Josh Marshall wrote a short piece today about his reaction to reading a Washington Post article on how the Bush administration “screened political appointees for jobs in post-invasion Iraq based on loyalty to Bush and the conservative agenda.” As Marshall points out, at some level this is completely unsurprising: anyone who's been paying attention already suspected (or, really, knew) this was true in general, and is probably outraged enough about the Bush Administration that this will just be one more matchstick on the pile.

Normally, Marshall points out, you read the news to hear something new. But in the past six years we've mostly read the news angrily wondering why the things we believed to be true weren't in the newspaper. Now that they finally are appearing there (this having something surely to do with the president's poll ratings), as Marshall points out, they're no longer news. I mean, did anyone think the Bush administration wasn't spying on people? Or had really stopped torturing prisoners?

This leads, Marshall writes, to a completely new experience of reading the news pages:

The new turns out to be strangely familiar. As someone whose first daily reading is the sports pages (and as one of the members of the last generation of people to actually subscribe to newspapers), I know well the pleasure of reading about a game to see the quotes, look over the statistics, or get the columnists' reactions. One of the things that makes sports (like politics) fun is that it provides for an endless amount of metadiscourse in multiple media (photos, articles, features, columns, statistics), and an endless pleasure in renarration. Anyone who's watched sports enough knows how riddled with cliches they are; hardly anything a professional athlete or professional commentator says is anything other than a remade version of a sentence they (or someone else) said five minutes ago.

This is true in politics, as well, with the difference I suppose that almost everyone is lying, and almost everyone knows it — as E Wesp's daring forays into the White House press conference transcripts suggest. But the same kind of repetitive structure, willingness to sincerely mouth cliches, and metadiscursive variability that marks sports news is a crucial feature of the Sunday talk shows and of the opinion pages.

Marshall goes on to denote the obvious distinction: “Of course this Administration's record--or, more precisely, the recording of that record--is a far more serious undertaking than a ballgame.” Right right. And yet the fact that news under the Bush administration has acquired the same unreal quality as professional sports have for most of us suggests in fact that the media (and perhaps the public, and perhaps also the administration itself) does not agree with that simple claim. Otherwise, why would it be so easy to describe so much of the coverage that followed 9/11 and led up to the Iraq War as cheerleading?

No comments