Page 134 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

BITES AND BLIPS 123

may be one who has concluded (with good reason) that since he
can do nothing to change politics, he can only understand it. Or he
may see all political issues in terms of being able to get some
insider on the telephone. [In any case] he is politically
cosmopolitan…. He will go to great lengths to keep from looking
and feeling like the uninformed outsider.
The goal is ‘never to be taken in by any person, cause, or event’. 5
Over the past forty years, Riesman’s inside dopester has evolved into
another type: a harsher, more brittle and cynical type still more
knowledgeable in the ways in which things really work, still more
purposefully disengaged. The premium attitude is a sort of knowing
appraisal. Speaking up is less important— certainly less fun—than
sizing up. Politics, real politics, is for ‘players’—fascinating term, for it
implies that everyone else is a spectator. To be ‘interested in politics’ is
to know how to rate the players—do they have good hands? how do
they do in the clutch? how are they positioning themselves for the next
play?
Savviness flatters spectators that they really do understand; that
people like them are in charge; that even if they stand outside the policy
elites, they remain sovereign. Keeping up with the maneuvers of
Washington insiders, defining the issues as Washington defines them,
savviness appeals to a spirit both managerial and voyeuristic. It
transmutes the desire to participate into spectacle—one is already
participating, in effect, by watching. ‘I like to watch TV’ (in the
immortal words of Chance the gardener in Jerzy Kozinski’s novel and
screenplay Being There) is the premium attitude. If you have a
scorecard, you can tell the players. The ultimate inside dopesters are the
political journalists.
Today, both advertising and political coverage flourish on, and suffer
from, what Mark Crispin Miller has called ‘the hipness unto death’. 6
Miller argues that TV advertising has learned to profess its power by
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apparently mocking it, standing aside from vulgar claims, assuring the
viewer that all of us knowing types are too smart to be taken in by
advertising—or gaucherie or passion of any kind. In the same way, the
postmodern savviness of political coverage—whether glib and smirky,
as in the preferred voice of network political experts, or sedate and
professorial, as in public television or the Sunday morning talk shows—
binds its audience closer to an eerie politics of half-truth, deceit and
evasion. If the players are adept enough to evade an issue, the savvy
spectator knows enough to lose interest in it as well.