I have a problem with YouTube. I watch it all the time. Two things that caught my attention as I was watching today. One, Janeane Garofalo is sexy as hell even with all her faux-prison style tattoos. She is smart and articulate and seems to have spent a good deal of the time since 1994's Reality Bites reading about politics. Ok that was unkind. She was very good on The West Wing. Two, most of the serious debate you can find on the internet on subjects like America's involvement in Iraq is comedians and celebrities talking. Here for example is David Letterman getting seriously pissed at Bill O'Reilly.
This is a surreal aspect of celebrity culture; even the most important events of the day, some of the most important events of our lifetime, are only relevant when discussed by celebrities. O'Reilly and his loathsome ilk are celebrities created specifically for this kind of commentary. Why, one might reasonably ask, is anyone like O'Reilly necessary when we have universities filled with people who study these issues professionally.
Being on tv isn't as easy as it looks. There is a knack to appearing as if you were not on camera that only a few people have. Anyone without this strange (and useless for 99.999% of our life as a species) talent is not much fun to watch. And yet, when we are discussing spending billions of tax dollars or killing tens of thousands of people we ought rise above our irritation at such limitations.
O'Reilly and the rest of Fox are partisan hacks. As are the less successful, but equally annoying, hacks at MSNBC - I make an exception for Rachel Maddow, not because she isn't a partisan but because I think she is hot. Yes, I have strange tastes.
Celebrity commentators don't know very much. The limit of their ability to comment is set by the information they possess and they just don't have it. This is what allows the phenomenon Stephen Colbert coined "truthiness", when something feels true regardless of the factual record. It allows commentators to make up facts, just pull them out of their ass. To stick with O'Reilly, the infamous statement no bankers had been arrested after the 2007 crash because no crimes had been committed come to mind.
Limiting debate is seen as necessary because the audience is seen as stupid. This is self-stroking. So long as the audience as treated to entertainment requiring no intelligence, there is no need for the audience to become critical thinkers. Raise the bar and the audience will raise itself.
Until then Noam Chomsky is stuck on PBS and Matt Taibbi will remain the closest thing we have to a public intellectual.
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