01/14/2004: 
Stuff That Doesn't Suck
C- Span, and How it Rules
The other night, I was watching deep cable (defined as any channel over #100) with prof_booty. We started watching the Phillipines Evening News on the International Channel, which was informing in an expand your brain kind of way. After that, I started flipping around and finding stuff like the gay black guy from "Designing Women" ride a horse on a Discovery Channel spinoff channel. Disgusted that my money was going towards this, I turned to C- Span, and Howard Dean was on, doing his stump speech in Iowa somewhere, taking questions from the audience, and generally pressing the flesh. I watched it for about 15 minutes, watching the political process unfold without commentary or flashy graphics telling me the terror alert TM status or the weather in Cheyenne, just pure uncut Howard Dean. Did you know he has a bald spot?
Watching this uncut feed was absolutely fascinating to me. I know many find C- Span boring beyond words, but watching politics unfold without commentary allows one, if you can stay awake, to form your own opinion about an issue, or in this instance, a candidate. I realized that before I had caught this broadcast, I had never seen Howard Dean speak a complete sentence! All I know about him is his face superimposed over something else while a talking head talks about him, or a 3- second clip of him which is overdubbed by someone talking about him, and if I'm lucky, I might hear him say one thing which is about how bad Bush, Jr, is. The next day, I discovered via the "news" that before the prof_ and I had tuned in, someone in the audience had called him out about his Bush, Jr.- bashing and Dean said something about Bush, Jr. being a bad neighbor, and this clip was played repeatedly while talking heads ran to defend or defame Dean. Watching him campaign uncut allowed me to clarify my opinion of him.
What is this leading to? Well, I constantly harp on the fact that if you don't pay attention to the government, you can't fight back. How can millions of people form opinions about issues and candidates if they merely watch TV news? Do we really live in a country where millions of voters choose who will lead the free world because they are more attractive than the other candidate? And you wonder why the last election ended in a tie?
4 Annotations Submitted
Wednesday the 14th of January, rafuzo noted:
C-SPAN is indeed the bomb. It's about as close to source material as cable gets these days, and it's lack of regular viewership is telling. I learned the lesson you did years ago by watching Newt Gingrich speeches on C-SPAN and realizing that, while I may disagree with some of his ideas and policies, his justifications for them are interesting and nuanced and he is hardly the firebreathing hatemonger that so many bumper stickers made him out to be. Just like TV news, everyone took select bites of things that he said, often out of context, and created the monster.
Your latter point, while worthwhile, I think misses a subtle point: that our government, indeed our society, are both solid enough that we can elect people like Clinton and Bush based on attractiveness and not have our worlds explode as a result. We are awfully lucky that idiots who have no better opinion on politics than what they read in Time or see on NBC News can elect someone and not end up face down in a ditch or in a gulag.
Wednesday the 14th of January, prof_booty noted:
check out http://www.c-span.org/
Wednesday the 14th of January, crazywriterinla noted:
To be honest, I've never heard any democratic candidate speak for more than a few words. I love how much power the media gets in these elections. It makes you wonder if the cost of the freedom of speech that the media takes so for granted is worth the general populous having such little idea about what really goes on in government, seeing as though we all know that most elections are now media based and barely based on politics.
Thursday the 15th of January, santo26 noted:
Interesting, Mr. Rafuzo- I began watching C-Span lo those many years ago for the same reasons- something that NBC News was describing as the "Republican Revolution" had happened, and it sounded indeed like Newt Gingirch was one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Watching him on C-Span (or is it C-SPAN?) made me begin to question my assumptions about politics, a tradition I continue to this day.
Perhaps if I wasn't about to get out of work I would have crafted a better conclusion, but I stand by my work. Also, it is not as if we have lost the magical power of nominating the presidential candidates. Where the politicians once emerged from a smoke- filled room to nominate the candidate, the media now focuses on the anointed "front- runner" to the detriment of the coverage of the other candidates, who may or may not be better qualified.
