Tuning Out
“Facts don’t care about your feelings” is a popular line these days. While that snarky bit of internet juvenility is part truth, part “sick burn, brah” self-flattery, ratings can be an interesting metric of how people are vetting issues based on their most precious commodity: time spent paying attention to it. In other words, they are as good a metric as we have about what facts folks are feeling enough to care about.
News coverage of special counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony before Congress Wednesday drew a sizable audience — but not as big as some other recent televised hearings.
The 7 1/2 hours of hearings, from 8:15 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. ET, drew an average of just under 13 million viewers (12.98 million) on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.
In the hearings, Mueller reiterated the findings of his report on Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election and contacts with members of Donald Trump’s campaign — including that the report did not clear the president of possible obstruction of justice.The 13 million viewers falls short of some other recent televised hearings: Former Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, for instance, drew about 16 million viewers when he testified before Congress in February. Ex-FBI Director James Comey’s 2017 appearance before Congress attracted 19.5 million and Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing averaged 20 million viewers.
However you want to divvy it up, spin it, analyze it, or otherwise talk around it, there is a definitive trend line of less and less interest at each mile post of the Mueller investigation — A downward trend. Minds are made up. The premise that former Special Counsel Robert Mueller appearing in person while congressional committees — the most intolerable of government theater that more often than not oscillates between mind-numbing boredom to cringe-worthy grandstanding — was going to captivate an audience not already overly invested in the drama by saying the same things they have for months just in the form of questions was foolish. Now we have the numbers to support that.
Before the election, the nation had nearly 70 years of book on who and what Donald J. Trump is. A well-documented book at that, with multiple books, a ubiquitous media presence, and an incessant need to be in the headlines — both news and tabloid — for decades. Almost 63 Million Americans looked at that, found their various reasonings, and voted for him anyway. Nearly 66 million did not. After three years of this story, and two years of investigation by Mueller, and 6 months of hearings since the Democratic Party decisively retook the House of Representatives in the mid-term election, the numbers aren’t lying; the needle isn’t moving among most Americans on this issue. Impeachment still remains on the wrong side of the popular opinion Mendoza line, sub-40%. Proponents of holding the president accountable will continue to cry out for legal, moral, and political justice but few not already pre-disposed to hear that message at this point is listening.
It is apparent, if objectively observed, that to a vast swath of the American people not a part of the chattering political class or dwellers of social media arguments have adapted to the onslaught and persistent presence of non-stop coverage not with outrage, engagement, or calls for action, but with the lesser talked about but most consistent of American political moods: Apathy. A great numbness to it all has set in, calcifying opinions into whatever rut they have been in for some time now, with no exit from it in sight.
“I mean I totally underestimated the degree to which people would just get sick of 24-hour-a-day talk television and talk radio and then the degree to which this whole scandal became just sort of disgusting by sheer repetition,” a shellacked Newt Gingrich said after his party lost seats in a mid-term election immediately prior to the failed impeachment of then-President Bill Clinton. But he was wrong. People weren’t disgusted by it, though they should have been, not only at the actions of President Clinton but the hypocrisy involved that brought down, among others, not one but two Republican Speakers of the House concurrent to the Clinton scandals. They just got tired of it. Numb. Apathetic. By that point the Starr probe’s origins stretched back almost 8 years, longer if you want to include the Whitewater Scandal genesis that was the point of the inquiry before Monica’s blue dress grabbed the attention of both press and populace.
We are three years into this affair, and minus bombshell new information another 16 months of the same song stuck in people’s heads is not going to endear the singers to the hearers.
All the while, the Russians, Iranians, North Koreans, and others are all taking notes on subversion and intelligence, how both our political leaders and general populace react to clear evidence that social media, traditional media, intelligence methods, and old-fashioned P2P skullduggery, can be utilized to sow chaos around an election and practically any other time. As do the oppressive rulers of China, who are far better in cyber than the others and have plenty of economic and geopolitical motives for such actions of late. These threats are clear and present dangers to our country, to the experiment of a free people self-governing that the powers-that-be of those oppressed countries cannot abide to be a shining light to the peoples of the world of what could be. But much like the present crisis, most Americans are reacting to that threat like they are the cacophony of noise purposefully perpetuated by the symbiotic relationship between president, media, and ancillary players that want to be a part of either or both, by tuning it out.
Meanwhile, those same tuned out folks not of those three groups is being further inoculated to the insanity of it all, numbed to the next time something really important needs to be discussed, apathetic to the next scandal that might be even more important but less heard than it’s predecessor. The politicians and pundits of the moment perfectly content to not worry about the fact that all current noise is like grass, soon to whither. The House of Representatives is up for re-election in only 17 months, and every two years thereafter. Trump is running for re-election now, and no matter what has a finite amount of time in office. Time and tide what for no man, but it is one fact that really does not care about the feelings, motivations, or profitability of the news cycle.
The hope against hope is that at some point a coalition of the decent can wrest enough sway to keep the ship of state somewhat on course, keep guard rails of the republic somewhat in place, and rules and laws thereof uniformly applied. Anyone not affiliated watching the Mueller hearings on Wednesday would probably consider that a forlorn hope with the present cast of characters in our political melodrama.
The tribalism, corruption and splintering of our political and societal norms displayed there is a symptom, not the sickness. If America’s way of governing dies, if the greatest experiment in a free people self-governing ends in failure, it will be from chronic, untreated, bipartisan apathy. Which will make for poor TV ratings, no doubt.
I’m a political junkie but I didn’t even bother watching the hearings. I doubt Andrew Lloyd Weber could make anything interesting out of them. I’d be curious to know how many folks here watched the testimony.
There were reportedly rumors that some Republicans had said Mueller was basically “gone” before the hearings, and not to expect much of anything from him. Quite a few Democrats on the committees must’ve heard the same.
I’m not sure what metrics Democrats use to pick committee chairs, but in a saner world the one’s they have now should have been at the bottom of the list, apparently chosen more for fanatical belief and a willingness to ignore all realities in their pursuit of a great white whale. It leads to a lot of missteps like Mueller testifying on TV.
It’s true that Trump will eventually leave the White House, but there are plenty of other Trumps who can replace him. Plus, Boris Johnson was born in New York and he’s extremely entertaining.Report
“I’m not sure what metrics Democrats use to pick committee chairs,”
Mostly, fundraising for national coffers and seniority.Report
Same metric Republicans use FWIW.Report
What I will wait to find out is whether any significant number of”persuadables” watched, and how they reacted. Like the lady we’ve all seen on TV who had been startled to learn that the Mueller Report did not say what Attorney General Cohn and Fox News said it said.Report
My guess is going to be, damn few.
Not because they didn’t want to be persuaded, but because 7 hours is a long damn time to listen to Mueller say nothing new (and he’s not exactly a riveting, dynamic speaker).Report
Define “persuadables”. What can they be persuaded about: voting for Trump, general support of Trump, support for impeachment? Second question: what would any of those persuadables have seen yesterday that would persuade them one way or another?Report
1. “persuadables”: persons whose minds are not made up, or whose views are so tentative that more information might change their minds about the matters covered by the Mueller Report and whatever implications those matters might have on their views of what to do about Trump.
2. Depends on what they already knew and what they thought based on what they already knew.Report
Apathy is also a symptom. You can’t cure it without curing the underlying disease – fear. Fear of loss of social, cultural and economic place mostly. Fear of retaliation. Fear of social banishment and public shaming.
And unlike apathy, fear has been weaponized in many ways in the political process. We see it in immigration debates, in economic debates, in gender debates, and in voting and civil rights debates. Sadly, these days its been weaponized successfully by one political ideology as armor against all others.
Hope could be weaponized, but it needs to be wrapped in a healthy dose of whats actually happening. It seems no politician is up to that challenge today – and frankly this semi-polemic isn’t either. But hope, which rebellions are famously built on, is the real solution.Report
Hope is the sword Trump wields as he rides his trusty steed (or velociraptor) in countless Internet memes. His campaign slogan is MAGA, which is like Superman’s ‘S’. We’re going to make America not just the greatest country on Earth, because we were already that, but the greatest country in the history of the expanded universe!
This is in stark contrast to the Democrat candidates who are campaigning to overthrow our white-supremacist Nazi regime that runs concentration camps, makes students pay for college, mis-genders people, and is the fetid source of all the oppressive bigoted evil in the world.
How did we end up here? Largely Trump derangement syndrome. Every morning Trump gets up and makes a choice. He can support something good, in which case Democrats will oppose it, or he can oppose something bad, in which case Democrats will support it. Yesterday AG Barr said he was going to re-institute the federal death penalty and listed five people on death row, all of whom are child murderers, and at least one of them has an Aryan Nations tattoo on his neck. Sure enough, the squad rushed to their defense – in the run-up to an election year.
The vastly wiser, sane, trustworthy Democrats can hardly get any press coverage because the media has decided to turn DC into a reality show, and hurling Molotov cocktails gets ratings. And frankly, most of the senior Democrat leadership is about as interesting and old as the Politburo, while the student-protest wing of the party runs amok in front of the cameras.Report
Apathy isn’t a symptom of fear, it’s a defense mechanism. It’s a mental callous that forms because people just need to get through the day, even if they want to to care about X.
And while I agree with you that our political class is the source of the fear people are experiencing, let’s not forget that the media and activists are the whips that constantly lash at us, until those callouses form. Doesn’t matter if the whipping is because the media wants ratings/clicks, or if it’s because the activists honestly think yelling at everyone just one more time, and a little bit louder now, will finally bring them around.Report
It’s also what happens when you are the only customer in sight and there are two-hundred hungry ad-men, politicians, and activists across the street, eyeing each other other warily right before they make a mad dash to your door to try to make sure that they are the one that gets their foot in you door and makes the sale. And they do it every couple of hours, if not even more frequently.
Even someone who feels passionately gets burnt out when they have to care with all their hearts about polar bears, and then whales, and seals, and California sea otters, and over fishing, and plastic straws, and deforestation, and wind turbines, and nuclear plants, and coal miners, and offshore oil drilling, and electric cars, and deforestation, and Syrian refugees, and Guatemalan migrants, and Russian bots, white supremacy, House Resolution 1234, campus rape, transfats, Trump, Trump, Trump, and, lest we forget, red cockaded woodpeckers, the Book of Mormon, and water filters that will remove 99.9% of toxins from your tap so you don’t poison your children. And to compete, each pitch has to crank it up to eleven to drown out all the other causes vying for your attention.
And then most people realize that the importance isn’t really eleven for any of them. It’s maybe a two, otherwise none of us would be chatting about TV shows and movies. When I see some bug-eyed fanatic with veins popping out of his forehead, I know that he’s going to deliver one of those impassioned sales pitches where he screams that his cause should rate an eleven on my personal importance scale, if not a twelve, and I flip the channel to see what Supergirl is up to.
It’s a form of exhaustion, but also a form of wisdom. Many environmentalists, who used to compete with each other over things like wetlands restoration versus invasive species versus urban sprawl, have complained that global warming sucked up all the resources. When it became a catch all for every environmental issue, it also Hoovered up all the money and public attention because exasperated folks could just focus on supporting the one big theoretical cause instead of worrying themselves to death over 250 localized environmental problems. “Wetland restoration doesn’t matter if we’re all going to drown because people didn’t vote for Inslee in the primaries!” It offered a time and guilt saving shortcut, much like flavors of Christianity where you just accept Jesus as your personal savior and never again have to worry about your conscience or actually helping anyone around you.
So the people who’ve opted for the big environmentalist shortcut shouldn’t complain too much when they note a lack of passion and attention to political minutiae out there. What small spotlight that still exists came by taking a bunch of other such shortcuts to whittle down people’s daily “get-worried-sick-over X” lists.Report
Case in point. Think Progress just posted that We have only 14 months to save the climate.
Saying we only have 12 years till mass extinction wasn’t getting them up high enough on people’s priority lists.
Q: What threat are we facing?
A: A planet destroying apocalypse!
Q: When will it hit?
A: Shortly after your check would have cleared if you don’t send me money now!
How can poor Jerry Nadler compete for oxygen except to scream that we must impeach Trump even before you can get your check book out?Report
Do you care to understand the underlying science? I actually do, and its stark. Sure, many of the impacts are still years to decades away, but not starting to do something now means we have fewer choices later.
Case in point – there’s a four lane US highway down the street from me that runs along one of the Gulf Coast’s tourist beaches. Its a lifeline for local economic activity as well, and its built on an old streetcar road bed. It also floods on a good strong onshore wind and spring tide, now, where it didn’t a decade a go. That’s all due to sea level rise, and as the mean high tide line inches closer to that road over the next decade or two it will become permanently impassible unless its moved or elevated. And we do have a short and closing window to do something about human contributions to the global climate crisis, or we will be locked in to either abandoning or raising the road in a dace or so. At enormous costs.
Apparently I’m nuts to think we should do something about that. So too it seems Think Progress is.Report
So you want to trap the third world into another century of grinding poverty because you’re too lazy to repave your little beach road?
That’s Western environmentalism in a nutshell.Report
I want nothing of the sort. I want the US to make different choices about what we do, so our own people don’t loose what we’ve gained.Report
Well, you’re going to have to go overseas and convince India and China to quit pumping out staggering amounts of CO2. We could drop our CO2 emissions to zero and the oceans would keep on going up, since China passed us up a long time ago as the world”s top emitter. India is just ramping up, as is Brazil.
Considering just those three countries (India, China, and Brazil), our emission are currently only about 40% as large as theirs. As they reach the per-capita emission levels of Poland or Germany, we’ll only be emitting 20% as much as they do. The emissions of all four countries will double, but we won’t be to blame, they will! Good news, eh!
You either have to roll with it or figure out how to keep them, and everyone else in the developing world, mired in poverty in perpetuity, or figure that advanced nuclear or space-based solar power will fix the problem. Wind turbines won’t do it because most of those countries don’t have hardly any wind.
And look on the bright side. Though they won’t admit, liberals and progressives love global warming, so much that they’re not willing to wait a century for 2 C of warming, they want it right now.
So they moved to large built up cities where they can get about 2 C of urban heat island effect because frankly, we evolved on the African savanna and this planet is still too freakin’ cold for us. So we’re going to turn arctic wastelands into a tropical paradise.
The dramatic change started in the big cities, and a liberals flocked in to take advantage of the warmer climate, and now we’re going to let more rural people also reap the rewards. We’re not going to let you hog all the warmth while you institute policies designed to keep us poor and freezing.Report
India and China are in compliance with their Paris Accord targets. China has reduced coal fired emissions 40% in something like 5 years – ironically as a public health issue as it was killing hundreds of thousands of their workers. China is also adding wind and solar faster then any other nation. But sure, lets not do anything until they do.Report
China’s coal consumption dropped from about 4.25 billion tons in 2013 to around 3.5 billion tons in 2015, and has been going up ever since, and last year was 3.87 billion tons.
In 2000 they only produced 1 billion tons and in 2004 produced 2 billion tons. They crossed 3 billion tons back in 2010. Despite dropping back for about two years, consumption is on the rise and projected to keep on increasing. They may cross 4 billion tons this year.
In contrast, US consumption is 0.77 billion tons, exactly five times less than China’s.
Remember back in 2000 when we were facing a climate crisis because both countries produced a combined 2 billion tons? Good times. China alone is now producing twice that, with no signs of stopping.Report
“I’ll take false dilemmas for $1000, Alex”Report
It’s not nuts to think we should do something about it.
But I have only so many hours in a day to focus on things that impact me daily life*. One of the things the internet and the 24 hour news cycle has done is perpetrated a near constant state of decision/attention/outrage fatigue on everyone. If a given issue is not something you have impacting you directly enough, chances are pretty good you do not have the mental capacity to do more than acknowledge that X is something that deserves someone’s attention.
But not much more of my attention, mine’s already used up.
*Yes, climate change impacts my daily life, but not as profoundly as my need to make money to support my family, or my need to pay attention to my household, or my need to decompress on a regular basis.Report
Ha, there are population centers that have pumped so much ground water to supply demand they are experiencing land subsidence at the same time as minor tide increases.
Two feet of subsidence is going to make these rising tides pretty comical.
Now if we had to pump a lot more water for a larger population, hahaha.Report
There was an post on Daily Intel this week about how Donald Trump might be the first President to really hit peak polarization. 90 percent of Republicans approve of his performance. A similar number of Democrats disapprove of his performance. What is more is that numbers are for strong approval and strong disapproval. 80 percent of Democrats strongly disapprove of Trump. 72 percent of Republicans strongly approve of Trump.
It is impossible to have a neutral or meh opinion about the man. This is especially true as the parties become more polarized and have become ideological and not practical actors. In a sane political environment, parties would change or moderate positions to win votes. But maybe this world never existed. Look at the California GOP, they largely turned themselves into a rump party that cannot win a state-wide race. Sometimes they cannot even make it into the general election in a jungle primary. You would think that they would find a way to moderate and become more attractive to voters. The California GOP should probably be a kind of “socially liberal but fiscally moderate” party. Except that does not happen. The California GOP decided it would rather own the libs and troll rather than be old-school Rockefeller Republicans that win elections in a blue state like CA.* This further accelerates their decline.**
*Despite our reputation, SF usually elects more moderate and business friendly Democrats to positions bigger than Board of Supervisors because we are small enough that city-wide elections depend on courting the total of San Francisco. You need to get the votes of well-to-do professionals in Noe Valley, hipsters/techies in the Mission, and more working class people in Bayshore/Hunter’s Point/Vistacon Valley, middle class voters in Midtown Terrace, etc.
**There is a small but loud group of Bay Area Republicans. In wealthier communities like Portola Valley, Alamo, Danville, Black Hawk they can be about 43 percent of the population (my cynical guess is that the husbands are Republicans and the wives are Democrats). A lot of these guys seem to have learned everything they needed to know about politics from Ronald Reagan and have not changed. A friend of mine said her boss sent out some kind of letter about how no one should vote Democratic and public transportation is evil socialism. This is in the Bay Area. Not exactly going to win friends and influence people. The thing is that there are plenty of people in the Bay Area who are probably fiscally moderate to conservative but look at the GOP and say “they sure hate gays and brown people” and want to stay away.Report
We keep saying we can’t normalize Trump, because it is very easy for people to adjust to even bizarre circumstances.
The way Berliners found it bizarre to wake up and see coils of razor wire strung across streets, but then slowly adjusted to the Wall and eventually just accepted it as the new normal.
I am reading a book currently about the fall of the Roman republic, written in 2002.
It is interesting, the parallels- the Romans lost their republic because they accepted the repeated assaults on the cultural and political norms that supported it.
They spoke about citizenry and equality of Romans but accepted corruption and class hierarchy with a fatalistic shrug.
I really do think we are at one of those historic inflection points, one which will mark a chapter in some future history book. We’re facing a test of our true beliefs- do we really value liberal democracy, a republic where we are all equal citizens, or will we accept an ethnic apartheid state where one ethnic group holds power?Report
“because they accepted the repeated assaults on the cultural and political norms”
The reason that they accepted the assaults is because in a state of decadence, things are so rotten there is little seen worth saving, which is pretty much the way I look at ‘liberal democracy’. Liberals have picked their ingroups/outgroups for 60 years now, which contradicts a republic, so here it is, ending in so many whimpers.Report
says you. There’s a lot worth saving in the US but its going to require a common set of goals, compromise, – turn your libertarian heart over twice – government to enforce.
and conservatives have also spent decades picking in/out groups and enforcing the divisions, with way more success then liberals.Report
common goals? compromise? hahaha, remember about the 1,764,982,849 time conservatives compromised and the next day it was all about them being bigots? That straw that broke the tolerance was a few mile markers back. Hell you guys even fished up libertarian tolerance and that’s fishing really, really hard to do.
Maybe it would have been a lot better plan to just leaving people alone, and not been a faction of Progressive annoyers.Report
The thing about normalizing Trump though is that is stubbornly polls the same. Is this proof of Trump being normalized? Not being normalized? Both?Report
I listened to some of the highlights on NPR on my commute home. Mueller sounded like a broken record, when he wasn’t sounding like a senile old man, while the question askers each spent more time crafting a narrative his answers were to highlight. I could have fallen asleep to the Q&A and it revealed nothing…nothing new. And we’re talking NPR, not Fox. If NPR broadcast a snooze fest, who do you think would care except the damn fringes?Report