Tag: reality television
Republicans Are Misrepresenting Policy For The Sake Of Entertainment

Republicans Are Misrepresenting Policy For The Sake Of Entertainment

True to his promise of a more entertaining convention, Donald has “Trumpified” the Republican National Convention, replacing politicians with reality TV stars for the sake of ratings — and, perhaps, because there aren’t many politicians who want to share a stage with Trump.

Apart from a plagiarized prime-time speech delivered by Melania Trump, Monday night’s “Make America Safe Again” event was anchored by actors Antonio Sabato Jr. and Scott Baio, who lectured the crowd on how the GOP nominee will strengthen national security. (Who knew appearing on Happy Days taught you so much about politics?)

In Sabato’s speech, for instance, the Italian-born actor detailed how he came to the United States legally and then became a naturalized citizen, saying, “others who want to come to the U.S. to live and work should follow the same rules” that he did.

But when a man whose claim to fame is appearing on a medical soap opera is rallying the convention crowd on the issue of immigration, it’s clear that Trump’s speakers serve little purpose other than erasing the convention presenting concrete policy points. This is consistent with Trump’s equally policy-averse time on the primary campaign trail.

Nowhere is this more obvious in two speeches Monday, those of Baio and Willie Robertson, star of the reality TV show “Duck Dynasty.”

Robertson, who found fame chasing waterfowl with a rifle on A&E, is not a bad poster boy for unrestricted recreational gun access. He hinted at this status during his speech when he referred to himself and the crowd as “regular folks like us who like to hunt and fish and pray.” But his speech was otherwise a list of why he liked Donald Trump’s personality, not how Trump will protect voters’ gun rights.

Baio, on the other hand, uttered little more than a few attacks on Hillary Clinton, making the lack of viable Republican politicians and policy experts willing to speak at the convention increasingly obvious. The committee members and lobbyists who fought over the party’s alarmingly conservative platform don’t seem to want anything to do with presenting that platform to the American people.

On Tuesday night, for instance, one-time presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson will be headlining a night that looks to focus on jobs and the economy, titled “Make America Work Again.” While Trump cronies and lobbyists toiled in the shadows to set the party’s economic platform, Carson — who for years sold supposedly magical health supplements — is the one who will be presenting (or entirely sidestepping) these policies to voters.

It wouldn’t be surprising if Tuesday night were more filled more with rants against vaccines, transgender people, and the credibility of evolution than with the GOP’s hopes to stimulate the American economy.

While Clint Eastwood famously performed an onstage political duet with a chair in 2012, he was one of just four individuals at that Republican convention whose credentials didn’t come from business, politics, or family ties to the candidate, out of 84 speakers total. (The others were Tea Party actress Janine Turner and Olympian skier Christopher Delvin-Young, and the rabbi who gave an opening invocation.)

This year’s program, though, is a clown car — and that’s not just due to Trump’s WWE-style entrance onto the stage on Monday. As the LA Times points out, many of the celebrities that Trump has selected to speak have done stints on reality television, just like The Donald himself: Sabato starred on “Dancing with the Stars” and his own dating show on VH1, while golfer Natalie Gulbis appeared on Trump’s very own “The Apprentice,” and Baio was on a curiously-named show called “Scott Baio is 45… And Single.”

We’ll also be treated to remarks from soap opera actress Kimberlin Brown, astronaut Eileen Collins, mixed-martial arts magnate Dana White.

 

Photo: Screenshot of Antonio Sabato Jr. via YouTube

Endorse This: Trump Aide Calls Presidency ‘The Ultimate Reality Show’

Endorse This: Trump Aide Calls Presidency ‘The Ultimate Reality Show’

Appearing as a guest on Chris Matthews’ Hard Ball, Paul Manafort explained what he thought Donald Trump’s strengths were as a candidate. “It’s the first modern campaign in the social media era,” Manafort explained. “He understood how to use earned media instead of paid media.”

Fine. We know that about Trump: He’s appalling as a political tactic.

But then Manafort went a step farther. It’s not that Trump sees the coverage of his campaign as a free media spectacle — though it is, increasingly — but rather that Trump sees his presidential campaign and the presidency itself as one giant reality show.

Good luck, America.

Watch for yourself. Discussion of the Republican National Convention and Trump’s “reality show” occurs around four and a half minutes in.

5 Things Donald Trump Learned From Howard Stern

5 Things Donald Trump Learned From Howard Stern

On August 5, 1994, Howard Stern ended his campaign to become governor of New York.

He had promised to resign anyway, if elected, “before I can really screw anything up.” His running mate would carry out his commitments: actively pursuing the death penalty and using the ashes of executed criminals to refill potholes.

Stern was dropping out rather than disclose his personal financial records. “I spend 25 hours a week telling you all the most intimate details of my life,” he said. “One fact I’ve never revealed is how much I make and how much money I have… it’s none of your business.”

That’s how most “serious analysts” thought Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign would end — just another in his endless transparent publicity stunts. Fred Trump’s fortunate son had mentioned himself as a candidate for president and released a book pretty much every four years since 1988 and always waffled, worried about exposing his various financial misdealings

Trump, of course, figured out how to bury the truth in an avalanche of disclosure. We still have no idea how much he’s really worth or if he pays any taxes at all — he’s the first candidate in recent memory to win a major party nomination without releasing anything resembling a tax return.

Trump has taken the campaign-as-PR thing much further than Stern ever did, but he’s done it by becoming a master of a genre that the “King of All Media” created: the reality show.

Stern in 2016 exists in a different universe than he did in 1994, when few in the mainstream press defended his racially and sexually-charged — and wildly successful — humor for the multi-layered “Archie Bunker”-type parody it often is. Today, he’s widely regarded as the greatest celebrity interviewer and most prolific American humorist alive, possibly ever. And he is the man who taught Donald Trump, a frequent guest of the Stern show for decades, how to win the Republican nomination.

Last week, liberal commentator Van Jones warned Democrats on CNN that Trump is likely to win the presidency, despite polling and punditry suggesting otherwise. Jones compared Trump’s mastery of reality television and social media to FDR’s gift for radio of JFK’s flare for television. Stern’s utter destruction of the “fourth wall” pioneered an approach to media that consciously attempted to present that “reality.” Without Stern, Trump is impossible.

A donor to Hillary Clinton, Stern says he’s torn in the general election, he says, because he’s a fierce defender of reproductive rights and one of the rare Americans who’d proudly call himself a pro-abortion advocate — he wants more of them. But he figures Trump will invite him to Camp David, and he wants the American public to see how our royalty really live.

Stern doesn’t believe that Trump is truly anti-abortion rights because better than anyone he gets the game the billionaire is playing, which is why he was one of the first people to predict Trump would be the GOP nominee. It’s a game he invented.

Here are five rules Donald Trump learned from Howard Stern that Democrats better understand if they don’t want to make the same mistakes Republicans did.

  1. Never be boring.
    This might be Stern’s One Commandment. You can be famous for curing cancer or over-tanning your daughter, but you’re never going to get air time on the Howard Stern Show unless Stern can find a way to make you fascinating. Trump got $2 billion in free air time because if you put a camera on him, he says something you can’t help but tweet about.
  2. Make your fans feel special.
    Stern invites his fans to be part of a world that’s almost the exact opposite of the shitty job they’re driving into. There, when your boss yells at you, you can yell back, as long as it’s funny. And in the GOP primary, Trump has proved mostly immune to political facts. His fans believe in him, not the details. Much of this appeal is built on his soft-white nationalism, but a lot more is built on personality and charm — tailored to older, whiter more male Republican voters. If the GOP primary is a bachelor party, then the general election is the wedding.
  3. Create your own reality — just take shit over.
    One of Howard Stern’s greatest assets is that his competition is generally terrible, but also that no one really pointed it out before he did. Stern’s honesty and unpredictability makes any appearance he makes an event. Trump has used Democratic talking points to attack all of his opponents and Republican voters loved it. Trump understood that by being the most anti-Mexican, anti-Muslim candidate on the stage, many conservatives — who have been fed a diet of dog-whistle politics for generations — would never question his conservative credentials. With decades of experience, total shamelessness, and no fear of having to find any job after this, Trump steamrolls over interviewers, presenting lie after lie that goes unchallenged, humiliating reporters who should know better. But he, like Stern, always gets invited back because he makes great TV.
  4. Your enemies define you.
    Stern’s early career was defined by his battles with management, other DJs, the FCC. It turned his show into a daily drama with a relatable hero to cheer for. Trump likewise has no fear of making enemies — in fact, he revels in it. Like Stern, he has feuded publicly Rosie O’Donnell, offering his opponents some of his most stinging gender-fixated insults for attack ads. Unlike Stern, he hasn’t made peace with O’Donnell, who the billionaire attacked again Saturday night in a rally in Washington. This suggests Trump’s biggest weakness and one Stern occasionally suffers from — thin-skin. But Trump’s skin is so thin that we have to assume his organs are orange.
  5. Be willing to change because that’s what real people do.
    This is the main reason why Trump is dangerous for Democrats. He has no loyalty to ideas and no fear of casting off the most unpopular ideas from the GOP platform, which happen be dearest to many hard-core conservatives’ hearts. After tens of thousands of hours of radio, while Stern’s show is still often puerile, it’s also one of the few places Americans can expect to hear adults speaking without posturing, over-production, or self-censorship. Stern treats his audience with respect; Trump, however, often lacks that grace. He lies and reverses himself casually, without acknowledging the twists — yet somehow still gets branded as the “tells-it-like-it-is” candidate. Outrageousness made Stern’s career but authenticity has sustained it. If Trump learns this lesson, Democrats beware.
CBS’ ‘The Briefcase’ Plumbs New Depths

CBS’ ‘The Briefcase’ Plumbs New Depths

Recently, I watched the first episode of The Briefcase, CBS’ new “reality” show. I found myself vaguely ashamed for doing so. I kept reminding myself that I had to watch it in order to write about it.

Myself wasn’t buying it. Myself wanted a shower.

It will probably not shock you to learn that your humble correspondent has no love for so-called reality television. Somehow, on the road from Candid Camera to An American Family to various real housewives of various real American cities, the once novel and seemingly harmless idea of focusing television cameras on the lives of ordinary people curdled into a species of “entertainment” so invasive that the camera might as well be a proctological device.

In that sense, you could argue there is nothing new, nor even particularly noteworthy, about The Briefcase, a summer series that premiered last week. Its premise is that a struggling family is given a briefcase full of cash — $101,000 — with the stipulation that they may choose to keep all of the money, keep some and give the rest to a second down-on-its luck family, or keep none of it and give the entire fortune to that other family.

It is a rigged morality tale, a financially strapped couple wrestling with questions of self-preservation versus altruism. In that situation, should you be selfish or selfless? At one point, each couple is taken to tour the other couple’s home while those people are away. They rifle through the other family’s overdue bills, inspect their busted appliances. The twist is that unbeknownst to each couple, the other has received an identical briefcase, has taken the same tour, and is wrestling with the same question: What is the moral thing to do?

Actually, if anyone really cared about these families’ problems, the moral course would be obvious. Let CBS (estimated value, according to Forbes, approximately $30 billion) give each struggling family what it needs to get back on its feet. Problem is, the moral course would not be the most entertaining course, would deprive the rest of us of watching these men and women argue, weep, shoot death glares at one another, confess intimate fears to the camera and, yes, vomit in emotional distress, as they try to make this inherently unfair decision.

Look, it is not exactly news that “reality television” is a cesspool. For those who enjoy it, that’s apparently part of the attraction.

But The Briefcase plumbs new depths. CBS has made a calculated bet here that you and I would not mind seeing real-life poverty as mass entertainment. So far, they’re right. According to Variety, The Briefcase was the most watched Wednesday-night series on television last week. Almost 7 million of us tuned in to find diversion in the exploitation of financially and emotionally vulnerable people.

It is particularly, well … rich that this comes from CBS. In 2002, you may recall, that network proposed to take a poor and unsophisticated rural family and plunk them down in a Beverly Hills mansion for America’s amusement. There was an outcry and CBS was shamed out of airing The Real Beverly Hillbillies. But apparently, that was a Pyrrhic victory. Thirteen years later, here comes The Briefcase. Thirteen years later, in a country where “the poors” are called “takers,” “moochers” and scavenging animals, that same network now uses them to fill the space between commercials for soft drinks and erectile-dysfunction pills.

There is something blinkered about the morality that makes such a thing not simply possible, but popular. There are 45 million Americans submerged below the poverty line. That’s 1 in every 7 of us, many living one medical diagnosis, one broken transmission, one missed paycheck, from disaster. Friends, that is tragedy, not entertainment.

And pity any nation that can no longer tell the difference.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL, 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.) 

Screenshot: CBS/YouTube