Last night, I first tuned to PBS to watch the final night of the Democratic National Convention. While the official speakers were talking inaudibly in the background, the PBS anchors introduced the same panel of commentators, poised to make the same lukewarm observations, as we saw on previous nights. (I complained about David Brooks’ mouth sounds in Tuesday’s forum.) Before they could start blathering, however, the anchors cut away to a reporter on the floor, to ask her what the mood was among the delegates. Questions about mood are as lazy as they are common, sadly, but journalists keep asking them. I wanted to hear who was speaking at the actual convention, instead of the meta-convention within the PBS booth, so I switched to C-SPAN.
At that moment, the Central Park Five were on stage. It was a powerful moment. The people who were wrongly convicted of rape and imprisoned for between 6 and 13 years reminded us that Donald Trump was at the head of the mob, with his infamous full-page ad demanding that they be tried and executed for a crime that they did not commit. Yusef Salaam, now a city councilman in New York, pointed the finger at Trump: “That guy says he still stands by the original guilty verdict. He dismisses the scientific evidence, rather than admit he was wrong. He has never changed, and he never will.”
There were equally meaningful moments from last night’s agenda. People whose loved ones were murdered with guns, and Gabbie Giffords, who barely survived being killed by a gunman. Chris Swanson, the Michigan sheriff who defused a protest on behalf of George Floyd by marching with the protesters. Courtney Baldwin, a former sex slave trafficked through the web site Backpage, which Kamala Harris prosecuted.
Chances are, if I had kept watching PBS, I would have missed at least some of these moments, since PBS regularly cut away from speakers during the convention. Sure, I didn’t get to hear Amy Walter tell me how Kamala Harris needed to appeal to cynical voters who doubt she is strong enough to be president, or Jonathan Capeheart remind me that the war in Gaza is a fraught issue, or David Brooks observe that gun control might find more support if Democrats are “respectful of rural America,” but I don’t feel deprived.
Which makes me wonder, what is the benefit to news outlets to having the commentariat constantly shoving their heads in front of the news? Does it help sell papers or attract viewers? Speaking only for myself, I didn’t need someone to obstruct the view of the Central Park Five, or summarize what they said, or tell me how I should feel about their moment at the DNC. Talking heads at moments like these are akin to the music you hear while on hold waiting to get to a customer support representative, noise that I don’t want interposed between me and the useful information I do want. Even worse, they’re like the giddy messages that break into the hold muzak, never telling me anything useful.
Just as no one buys an iPhone for the hold muzak while waiting for Apple technical support, no one buys The Washington Post to read Matt Bai, Michele Norris, or David Von Drehle. And yet, the Post featured a conversation among the three of them about Harris’ acceptance speech, which included various fact-free musings (“But I wonder whether the Democrats missed a chance to make more overt outreach to the Latino diaspora.”), repetition of what the candidate said (“Her closing argument focused on her competency and Trump’s contempt for democracy and American norms.”), and recitations of the blazingly obvious (“One thing that had struck me throughout the convention is the running threads of empathy and joy.”). Even worse was the Post’s utterly vacuous live chat from 10 columnists. I struggled and failed to find the link to it, even though I read it this morning. Which, if you think about it, is a good metaphor for most commentary: so vaporous that it disappears from memory almost immediately.
Do networks and newspapers think that they’re doing a public service by providing this commentary? It’s not as though opinion writers serve no useful purpose. At times, they can shine a light on something that we’ve otherwise missed. Lately, John Oliver does a good job of this, deliberately choosing off-the-beaten-track topics like hospice care, dollar stores, and McKinsey & Company for his half-comedic, half-serious longform treatment.
Commentators can also give us a very different point of view than received wisdom from other sources, or our own opinions. Christopher Hitchens, for example, was a great contrarian, willing to poke holes in the hagiography around icons like Mother Teresa and Winston Churchill. But these are the exceptions to the kind of highly predictable, not terribly challenging, and entirely forgettable commentary that fills big sections of news outlets like gravel and mulch.
The other obvious explanation, of course, is that commentary is a form of political leverage. Unflattering columns are inexpensive and easy to produce, relative to their potential impact (versus, say, investigative journalism). But the amount of leverage produced may be overstated. When was the last time that a newspaper’s endorsement had a substantial impact on an election? Did The New York Times convince Biden to drop out of the race, or did the people around him help him reach that conclusion? Is there any columnist today with the influence of a Walter Lippmann, Molly Ivins, H.L. Mencken, or even an Art Buchwald?
It’s entirely possible that there is no good argument for the amount of commentary that fills broadcast and written journalism. 24 hour news outlets are in a special category: given the constant need to fill their schedules, why not pack them full of cheap speculation? But outlets like PBS and The Washington Post don’t have the same compulsion. They can aggressively prune the amount of opinion without anyone really even noticing. No one will cancel their subscriptions to the Post if you don’t have as many people making observations such as, “Many voters were resisting Biden’s reelection not on policy grounds but simply because they thought he was too old.”
Companies often struggle with products that still exist in their portfolios, but don’t really have a strong justification for sustaining them. Sometimes, the psychic investment in making products successful is hard to overcome. Factions within the company may have strongly differing opinions on the continued importance of the product — and, of course, the people in that product group argue strongly in favor for its continuation. But it’s up to every organization to regularly ask the question, Do we still need all this? As a consumer of the news, I certainly don’t.
