Michael Moore Can be Your friend Too!

Michael Moore Can be Your Friend Too!

Inside Television 536

Publication date: 1-14-11

By: Hubert O'Hearn

Generally speaking, as one ages one is supposed to become more conservative, in dress as well as politics. But I think that my rising ardor for more a more radical liberalism (please note lack of capitalization) has been given the stamp of approval by one of its leaders. I have been re-Tweeted by Michael Moore.

I point this out not so much as a fresh notch on the doorframe of coolness, although admittedly that is part of it. Rather, I was involved in the thick of things as witness and participant in the news cycle whirlwind that is the arrived tempest threatening to blow away every other form of journalism, television included. News by Tweet.

It was of course the Saturday, January 8^th slaughter of six innocents and the wounding of twelve others, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords that I write of here. I was laid up at the house with your standard mid-winter stomach thingy, so I first heard of the shooting on Twitter while I was flogging the latest book review or some such.

Normally, or until that day when normally changed, I would have leapt for the remote control for CNN. And I did, eventually, with CNN or the BBC on the TV. But it was very much background noise.

What I rapidly realized was that the debate, the outcome of this horror was being shaped in real time by people wondering and seeking leadership in Appropriate Action.

Instantly of course, the instinct was to seek out whom to blame. Was it Sarah Palin, with her asinine Facebook page showing elected officials framed in gunsights, including Giffords? Do we blame her? Do we blame the Tea Partiers? The shooter was a liberal – a communist! it was said - so do we blame the left? But we can't blame the guns. Why, Representative Giffords was opposed to gun control laws! One suspects she may be revising her opinion if God willing she survives.

My side of it was that there were two possible positive outcomes. One, that the sheer fear and hatred infecting politics needed to be curtailed; and two, to take the opportunity for there to be the first wholehearted debate on gun control laws since the shootings of Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968.

To simply attack Sarah Palin or one group or the other is to chop down one tree and pretend that the forest has been cleared. Besides which, Palin was already finished as a serious Presidential candidate, perhaps never even really begun. When people are amused by you, they'll let you appear on their TV sets, but they'll rarely vote for you.

As I write this on Monday night, the whole shaping of the framework by which this incident should be discussed is still taking place. Led by the quite wonderful Sheriff Clarence Dupnik of Tucson who lambasted his network, Fox News President Roger Ailes (an old Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan hand, by the way) ordered his correspondents to ease back on the rhetoric. If that lasts longer than a month, I'm my Aunt Nancy's cat, but any break will be welcome.

That said, Fox News host valet Megyn Kelly had on Dupnik and essentially stated that Dupnik felt that ranting rhetoric had led to the shooting because he was...a Democrat. Yes I'm quite sure that the first thing on the mind of a law enforcement officer leading the investigation on the most gruesome, insane crime to ever take place in his district would be, 'Hey, how can I score political points out of this?' To make such an implication on the air provides a moment of irony that would have done Harold Pinter proud in his prime. She made Dupnik's point for him.

Megyn Kelly...Surely the heir to Murrow

There was a fairly idiotic media panel on CBC News Sunday night, including Frank Sesno, retired from CNN. They shied from the rhetoric begats violence argument, hiding behind the rubric of 'it remains to be seen'. The concentration will then be on the insanity of the shooter – and no I will not write the name of his poor sick bugger here – with the rhetorical flip that of what use is the experience of a madman? Television news panels will never blame political advertising and television. They're employed by the network; they gain celebrity and income opportunities from the network. And the network lives by the advertising. I'll take Twitter, thanks.

I'm equally hesitantly optimistic about the chance of a gun control debate. That is creeping up on the radar and the moment needs to be seized. Which leads me to the Michael Moore re-Tweet. It was: 'Can't there at least be a DEBATE about gun laws? How can a nation with so many guns have so few balls?' Be seeing you.