Most people don’t watch cable news, but enough do as to distribute approximately one at every Thanksgiving table. So it is those of us who will fly home this year wanting to talk about literally anything other than politics — the AFC East, Ecuadorian gang life, the Third Law of Thermodynamics — instead will have to listen to yet another rant by Uncle Mortimer about how January 6 was done by George Soros and the Umbrella Corporation. And isn’t Cousin Trevor, who only ever wanted Mortimer to pass the damned cranberry sauce, one of them CNN-loving Antifa vaxxers? Cable news caricaturing thus follows us home, and makes us sound a lot like caricatures ourselves.
Edmund Burke once rebuked the French, “Your legislators seem to have taken their opinions of all professions, ranks and offices from the declamations and buffooneries of satirists.” This is our problem as well. Caricatures are supposed to be the province of comedians, who use them to simplify and spoof. And once upon a time they were, which is why the genesis of modern cable news is the aforementioned Jon Stewart. It was Stewart who pioneered the art of clipping Fox News videos out of context and milking them for attention. Now everyone else on cable is ripping off his act.
And I do mean everyone. Tune in to MSNBC right now and you very well might find Stephanie Ruhle responding to Laura Ingraham responding to Chris Cuomo responding to Sean Hannity responding to Rachel Maddow responding to Fox and Friends responding to Don Lemon responding to the ghost of Walter Winchell responding to Skeletor. It’s like a Narcissus infinity mirror. There are simply too many of these drama merchants to trace their complaints all the way on down. Which perhaps is the point: outrage rarely sprouts from deep roots.
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