Observations On Concision

My appearance on Bill Moyers' Journal, broadcast last night (and re-broadcast throughout this weekend on PBS), can be viewed here, and a transcript is here.
The show's format, as well as Moyers' interviewing style, allowed for
what I thought was a very substantive and in-depth discussion --
especially for television -- of the Bush legacy, the rule of law, the
need for investigations and prosecutions of the government crimes of
the last eight years, the complicity of key Congressional Democrats,
and several other issues.

We had also intended to discuss the
fundamental dysfunction and corruption of the American establishment
media and the indispensable role it played in the most consequential
and destructive events of the Bush era. No discussion of the events of
the last eight years is complete without extensive consideration of
that topic (Moyers' program last year
on the vital role of the media in selling the Iraq War to the American
public -- "Buying the War" -- is unquestionably one of the best pieces
of journalism produced on that topic and, quite revealingly, was one of
the only television programs ever even to address the issue). We ran
out of time before getting to those media issues and are trying to
schedule another interview, principally to talk about those topics,
likely for late January.

The full 25-minute segment from last
night's program is also available in 3 parts on YouTube (the quality on
the YouTube clips is slightly inferior to the one posted on the
above-linked PBS site):

On Thursday night, I was on The Rachel Maddow Show to talk about the closing of Guantanamo and the fear-mongering campaign
now being waged by the likes of former Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith
and the Brookings Institution's Ben Wittes to convince Americans that
they will be slaughtered by the Terrorists unless Guantanamo's closing
is accompanied by still more radical and patently dangerous expansions
of executive power (such as a new law empowering the President to
"preventively detain" people indefinitely without charges and the
creation of a new "national security court" that re-writes the rules
governing our courts in order to make it easier for the Government to
convict accused terrorists). Part of that discussion includes the key
enabling role Democrats played -- and, in many cases, continue to play
-- in so much of Bush's anti-constitutional extremism.

I had been
interviewed by Rachel on her radio show many times before and, because
of the way she conducts interviews, the discussions were always quite
substantive and comprehensive. As I often noted long before she became
an MSNBC regular, Rachel is one of the smartest and most thoughtful
political commentators around.

But the contrast between Moyers'
format -- which permits, even compels, lengthy, detailed, highly
developed answers and all sorts of in-depth follow-ups -- and the
universal limitations imposed by the cable news format -- where major,
complex topics are reduced to 5-minute segments involving a handful of
questions and 3o-second answers that cannot possibly entail anything
beyond the most generalized, conventional bullet points -- was even
starker to me as a result of taping these two interviews on the same
day (see this definitive 3-minute explanation
from Noam Chomsky on precisely how mainstream television's demand for
"concision" -- which shapes how the overwhelming majority of Americans
receive their "news" -- precludes any meaningful examination or
challenging of prevailing political orthodoxies).

The Maddow segment is here (the interview with me begins at roughly the 2:30 mark):

Regular posting, I'm happy to note, will resume tomorrow.