TV Casualty | ATTACKERMAN

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TV Casualty
By: Spencer Ackerman Tuesday March 24, 2009 11:25 pm	Tweet

Ugh, finally home and exhausted. Ladies, I don’t know how you remember to take the makeup off before you fall asleep.

So you know who ended up joining me at al-Jazeera’s for Obama-presser reacts? Why, none other than Jane Hamsher. She did better than me, predictably, and somehow found a way to leave al-Jazeera to be great on Rachel Maddow as well. And as I was ending my third hit of the evening, who should come down to the first-floor studio — as isolating as a skinnerbox, it is — but last-presser-breakout-star Sam Stein. We found it hard to believe there was no repetition of the New Media anointment. You were robbed, Faiz. You too, Ambinder.

I don’t do TV very often, but I have done it intermittently for a few years now, and one thing disturbs me: it’s a format where you’re not allowed to say you don’t know something. This isn’t to criticize al-Jazeera, it’s to criticize all of TV news. Tonight I was asked about global climate-change policy. It’s something I know absolutely nothing about. I faked my way through it. Twice. In the real world I would have just confessed that I don’t know anything about it. But this is not a format conducive to real talk, and that’s why there’s so much no-nothing-ism. It’s a problem and if I’m honest I don’t have a solution because it’s not like I turn down TV appearances on general principle.

4 Comments

4 Responses to “TV Casualty”

sgwhiteinfla March 25th, 2009 at 7:27 am

This is not a criticism but a suggestion. I have seen you on Tee Vee at least twice and both times I thought you did a helluva job. But I think a lot of times we say to ourselves that we can’t do something because nobody else will do it. Sometimes not realizing that we can be a trendsetter by doing something different. Look at what Jon Stewart did to Jim Cramer. Now admittedly there was a lot of the media taking up for Cramer afterwards but there were also people in the media who had this recognition that maybe they have been cheerleading a little too much or haven’t been quite skeptical enough in their own reporting. So my suggestion is the next time you are on Tee Vee and they try to get you to opine on something you aren’t schooled in just say ”Hey, thats not my deal”. Now thats not necessarily something you have to do but just throwing it out for consideration. I would personally love to see the reaction you would get both from the host of whichever show you are on and the public at large. I would personally bet people would respect that answer a lot more than most pundits realize.