What You See Is What You Get: An Excerpt from The Bush Dyslexicon

By Mark Crispin Miller, AlterNet. Posted June 5, 2001.

If Bush had won legitimately, we could say that we'd got the President that we deserve. His "message" having played well on TV, and the audience having picked him by a clear majority (both electoral and popular), he would be the people's choice, and that would be the end of it.

But the situation now is highly complicated – and not just because of the shenanigans in Florida and on the Supreme Court. For Bush owes his unlikely victory not only to those party flacks and goons who forced the issue, nor only to the Rehnquist Five, but also to TV. Although he never played well on the medium per se, TV was very, very good to him; because the network that controls the medium – from above, and from the anchor-desks and pundit-chairs – embraced him, and implicitly endorsed him, for several reasons.

First of all, there is the great extrinsic factor of the media's corporate ownership, the top managers and major share-holders preferring the aggressively big-merger-friendly GOP to the less-aggressively big-merger-friendly Democrats. Al Gore had many champions in Hollywood, of course, including all the top pro-Clinton heavyweights from Michael Eisner on down. (Even Rupert Murdoch was a quiet Gore supporter.) A tough New Democrat somewhat to Clinton's right, Gore was never threatening to the interests of the corporate media, for all his pulpit-thumping with Joe Lieberman.

Nevertheless, the media's parent companies will do much better, and clean up much faster, now that they have Bush to play with, since he's for corporate concentration above all (literally). Nor will his FCC – now chaired by Colin Powell's son Michael, an adamant free-marketeer – discuss even the feeblest sort of regulation, whereas his predecessor, Bill Kennard, did try now and then. The media-corporate bias toward the Governor was evident, for example, in MSNBC's decision to show repeatedly, throughout the five-week civil war in Florida, its dubious Hail-Caesar documentary on Desert Storm – an obvious stroke of pro-Bush programming, certainly approved, if not dictated, by the network's corporate dad and mom, GE and Microsoft.

And yet there is another, deeper reason for the medium's strong pro-Bush bias (which the Brookings Institution documented just a week after election day). Although Bush plays badly on the medium, the TV system as we know it is his natural ally – because both it and he are all about mere "message." Both of them, in other words, are all about TV, and nothing else.

This is nothing new for Bush, a calculating sort from way, way back, but on TV it was not ever thus. For many years – indeed, from McLuhan's day – both observers and practitioners of campaign propaganda entertained the question of exactly where to find the proper balance between word and image, argument and spectacle, issue and impression. The comfortable assumption was that those two categories were entirely separate, fixed, alike, resilient and both perfectly amenable to expert handling by the news professionals, who, if they were careful, could strike the crucial balance, and so both entertain and edify their audience.

But now there is very little place for "substance" – or, indeed, for any rational discourse – on TV for formal, political and economic reasons. As the networks have developed it, the medium is far too speedy, loud, disjunctive and sensational to permit a complex sentence (much less an idea). The heavy pressure of the advertisers, furthermore, forbids the airing of whatever issues might be either too depressing or too complicated for the venue's crucial atmosphere of lite festivity – a non-stop pseudo-carnival that never can slow down, or else someone might lose money.

Into this tightly regulated riot of commercial propaganda every politician has to fit his/her own propaganda "message" – and, if s/he's lucky, also has to fit him or herself, looking "nice" enough (with just the right amount of Self-Effacing Humor) and sounding "clear" enough (without alarming anyone) to keep from standing out as "stiff," "robotic," "wooden" or in any other way ridiculous. With such smooth integration all "political" success has everything to do image – which, by and large, leaves out telling truth, or making sense.

Thus Bush belongs in the culture of TV. He fits in, not despite his open calculation and the utter superficiality of his (overt) concerns, but because of them. Such defects don't disturb the pundits of today, most of whom – whatever medium they work in – cannot even see what's wrong with Bush, so steeped are they themselves in TV's trivial worldview. Our President's most calculating predecessors weren't so lucky, their over-concentration on mere spin arousing strong objections back in those less TV-saturated days.

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