are we this dumb now?
by Theron Dash

What's happening to Washington Week in Review? To PBS? To intelligent reporting and analysis? Are we this dumb now?

Washington Week, despite Paul Newman's flattering intro (which seems to have been missing lately...hmmm), has been getting progressively duller and unwatchable (as opposed to dully progressive, which describes...well, not us.) This used to be a fairly painless half hour update on the conventional wisdom in Washington, with the occasional insight and bit of real reporting. Now it's like a televised coffee break, in which unimpressive parrotheads giggle and mouth cliches, ingratiating themselves with each other and saying little or nothing new, trenchant or insightful.

Maybe the plethora of other news analysis shows on cable have depleted the ranks so they're forced to rely on lesser lights, but it's becoming embarrassing. Plus there's this giddy self-referencing hewing to a jockular theme, as in Friday's campaign coverage, about how both candidates are going negative so early, isn't it crazy, my god can they keep this up, what'll it be like in October? Shouldn't somebody go positive at some point? was one of the piercing questions. This was after they played a negative Bush ad and the counter-charge part of the new Kerry ad, neglecting to play, and therefore to notice, that the rest of the ad, most of it in fact, was positive.

It's not like there wasn't more to talk about, like the salon story about the Pentagon mentioned in the last post. Why is nobody else even mentioning that story?

But back to the dumbing down question. Frontline continues to be pretty damn good, but some other PBS docus I've seen are really puzzling, and maddening. I happened to catch a fellow named Wells on C-Span the other day---I've lost my notes on it already---talking about his research on human origins based on DNA, and it was pretty fascinating. He played excerpts from his docu aired on PBS, which I saw, but it drove me nuts to the point that I began hating this guy and his research. Which makes me even madder now that I realize I might have missed something interesting and important, all because people can't make a decent docu anymore.

That docu did the same thing as another very worthy project, "The Elegant Universe," a Nova production, about tne new physics, specifically string theory. In both cases some of the visuals were amazing. In the physics programs, the computerized visualizations and animations really helped with some of the concepts, such as Einsteinian curved space and gravity wells, and atomic structure (I liked how the nucleus pulsed like it was on speed) but it did what the Wells docu did: it made a point, then immediately repeated it, then repeated it again. Then came back to it, adding all the points onto the new point. Like the narrator's off-camera voice would say, " Einstein theorized that space is curved." Then picture of a scientist, and he says: "According to Einstein, space is curved." Cut to the narrator-host sitting somewhere very picturesque, or in the middle of a clever computer simulation (an elevator to infinity, for example) and he turns and looks at the camera and says with a perfectly straight face, "Einstein said that space is curved."

Did you get that? Well, don't worry. In about five minutes, they're going to repeat it all again.

Do they really think that because this stuff is hard, that the best way to approach it is blugeon your head with repetition until you're half dead, and then you'll be able to follow it? The sad part is that when the second half of the Elegant Universe program finally got to string theory and played it straight, it was fascinating and pretty easy to follow.

Are we really this dumb now? Are our attention spans so short, or just blugeoned into insensibility by endless repetition accompanying fast cut fancy movement images? What a waste of talent and money, and I might add, my time. Give me the twenty minutes of actual stuff, and save the rest for the pledge drive.

And can those Washington parrotheads. I'd rather hear Paul Newman talk about the news.