American TV proves the theory of karmic physicality (pt 1)

One of the things that you have to write about being an Englishman in America is the differences in TV culture. We have a "basic" cable package with around 80 or so channels. Coming from a five terrestrial channel home (we have resisted the blandishments of Murdoch and hmmed and hahed over Freeview) this is something of a shock. There are numerous essays to be written about the shopping channels, the televangelist channels, the bizarre approach to censorship etc etc.

Its worth confining my comments here to the fact that, while it may be due to the sheer number of channels, there is almost always something worth watching. On any given evening there will almost certainly be two episodes of Friends, two of Seinfeld, two of Frasier and one of Monty Python. There is also, every weeknight, two hours of left-ish satire on primetime television. Actually, if you take the view that Faux News is a post-modern ironic joke you can make that six, but let's assume for the sake of argument that Hannity, O'Really?, Coulter and the rest of those jokers are being serious.

Louise and I have become particularly fond of a nightly show called Countdown with Keith Olbermann. There is really no equivalent to this on British television. It sits somewhere between Newsnight and Bremner, Bird and Fortune. It's a well-researched news review show, gossipy about politics (you need to watch it a bit to get a sense of the players in the soap opera), but serious about abuses of power, and scathing of celebrity culture. Olbermann also has a running feud with Fox News (he was a former Fox Sports sportscaster - although whether this has anything to do with it I don't know).

Apart from its odd format there are two other interesting elements to it. The right consider it to be very left-wing . I'm not so sure that we would recognise it as such. It is certainly massively anti-Bush, although some of this is simply that the Bush administration is sinking in a Bermuda triangle of its own making, with Ideological Inflexibility, Incompetence and Corruption marking the three corners. Any mildly humerous topical news show would be calling a government in this situation - there is a large element here of shooting fish in a barrel. What is interesting, though, is that the criticism is rooted not in what we might consider to be internationalist or universalist ideas such as human rights, derived from the post WW2 settlement, but rather it derives from two distinctly American angles. The first, explicitly, is from the US Constitution. For example, the abolition of habeas corpus for "terrorist" suspects, sneaked through under cover of another bill, led to a consideration of what effect this would have on the Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments of the constitution). In fact only one was left - the others rendered meaningless or obsolete by the abolition (but at least soldiers still can't kip over at your house without you giving you permission - so that's OK then).

The other appeal has been to American exceptionalism. What I have noticed is that American self-perception, or self-mythology if you like, is of being a "good" nation. I say this not to ridicule in any way. This seems to me a higher aspiration for any nation than any other. It creates problems in that no nation could hope to live up to this of course, but I suspect that this is a subject for another blog. But many of the critiques of Bush on the show have at their heart that the administration is not living up to what an American should be. Olbermann has issued some pretty vituperative critiques of e.g. Bush's attempt to redefine the Geneva Convention to allow torture (oh yes he has), from precisely this position. Simply, America, the land of the free, the land of the poor huddled masses, a land which I have found to be stuffed full of people of tremendous decency, friendliness and generosity, should not be torturing people.

This sort of argument, of course, is far more dangerous to Bush and his supporters than traditional left-wing critiques, which could be dismissed as the rantings of "godless Euros". It helps that Olbermann comes across as a cross between Jimmy Stewart and Ed Morrow - he manages to project decency very effectively (whether he is decent, I'm afraid I have no way of knowing - there are no skeletons in his wiki entry, but, so what?). The contrast with Jon Stewart (Daily Show) and Stephen Colbert (Colbert Report) is striking. For the record, I think both are genuinely brilliant but they can come across as too clever by half and contemptuous of many people not as intelligence as they.

The second, frivilous, point is that it helps that he is a good looking man. There is a childish psychological assumption (which I think many people don't grow out of) that physically attractive people are more "good" than ugly ones. Nonsense of course, but then you see Bill O'Reilly looking something like a grizzly bear with a 20 year bottle a day whisky habit, stuffed in a suit and being employed as a children's entertainer, all the warts on his soul clearly visible on the outside, and compare with Olbermann doing his decent 1940s small-town lawyer schtick and you wonder. Whatever, Louise has officially placed him at no2 behind Hugh Laurie in her “greying 40 somethings I fancy" list, which means we both get to watch his show every night.