Through the eyes of Frank Rich, a non-stop media circus

In an era when such a staggering amount of news is so readily available, it would follow that the American public would be more informed than ever.

Not so, said Frank Rich, op-ed columnist for The New York Times, who charged that the presentation of news has become a never-ending circus show -- continually blurring the line between fact and fiction -- meaning we may not be as informed as we would like to think.

"This is where we are as a culture," Rich said Nov. 9 at Camp Concert Hall. "Politics and entertainment are so intertwined that the government can seize control of our culture and actually create false stories, such as the [Iraq] war, among other things. It's hard to distinguish between truth and what Stephen Colbert has aptly named 'truthiness,'" a term referring to what a person might want the facts to be, rather than what they actually are.

Rich talked about the intersection of politics, culture and art -- a topic he is well versed on as The Times' Sunday columnist and the paper's former drama critic, a position he held for 14 years.

Growing up in Washington, D.C., Rich said he had learned there was no correlation between the elaborate stage-sets of American democracy -- the White House and Washington Monument, among them -- and the way government actually worked.

"In politics ... the strings are being moved backstage and obscured from public view," Rich said Nov. 10 to a handful of journalism student in Keller Hall. "And you're being given a show. To me, it's a natural progression [from theater critic to columnist.]"

THE ELECTION

On the election, Rich said Republicans needed to admit President-elect Barack Obama was a formidable candidate, instead of blaming their party for McCain's loss.

"McCain was never really beloved by his own party," he said. "Frankly, I think I was surprised with how quickly the Republican Party forgot him. Everybody's talking about Palin."

Rich dismissed the idea that McCain had lost because he didn't stay true to his persona throughout the campaign during a conversation with several Collegian reporters.

"[McCain] said repeatedly he didn't know anything about the economy," he said. "And he never learned about it. That's a real character flaw that has nothing to do with the old McCain or the new McCain."

But Rich also expressed cautioned optimism about Obama's incoming administration, which will be coming into power during an economic crisis and two wars.

"We should be worried about Obama," he said. "He's not the most accessible person to the press. This is a guy who is brilliant at stagecraft and executes it well. And the press doesn't always get the difference between reality and theater."

CHANGES IN MASS MEDIA

The media's evolution during the past five years is a phenomenon Rich has ruthlessly examined, to the point of obsession, he said.

"It's hard to tell where information ends and entertainment begins," Rich said. "It sucks the air out of our national discourse, and takes over our governments, our culture and everything else, including our financial business world."

Rich is widely known for his blistering commentary against the Bush administration, the national news media and what he says were its failures throughout the 2008 election to correctly predict events, including its assumption that Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic presidential nominee.

The formation of what Rich calls the 24/7 "mediathon" emerged during the late 1970s with the hit television show "Roots," which chronicled the history of the African-American experience in the form of a weekly mini-series. At the time, the genre was heavily fictionalized, glamorized and over-sexed, but "Roots" came across as non-fictional, ushering in an entirely new form of television, he said.

Cut to the early 1990s, when the first 24-hour cable television network, CNN, debuted. It was widely derided as a folly, but CNN executives were quick to realize they could take a real-time news event -- in this case the Gulf War -- and turn it into a mini-series, branding it with a logo and its own theme music, all while producing it cheaply.

"CNN discovered something that revolutionized American communications," Rich said. "Anyone would go on TV for free and talk, as long as you called them experts. It was much cheaper than hiring actors."

The notion that this type of coverage could be applied to other stories became a reality as the media moved on to the O.J. Simpson trial during the mid-1990s. Rich called the event remarkable because days would pass when little would happen.

And still, experts invaded television, bloviating about how the trial was a milestone moment for the U.S. justice system and race relations, even when no news was happening. That obsession-driven coverage continued with the deaths of Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy Jr., ultimately maturing with the Bill Clinton sex scandal, Rich said.

"If we think back to the way the scandals overtook our lives, it seems like a moment of incredible hysteria," Rich said. "And it was juiced up as entertainment."

Rich directed much of his criticism at the television industry. During the early 1990s, the news media radically transformed when Fox News and MSNBC became competitors of CNN, the Internet emerged and entertainment companies bought the major news operations -- ABC went to Disney, CBS to Viacom and CNN to Time Warner.

"When journalism operations are taken over by entertainment companies, it's a completely different set of values," Rich said. "It's about sex, violence, drama, good-guy-versus-bad-guy. And those values began to take over the news."

When the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks struck, there was tremendous concern that the mediathon culture would endlessly chew over and degrade the event.

But the press kept itself under control, and Americans television viewers turned from cable news programs and rushed back to the three major networks news anchors -- people they trusted most, Rich said.

It was a decisive moment in American media, but one that was short-lived. Enter the Bush administration, which Rich said had had a masterful grip on the entertainment news culture and set out to seize it, perhaps no more plainly than with the Iraq war.

"We were watching bombs explode like fireworks above a city," Rich said, referring to the early "Shock and Awe" campaign by coalition forces in Iraq. "But we didn't know what was happening. We were given two things the government wanted us to know: We were winning, and war didn't have a cost. We didn't see death. We didn't see coffins. ... We didn't know where the bombs were headed, and what they were killing. There was a lot of fictionalization."

And Rich criticized Democrats for using similar tactics, referencing John Kerry's announcement about his presidential bid with the backdrop of an aircraft carrier.

But even as Bush prepares to leave office, entertainment media will not vanish, Rich said, arguing that Bush merely built on what had come before him.

"Going forward, we don't know what's going to happen," Rich said, referring to the Obama administration. "We have to be aware of how we consume information because so much goes unquestioned and unexamined."

Contact staff writer Dan Petty at dan.petty@richmond.edu