Humor, partisanship, media and democracy
I can’t believe I’m writing a second post about the whole Obama/New Yorker controversy. Blame Christopher Caldwell. His take on the kerfuffle in the Financial Times gets at something that had been gnawing at me: Understanding the cartoon requires sharing the New Yorker’s prejudices, not its sophistication. Without a prior understanding that the magazine is hostile ...
I can't believe I'm writing a second post about the whole Obama/New Yorker controversy. Blame Christopher Caldwell. His take on the kerfuffle in the Financial Times gets at something that had been gnawing at me: Understanding the cartoon requires sharing the New Yorker’s prejudices, not its sophistication. Without a prior understanding that the magazine is hostile to the paranoid style in American politics and well-disposed towards the Obamas, the cartoon is unintelligible. This problem would never have come up 20 years ago, when the only people who read the New Yorker were subscribers. But today, billions of people are a mouse-click away from being New Yorker “readers”. Enough clicks and the cartoon begins to convey the opposite of what it meant to. Under the influence of a hyperdemocratic medium like the internet, you can’t say anything to anyone that won’t be heard by everyone.... In a partisan climate, any joke that rises above mere jeering will miss its mark. For half the country, the target is too decent to ridicule; for the other half, he is beneath contempt. On the eve of the primaries, 39 per cent of young Americans told the Pew Research Center they got most of their news through late-night comedy shows. So comedy has never been more important to American politics. Perhaps as a consequence, it has never been less funny. Caldwell is onto something, but I'm not sure the problem is strictly about partisanship. Methinks it's the witches brew of partisanship and the democratization of media. I've always been an optimist in thinking about how more media affects public discourse -- but it's hard to be optimistic about the way this has played out.
I can’t believe I’m writing a second post about the whole Obama/New Yorker controversy. Blame Christopher Caldwell. His take on the kerfuffle in the Financial Times gets at something that had been gnawing at me:
Understanding the cartoon requires sharing the New Yorker’s prejudices, not its sophistication. Without a prior understanding that the magazine is hostile to the paranoid style in American politics and well-disposed towards the Obamas, the cartoon is unintelligible. This problem would never have come up 20 years ago, when the only people who read the New Yorker were subscribers. But today, billions of people are a mouse-click away from being New Yorker “readers”. Enough clicks and the cartoon begins to convey the opposite of what it meant to. Under the influence of a hyperdemocratic medium like the internet, you can’t say anything to anyone that won’t be heard by everyone…. In a partisan climate, any joke that rises above mere jeering will miss its mark. For half the country, the target is too decent to ridicule; for the other half, he is beneath contempt. On the eve of the primaries, 39 per cent of young Americans told the Pew Research Center they got most of their news through late-night comedy shows. So comedy has never been more important to American politics. Perhaps as a consequence, it has never been less funny.
Caldwell is onto something, but I’m not sure the problem is strictly about partisanship. Methinks it’s the witches brew of partisanship and the democratization of media. I’ve always been an optimist in thinking about how more media affects public discourse — but it’s hard to be optimistic about the way this has played out.
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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