The Hannity Prophecy
From H.L. Mencken’s diary, 1940:
My guess is that in the long run the newspapers will lose their more moronic customers to the radio. … The function of a newspaper in a democracy is to stand as a sort of chronic opposition to the reigning quacks. The minute it begins to try to out-whoop them it forfeits its character and becomes ridiculous. I believe that many people already notice this deterioration, and that is responsible to some extent for the movement toward the radio.
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That’s an interesting commentary on the effects of mass communications and democracy on each other. But regarding Hannity, I have a question. If we were an organized political movement rather than a dyspeptic remnant, and Murdock were funding us, wouldn’t we have our own version of Hannity simplifying our message beyond all recognition? Politics in a Democratic mass culture demands propaganda. And to steal a line from movie advertising, Hannity IS propaganda. They use gasbags like Hannity because he effectively communicates the neo-con and establishment message to a TV audience of simpletons. And getting the largest number of simpletons to vote you into office is what we call politics.
Or perhaps a paleo-con FOX news would sound more like this. “And now from Moscow, Dan Larison who asks, What Would St. Maximos Do?” “And after that, David Lindsay weighs in with the Old Labor, Catholic Medieval view”
Newspapers-at least the morning ones-were doing fine until the internet came along. But I think most people were reading them for
sports, horoscopes, advice columns, “lifestyle” tripe and the advertisements. The extent of the popular appetite for serious news can be deduced from the fact that “journals of opinion” are-and always have been- subsidized money-losers.
“The function of a newspaper in a democracy is to stand as a sort of chronic opposition to the reigning quacks.”
They gave up that function a long time ago. The NYT Science section being an occasional exception to the rule.
On democratic politics and the press: Not even the most demented Trotskyist could deny that Enoch Powell was a genuine intellectual, yet the press reduced his career to one taken-out-of-context phrase.
This brings to mind the fact that another intellectual, Mel Bradford, was very active in the Wallace campaigns of 1968 and 1972. During the NEA appointment controversy I don’t believe that any controversial pro-Wallace statements of his surfaced. How did he manage that? All the brouhaha seemed to be about his rough treatment of Dictator Lincoln.
Mr Meehan,
Thanks for the Friday laugh before my Friday commute.
Jack, your welcome. Anything to relieve the earnestness.