Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting

Chapter 13 Bank Tellers and Flag Wavers

Chapter 13 Bank Tellers and Flag Wavers Cable News in the United States Toby Miller Forty-five years ago, John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s Federal Communications Commissioner, Newton Minow, called U.S. TV a “vast wasteland.”1 He was urging broadcasters to embark on enlightened Cold-War leadership, to prove the United States was not the mindless consumer world the Soviets claimed. The networks would thereby live up to their legislative responsibilities to act in the public interest by informing and entertaining. Twenty years later, Ronald Reagan’s Federal Communications Commissioner, Mark Fowler, argued that “television is just a toaster with pictures” and hence in no need of regulation, beyond ensuring its safety as an electrical appliance.2 Both expressions gave their vocalists instant and undimmed celebrity. Minow was named “top newsmaker” of 1961 in an Associated Press survey, and he was on TV and radio more than any other Kennedy official. The phrase “vast wasteland” has even, irony of ironies, provided raw material for the wasteland’s parthenogenesis: it has been the answer to questions posed on numerous TV game shows, from Jeopardy! to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?3 The “toaster with pictures” is less-celebrated, but it has been more efficacious as a slogan for deregulation across successive Administrations. Where Minow stood for public culture’s restraining (and ultimately conserving ) function for capitalism, Fowler represented capitalism’s brooding arrogance, its neoliberal lust to redefine use value via exchange value. Minow decries Fowler’s vision, arguing that television “is not an ordinary business” because of its “public responsibilities.”4 But Fowler’s phrase has won the day, at least to this point. Minow’s lives on as a recalcitrant moral irritant, rather than a central policy technology. 284 Four decades on from Minow, and two from Fowler, it seems to me that U.S. cable TV is two things: • a bank—because it has been taken over by conglomerates with little concern for or experience of media ownership’s role in democracy, and is increasingly characterized by a model of governance at a distance that informs and entertains U.S. viewers by addressing them in terms of their own financial risk and security; and • a flag—these corporations ground their otherwise rootless quest for profit in a violent, destructive nationalism that addresses U.S. citizens in terms of their physical risk and security and moral superiority over others. My case study will be recent coverage of U.S. militarism. The influence of economic discourse on news has a special power in the United States. Business advisors dominate discussions on dedicated finance cable stations like CNBC and Bloomberg, and they are granted something akin to the status of seers when they appear on MSNBC or CNN. Former Federal Reserve Chair (and husband of NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell) Alan Greenspan was filmed for decades getting in and out of cars each day as if he were en route to a meeting to decide the fate of nations, each sclerotic upturned eyebrow subject to hyper-interpretation by a bevy of needy followers. The focus is always on stock markets in Asia, Europe, and New York; reports on company earnings, profits, and shares; and portfolio management. There is a sense of markets stalking everyday security and politics, ready to punish all anxieties and any political activities that might restrain capital. The veneration, surveillance, and reportage of the markets is ever-ready to point to infractions of this anthropomorphized , yet oddly subject-free sphere, as a means of constructing moral panics around the conduct of whoever raises its ire. TV-as-bank is dedicated to knowing and furthering the discourse of money and its methods of representing everyday life, substituting for politics and history. Economic and labor news has become corporate news, and politics is measured in terms of its reception by business. In the case of the assaults of September 11, 2001, TV produced an immediate calculation of the likely impact of the attacks on Wall Street, an already-emergent recession, and the global economy. There was no critical discussion of labor issues and minimal participation by academic economists. CNBC even ran pitiful quasi-public-service announcements for the market as an indomitable force that would trump the effects of the violence.5 Bank Tellers and Flag Wavers 285 This selfish appeal to monetary gain is both ramified and legitimized by a...