Scholar Elvin T. Lim of Wesleyan University) found strong evidence to support those complaints, not just in his interviews with retired speechwriters but in the presidential texts themselves.

In what must have been a heroic effort, he applied standard techniques of content analysis to state papers of every president from Washington to the second Bush. His tool is something called the Flesch readability score -- a measure of the average number of words per sentence and the average number of syllables per word. The higher the Flesch score, the simpler to get the meaning.

Applied to the annual State of the Union addresses, the average score has doubled from the first few presidents to the last few. Those "messages were pitched at a college level through most of the 18th and 19th centuries," Lim says. "They have now come down to an eighth-grade reading level." The same trend, but more pronounced, is found in inaugural addresses. Their average sentence length has dropped from 60 words to 20.

Simplification has its advantages, if it serves to increase public comprehension. But it comes with a huge risk: The complexity of real-world choices can be, and often is, lost.

And you know this column is just full of the dreaded “conventional wisdom” because former shill slavish follower sycophant of The Sainted Ronnie R Peggy Noonan is quoted as saying that "the only organ to which no appeal is made these days -- you might call it America's only understimulated organ -- is the brain."

This would be hilarious if it wasn’t so pathetic.

This tour de force Media Matters post on Broder by Jamison Foser from April 2007 tells us, among other things, that…

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Broder used his perch at The Washington Post to heckle Al Gore for telling the American people, in detail, what he would do as president. No, we are not making this up. Broder described Gore's convention speech as "a request to step inside a seminar room, listen closely and take notes," adding, "Never has a candidate provided more detailed information on his autobiography and the program initiatives he plans. One more paragraph and he would have been onto the budget of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. ... [M]y, how he went on about what he wants to do as president. ... For all his Washington experience, Gore does not seem to have grasped Bush's point that a chief executive is smart to focus on a few key reforms, rather than dissipating his leadership on a crammed agenda. Or perhaps Gore just felt it necessary to throw a bone to every one of the constituency groups in the Democratic Party."

And do you really have to ask what The Dean Of Beltway Journalism thought of what Dubya said at the Repug convention in Philadelphia in 2000?

Lifted by an acceptance speech of exceptional eloquence and powered by a party enjoying unusual unity, Texas Gov. George W. Bush embarks on the final stage of his quest for the White House with prospects that almost measure up to his brimming self-confidence.

[...]

[T]he acceptance speech he delivered Thursday night was a success.

It contained almost everything good political rhetoric can provide -- humor, personal warmth, effective jibes at the opposition and glimpses of what his father, the former president, used to call "the vision thing." And Bush had rehearsed it enough to make it his own.

As Foser tells us…

Reading Broder's reaction to Bush's speech, you wouldn't have known whether Bush made mention of a single policy, proposal, or issue in his speech. You would, however, have learned that "Bush is seen by the public as a stronger leader -- and, by almost any measure, a man more likely to help cure the poisonous partisanship of the capital city."

With a superman like David Broder leading the fight for less substance and fewer details, nobody should have been surprised by Thursday night's Democratic debate, in which moderator Brian Williams asked candidates about haircuts and horse-race polls, and repeatedly dumbed down the debate with questions instructing the candidates to raise their hands in response, or to "say a name or to pass." No details, please -- our titans of journalism might nod off. Just raise your hand and move on.

Whacking Broder as if he were a piñata of sorts is easy sport I know, but his utter pomposity makes it impossible to avoid doing it. But unlike playing something like a child’s game at a birthday party, “breaking him open,” metaphorically speaking, would not yield candy I’d expect, but something else considerably more pungent and equally attractive to flies and other insects.