The Entertainment Value of the Nightly News

It seems that when the Romans changed from the Republic to the Empire, around the time that Christ was born, they kept the people quiet by providing them with food and entertainment. Panes et circenses was what they called it back then: Bread and Circuses.

By circuses, they did not mean Le Cirque du Soleil, although that was a part of what was going on back then. It referred more to the large circular building which housed their entertainment. Among the Greeks, the circle was the amphitheatre, a big circle with one side devoted to the seats, while the other side was the stage in which those who sat in the seats were entertained. But among the Romans, the circle consisted of the seats surrounding the central stage. One of the best examples of that type of structure was the Coliseum of Rome.

The Greeks would have dramas and comedies, with an occasional bit of baudy of the Satyr-plays thrown in for comic relief. I’m told that one of the few examples we have of this is that an average evening would start with, say, a drama of Helen of Troy just before Troy’s fall. Then there would be a Satyr-play, in which a number of young men dressed only in furry chaps and long leather dildos strapped in the appropriate places would prance about the stage and discuss gang raping Helen. Then there would be a comedy, maybe one including the antics which happened when Agamemnon returned home from the Trojan wars with his trophy bride, Cassandra, only to find that his first wife, Clytemnestra, had already found a boy toy of her own. I’m also told that Cassandra had the last word: “I told you so.” But no one was listening.

Among the less cultured Romans, things were a bit simpler: they would have entertainments including dancers and acrobats. Then they would have sports, including boxing, horse races, and teams battling one another. Then they would end the evening with a comedy of a brainless rich family taken care of by a smart slave. As a matter of fact, this sort of comedy was updated and turned into the Broadway play and movie A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Modern examples of this sort of comedy can be found in such sitcoms as The Nanny, The King of Queens, Everyone Loves Raymond, et cetera, ad nauseum.

Because the ancient Roman comedy so perfectly matched the modern sitcom, I decided to see whether there might be other matches between the past of bread and circuses and the present of rebates and TV. And behold: I found that there was an exact match. For the upper classes, there are PBS, Discovery, Biography and BBC America. For the lower classes, there are VH1, MTV, Spike, and what used to be called The Big Three. And for those who favor the modern equivalent of the satyr-play, there is Pay-Per-View.

There was, however, one little known aspect of the ancient Greek and Roman drama which I at first thought had no modern analogue. There was a stand up comic, who sat in the seats among the people, whose job was to take attention away from the main stage when the real actors, dancers and athletes were setting up for the next event. This stand-up comic was called the Hypocrite.

The Hypocrite’s job was quite simple, and quite effective: He would draw the laughter and scorn of the people in the seats by ostentatiously condemning them for doing the same things that he himself was doing. “You know,” bawled the Hypocrite, “I really hate it when people yell during intermission!!!. And I hate it even more when people are drinking wine in the seats (glug-glug-glug). And most of all, I hate it when people drop their bottles and let them roll into other seats (clank!, bounce-bounce-bounce).”

Now, we’ve seen occasional examples of this sort of thing among the so-called religious on television, and it is vastly amusing when it happens. The most amusing example of this in recent years was the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart, who on his television show was condemning the sinful, including such ”sinners” as Mother Teresa, even during the time that it was becoming more and more evident that he was engaging in acts which made even the real sinful blush, or to look on in admiration for his audacity.

Then I suddenly realized that there was an exact parallel with the Hypocrite and modern examples. It was the nightly newscasters and the political commentators. Here are a group of people whose supposed education is vaunted as teaching them to be objective presenters of the news; people who will go out of their way to give an impartial, accurate, and complete view of the world around them, and who will give equal time to all important views. What a laugh, when this ideal is compared with what they actually do!

One of the most amusing examples of this sort of humor can be found in the way that most newscasters decided to keep quiet about the peccadillos of Senator John Edwards of the Eeyore Party. It seems that Mr. Edwards, while he was so supposedly solicitous about his wife of many years, who was suffering from cancer, had been having a long term affair with one of his employees, and had been paying this woman considerable sums of money, either to keep her quiet, or to help support the child which he had fathered upon her.

We only learned about Edwards because one tabloid journalist kept investigating the matter until finally he caught Edwards in a hotel with this woman. And it seems that the rest of the press, while they knew what was happening, said and did nothing, because Edwards was first a presidential candidate, and then a possible vice-presidential candidate, and the press considered this to be “just a family matter.”

Of course, when Governor Palin of Alaska was announced as the Heffalump Party’s vice-presidential candidate, it took the press no time at all to reveal that Palin’s daughter was pregnant, to insinuate (falsely, it appears) that Palin’s fifth child was actually her daughter’s first, and to bring up the fact that Palin’s husband had twenty years ago had had a DUI, among the many other things which have been revealed in the last four days. Did the press once stop because all of these things neither concerned Palin directly, and until recently, were also considered to be “family matters”? What equanimity. What impartiality. What decency to Palin’s family. What a laugh!

And then there’s the fact that for the last sixteen years, the Eeyore party has been turning out presidential candidates weak on foreign policy experience. First there was former Bill Clinton, who proclaimed himself as a “domestic policy first” president, who had no knowledge of foreign policy as an Arkansas governor, and who slept through foreign policy briefings both during his candidacy and the first four years of his presidency. Then there was Al Gore, who was the classic example of Dr. Johnson’s withering rebuke: “There is a man who has but one idea, and that a wrong one!”

And then there was John Kerry, who as member of the Senate Intelligence Committee missed nine-tenths of its meetings, apparently read none of its findings, and followed Bill Clinton’s example in avoiding any briefing on intelligence reports and foreign policy during his candidacy. Finally, there is Barack Obama, whose foreign policy experience appears to consist of giving a speech four years ago and campaigning in this country, with one junket to the Mid-East and Europe about a month or so ago. Did our impartial press raise any outcry about these matters as disqualifications for any of these presidential candidates? Not to my memory.

But when Governor Palin, who has had more executive experience than any of the other three candidates combined, who is the governor of a state whose nearest neighbors include Russia, China, Korea and Canada, and whose state averages four billion dollars a year in trade to twenty nations, including the four named above, is chosen as vice-presidential candidate, do our impartial press and political commentators possibly give the benefit of the doubt to this experience? Do they consider that the vice-presidency has always been a world-class foreign policy apprenticeship, or that Governor Palin appears to be a quick study? Again, it is to laugh.

And finally, the press appeared to have debated among itself, during the contest between Obama and Clinton, and decided that yes, Ms. Clinton deserved to be treated as a legitimate candidate, and that this was supposedly no place for sexist characterizations. Has any of that slack been given to Governor Palin? That’s the funniest thing yet!

But the most amusing thing of all, other than that the press still considers itself to be journalists and not comedians, is that its members appear to be clueless as to why readership of newspapers or viewership of television news programs are declining so precipitiously. That is for two reasons: 1) any one who wishes to know what is actually happening is going straight to Reuters, Lexis/Nexis or is reading the (free) online foreign and domestic newspapers, and otherwise bypassing paying the press entirely, either through subscriptions or via advertising; and 2) as comedians, the newscasters and commentators really aren’t all that entertaining.

A number of years ago, the comedian Will Rogers solemnly announced that he was in fact a journalist: he “just read the papers and reported the news.” I find that I can do the same thing, simply by pointing out what American journalists preach and what they actually do.

And that is the funniest thing of all!