OXY MORONS

An oxymoron is an apparent contradiction in terms, such as “deafening silence,” or “jumbo shrimp.”  Comedians like to cite “military intelligence,” “political courage,” and “business ethics” as other examples.

The oxymoron of 2010 is “mainstream media.”  The major news organizations are headed and staffed mostly by people who couldn’t be more detached from the attitudes, concerns and opinions of ordinary Americans, who they hold in contempt.

CBS News anchor Katie Couric told media critic Howard Kurtz she’s enjoying getting out from behind her desk and touring what she called “this great unwashed middle of the country” in an effort to divine the mood of the midterms.

A revealing statement, on several levels.

First, “ great unwashed” is not a flattering description. (Ms. Couric insists she meant no offense.)

Second, perky Katie has a peculiar notion of what constitutes the “middle of the country.”  Her touring so far has taken her to Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and New Brunswick, New Jersey.  All except that Midwestern backwater of Chicago are accessible by the Acela train from Manhattan.

I suppose I shouldn’t be too hard on Ms. Couric.  After all, if she’d gone to, say, Canton, Ohio, or Franklin, Tennessee or Rapid City, South Dakota, she might have run into a Republican.  And that would have been icky.  They are, after all, greedy racist ignoramuses who are clinging bitterly to their guns and their Bibles because they are angry and frightened out of their wits.

James Lileks notes the phrase “the great unwashed” was coined by the Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton (It was a dark and stormy night), who is considered one of the worst writers of all time.  (Since 1982, the English department at San Jose State University has sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest, which challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence of the worst of all possible novels.  Molly Ringle of Seattle won this year with this sentence: “For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss — a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.”)

I’m sure Ms. Couric had no idea of the origin of the deprecatory phrase she used to describe Middle America.  She isn’t nearly as smart as she imagines herself to be.

“I had the (unfortunate) experience of hearing Ms. Couric deliver the commencement address at Case-Western Reserve University in Cleveland in May,” wrote E.J. Hill in a comment on Mr. Lileks’ blog.  “What vapidity.  It was like having your appendix taken out with a hockey stick.”

I pick on Ms. Couric not because she is the worst example, but because she typifies the attitudes at the broadcast television networks, the cable networks other than Fox News, the New York Times and the Washington Post, Newsweek and Time.

When ABC moved George Stephanopoulos  to “Good Morning, America,” it replaced him temporarily as host of “This Week” with White House correspondent Jake Tapper.  Mr. Tapper is a rarity in contemporary journalism — someone who thinks it’s the job of journalists to report the news fairly, not to spin it on behalf of Democrats.  He got good guests from both sides of the aisle, treated them fairly, and asked them probing questions.  Ratings soared.

So ABC replaced him with Christiane Amanpour, the former CNN foreign correspondent.  The only thing more pronounced about Ms. Amanpour than her left wing bias  is her ignorance of American domestic politics.  Ratings have plummeted.

CNN hoped to climb out of the ratings toilet with a reprise of “Crossfire,” a left-right debate program that was popular in the 1990s.  But CNN dove deeper into it when it chose for its anchors disgraced former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who resigned after a prostitution scandal, and Kathleen Parker, CNN’s idea of the ideal “conservative”, because she likes Barack Obama and loathes Sarah Palin.

The “great unwashed” are about to issue a stunning rebuke to the Democrats for their arrogance and condescension.  If their allies in the news media don’t pay more attention to the views of Middle America, and treat them with more respect, the “mainstream media” will become the moribund media.