Channeling fools gold: Letterman and Charlie Rose

Now that I am back on dry land, I am able to write about something that has been on my mind since last week, after watching a disaster of a TV show, a.k.a. The Charlie Rose Show.  The remote control was indeed working overtime late Thursday night in all of the seamless channel transitions between Letterman and Charlie Rose.  For last Thursday night I was on a quest: a quest to find TV comedy even if that meant finding it on the most unconventional of channels, PBS.   And wow, I sure struck gold Thursday night between CBS and PBS.  The ”last channel” button on the remote is truly a fascinating feature to me … forget the damn remote, just give me the ”last channel” button … but that wouldn’t be very practical now would it?

It is readily apparent to me that The Charlie Rose Show has devolved into a parade of nightly functionaries spewing liberally tangent opinions, for even the pretense of objectivity is now gone from the show.

It’s as if Charlie has pushed all his poker chips to the center of the table intending to go “all-in.”  Yeah, that’s right, Charlie Rose, the prim and proper sounding PBS host of his own show, the man who interviews anyone from politicians to actors to authors to hard rock musicians and everyone in between, is letting all of his liberal chips ride.  And why not?  Charlie’s now 68 years old and perhaps has grown tired of acting the part of the “objective journalist” and was up for a move.  The kind of move folks approaching 70 typically make out of a desire to replace the hassle of two-story living with the convenience of a one-story ranch.  Charlie’s new one-story ranch of a show is likely less painful on him personally now that he’s free from climbing all of those cumbersome “objective journalist” steps; it is one-story liberal ranch-style living now for Charlie and it appears to be treating him just fine.

Truth be told, I actually like Charlie Rose.  Anyone who interviewed William F. Buckley Jr. 18 times must not be all that bad — to me, that’s a safe bet.  However, the way in which Charlie Rose spins himself as a neutral “interviewer and fact finder” has grown tiresome.  All of the spinning has produced in my eyes a web of liberal design; a web in place to trick the average viewer into thinking they are entering a neutral territory of high-minded discussion and unfolding thought, when all along, the so-called discussion and unfolding thought is cleverly manipulated in a way that borders on the sublime.  The clever and sublime manipulation is achieved by creating liberal themes and narratives and by the running of certain guests and discussion topics in succession.  Fairly straightforward stuff but the effect, when aired on commercial-free television like PBS along with a savvy host, is gold.  A liberal fools gold, that is.

Take, for example, the guests and subject matter discussed last Thursday on The Charlie Rose Show.

In the first half of the show, viewers were treated to the sanctimonious mainstream bellowing news baritone of NBC’s Brian Williams; lecturing us on the lessons of Hurricane Katrina by blaming all of the tragedy and heartache caused by the massive category five hurricane on the federal government and the administration of George W. Bush.

Williams has seen NBC’s market share tumble since he took over the helm from Tom Brokaw several years back.  Several years back was still a time when people were willing to give deference to the mainstream media by hoping against hope that the product of mainstream news could not be as bad as it seemed.  Hope against hope, the mainstreamers in charge of network news really couldn’t be so nefarious in perpetuating a scheme of liberal manipulation.  After all, we thought, how could the networks that brought us David Brinkley, Chet Huntley, Edward R. Murrow, Eric Sevareid, and Walter Cronkite be so deceptive?  It just couldn’t be, we thought … and thus, we hoped against hope, allowing ourselves to be deceived in order to preserve, at least in theory, the ideal of objective journalism — even if that meant enabling the deception by tuning in.