Sanity Rally Redux

The New York Time’s David Carr has written the smartest take to date on the “Rally to Restore Sanity.” He says funnyman Jon Stewart “took steady aim on the one American institution that everyone can agree to hate: The Media.”

In what Carr called a “deft, very articulate stump speech” at rally’s end, Stewart criticized the news media as “the country’s 24-hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator.” Stewart conceded that the press “did not cause our problems,” but said that “its existence makes solving them that much harder.” So true.

But Carr noted something that has been missing from the dialogue:

But here’s the problem: Most Americans don’t watch or pay attention to cable television. In even a good news night, about five million people take a seat on the cable wars, which is less than 2 percent of all Americans. People are scared of what they see in their pay envelopes and neighborhoods, not because of what Keith Olbermann said last night or how Bill O’Reilly came back at him.

Carr added that Stewart referenced the brouhaha over the recent firings of CNN’s Rick Sanchez and NPR’s Juan Williams. Carr states: “All due respect to Mr. Williams and Mr. Sanchez, not many people know or care who they are.”

Carr is right. His observations are revelatory, and provide a useful reminder that most of the disheartening chatter we hear inside the cable news bubble goes unheard outside of it. Fox News then, is only a big fish in a small pond. Symbiotically-connected political bloggers – with their minute by minute sensationalizing – like to claim the Internet’s infinite galaxy as their oyster. Fortunately, political biology restricts them to the same waters as CNN, MSNBC and Fox. Thus, their ravings are even more obscure to the general public.

That said, I’d still argue that the cable news complex remains influential in terms of shaping macro public opinion, and the actions of the political elite who run the country. And it only takes one person to contaminate, say, a barber shop with the erroneous or bias “news” he heard last night on MSNBC or Fox News.

Still, when conservative blowhards like Sean Hannity, nutcases like Glenn Beck or liberal firebrands like Keith Olbermann and Ed Schultz go off the deep end (something they do often), it’s nice to know that most Americans are blissfully unaware of The Media’s almost daily, panicky predictions of apocalypse. Indeed, it is why I can still sleep at night.