If the quality of presidents and presidential candidates is down, so too is the quality of TV network reporters who dog the candidates. There’s a TMZ-ization to the coverage of this campaign that has allowed significant issues to be trumped (and Trumped) by silly, what’s-your-favorite-color junk.
For example, the recent surge of former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum in the GOP race has been covered as just that — he has made a surge, or “gained traction,” as they now say in campaign-speak.
For the most part, all the public knows is that Santorum claims to be a strong family values man, including his devotion to religion — the two are often seen as one. Yep, faith and family; if you’re not a devout religionist you can’t love your family. Sounds like something out of the Muslim Brotherhood.
But nowhere on TV has it even been suggested that Santorum’s great regard for God and family seems to have a literary precedent in Sinclair Lewis’ “Elmer Gantry.” Santorum’s career, if anyone bothered to look, has shown steady service to the first family of cable TV sleaze, work-related drug deaths and the desensitization of kids to violence — pro wrestling’s McMahon Family.
In the late 1980s, as investigative reporter and pro wrestling chronicler Irv Muchnick (no relation) has written, Santorum served as a WWE (then WWF) lobbyist while a lawyer for the Pittsburgh firm that the McMahons still keep busy.
Two years ago, Santorum endorsed Linda McMahon in her failed run for US Senator from Connecticut.
Santorum, as a senator, also chose to be a semi-regular guest on Don Imus’ nationally syndicated radio program, a show distinguished — and for a time extinguished — for its vulgar and hateful content.
So how does an unwavering family values presidential candidate reconcile such a thing? No one, as yet, has asked.
Here’s a question that might be put to Santorum:
By 1997 Mr. and Mrs. McMahon had introduced a popular and highly marketable and imitated team of wrestlers, “D-Generation X.” Their signature move was thrusting their hands toward their crotches while hollering, “Suck it!”
Throughout North America, 13-year-old boys accosted 13-year-old girls with that gesture, accompanied by “Suck it!” Kids were suspended from school for imitating D-Generation X and for wearing the licensed T-shirts, the ones with an arrow pointing toward their genitals, sold by the McMahons.
And Mr. and Mrs. McMahon, as well as their children, would step into the ring to perform debased skits for the kids watching at home.
So how, then, Mr. Santorum, could you, as a family values advocate and candidate, have endorsed Mrs. McMahon’s candidacy to serve in the US Senate?
Or is it that you’re just another demagogue, a political hack with strongly stated convictions with nothing behind them?
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The coarsening of America now seems to extend to every TV show and under every premise. Why, for example, would a dinner time discussion of the Iowa primary on Fox News Channel include a crude expression that could get a kid sent to his room without his dinner?
On Jan. 3, Stephen Hayes, a regular contributor to FNC, spoke of a campaign that is gathering momentum. Its headquarters, said Hayes, “is taking phone calls up the wazoo.”
Geez, that’s the best he could do?
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I’m not one to see TV networks’ bias in every word of every newscast and political round table. But if George W. Bush, as president, had demanded that Iran return one of our spy planes — as President Obama recently did — Bush would have been lampooned as a clown, as if a spy plane is the same as a baseball that went over the neighbor’s fence.
Obama suffered no such ridicule.