This week NBC booked Donald Trump for “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon” on Sept. 11 and CBS locked down Vice President Joe Biden for Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” on Sept. 10 (perhaps anticipating a campaign announcement?).
The late-night booking war is in full swing.
Somewhere, the boys on the bus groan.
It’s been a fact of life, at least since candidate Bill Clinton played saxophone on Arsenio Hall’s show, that American politics and entertainment are intertwined. Hardened political reporters had lost ground to comics and satirists long before the Jon Stewart era. But this year politics and entertainment are not just intersecting, mashed-up aspects of the popular culture.
Now the two are co-dependent.
Somebody, get us to rehab.
Trump is the category buster long anticipated by movies — part “Dave,” part Peter Sellers’ “Being There.” He personifies the theory expressed in Neil Postman’s classic book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death, Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.” Trump’s candidacy and the media reaction to it represent the ultimate triumph of infotainment, the victory of celebrity over substance.
If it attracts clicks, ratings or pageviews, the culture is content to call it news. (Between Trump, Miley Cyrus and Kanye West, it’s no wonder there was no oxygen left this week for a discussion of the Iran nuclear deal.)
Party-game host Fallon is stealing Chuck Todd’s thunder. MSNBC, CNN and Fox News pick up where “Saturday Night Live” leaves off. A says millennials are nearly twice as likely to get political news from Facebook as from local TV. Could Tim Russert have forseen such a merger of civics and reality TV? Serious editorial writers are bumping into bloggers, podcasters and jokers on the political beat and coming up with the same one-liners.
(If it’s about his hair, we’ve already heard it.)
No joke: 24 million viewers watched the GOP presidential candidates debate on Fox News. CNN is asking 40 times its normal rate for commercial time in the next Republican debate, Sept. 16, thanks to the Trump hype.
Fallon, who favors fun and games in late-night TV, has been successful ratings-wise by avoiding anything serious. His politically savvy new competitor Colbert, launching Sept. 8, is going to do the opposite and give him a real contest.
Colbert told critics in Los Angeles last month that he plans to tackle serious, even intellectual topics in a fun way, not too dissimilar to his old gasbag persona on Comedy Central. He has lined up an impressive array of guests including some from politics and government — Jeb Bush on Sept. 8, Biden on Sept. 10, Justice Stephen Breyer on Sept. 14, Bernie Sanders on Sept. 18 — and can be expected to extract information albeit in a non-traditional context. It’s possible Colbert could take infotainment to a new, wittier level.
Fallon should be hiring politically astute writers to help with his interviewing style. The headlines this campaign season are going to come from late night TV more than from stump appearances.
It will be up to us to figure out what’s meant to be amusing, what’s a coded message to particular constituents, what’s silly and what, if anything, is real. On that score, the training we got from “The West Wing” is as important as anything we might have learned from Congressional Quarterly or Politico.
At this point in our technological evolution the public seems to give equal weight to a comment made on “Meet the Press” and a throwaway line on Bill Maher, a quote in a newspaper or a 140-character tweet. Trump further obliterates the divisions, spreading bombast across the platforms, creating synergy between celebrity and news, between politics and reality TV, between state fair meet-and-greet and formal press conference. He treats every venue like a carny on the midway. What used to be called the national discourse is one big amusement park.
Politics and entertainment are so co-dependent, the populace has trouble listening to a veteran of one, like Sanders, who refuses to engage in the other. The Vermonter has repeatedly chastised reporters for trying to engage him on matters of personal attacks or hair.
The game show aspects of the race are more disappointing every election cycle. At least so far nobody’s proposed a televised “American Ninja/So You Think You Can Govern” showdown.
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830, jostrow@denverpost.com or twitter.com/ostrowdp
