"Show Business for Ugly People": A Few Thoughts on the Foolishness

It is these days something of a cliché that politics is "show business for ugly people."

Clichés do not always have much to do with the truth--but this one most certainly does, and indeed, giving it some consideration can lead to other insights, not least into contemporary journalism and its colossal failings.

One of those failings is the disproportion between the attentiveness to the stupid maneuverings and idle speculations that are politics, as against the attention accorded the ends of politics that are policy--recently given fresh empirical confirmation by a notable study in the Columbia Journalism Review.

This has long seemed to me to reflect various aspects of journalism. There is, for example, the tendency to think of the reporter as going after a "story," and writing it up as a "story" for the reader--with politics much easier to turn into a "story" than policy, the former being centered on "people," "characters," whereas the latter is often technical, in a way taxing the understanding of anyone too lazy to do their homework. And certainly centrist prejudice exacerbates all this, with its greater interest in the political process than in the real world and the solution of problems in it, and the elitism that has it revering professional politicians while despising the intelligence of a public to which it thinks explaining policy not worth the trouble anyway, even if they did not think it a thing best left to "the experts" (at least, so long as the experts remain on the right side of the powerful before whom centrists bow and scrape).

However, it may be that there is something of this too--that even if as "show business for ugly people" the doings of Washington are inferior to the glamour of "real" show business (one reflection of which is how Washington types never miss a chance to go Hollywood in the most ludicrous ways, while folks from Beverly Hills get drawn to Washington--then get drawn back to the movies), it still has just enough glitter to make the weak-minded sorts who tend to become journalists at this level go ga-ga over it. Unsurprisingly a very large part of the time what is written about D.C. is no more serious-minded than what is written about Hollywood.