Getting angry at TV — The joys of a good podcast.
I haven’t had a TV that’s been connected to anything but a laptop or harddrive for my entire life. I couldn’t be happier.
Today, in fact just this evening, I had the kind of experience that made me really happy to not be a TV watcher.
I’d just finished listening to a great conversation between Ezra Klein and David Frum, a political journalist and occasional political operator, famous for his writing of Bush 42’s “Axis of Evil” State of the Union speech in 2002.
It was almost two hours. It was very well reasoned, it was thoughtful, I agreed with points made by both participants, and understood all the arguments even when I didn’t agree. It was the kind of experience you expect to get from having a great class at a top school with an articulate professor of political science, but you got two of those exposing each other’s potential gaps in thinking.
Then, I listened to the Bill Maher show and ruined it. David Frum was also a guest on this episode.
I understand that due to the requirements of an hourlong TV show, even as it is, not TV, but HBO, this was never going to have the same amount of space to unfold as a thoughtful conversation. But even so, where Ezra could let David expand about his opinions, how he’d came to them, and how he could support them extemporaneously, on the Bill Maher show I don’t believe David had over two uninterrupted minutes to explain the position that Bill had brought him on for in the first place.
I could go, I should go, and I want to go into detail on what that position was, but think I should extol the virtues of the podcast discussion in the hopes that more people will expose themselves to it. While simultaneously highlighting the crushing inadequacy of the comedy/chat/fracais format of the TV show. Now, I did listen rather than watch, as the show is released as audio, very graciously by HBO. But comparing the two experiences was an experience of frustration that just quite perfectly exemplified to me the value of longform conversation and discussion about the vital topics of institutional integrity in democratic politics. What a sentence. It showed me that podcasts are at least to me, the single best way to be exposed to new ideas as explained by smart people.
Podcasts may not be for everyone, I know myself to be an extremely aural learner. But for those of you who may watch something like the Bill Maher Show and consume nothing else then it’s sad that there’s a huge amount of context and reason and civility that gets left by the wayside in that format.
So if you’re at all intrigued by the prospect of a whole other world of civil, enlightening, engaging content, well may I suggest you give podcasts a try, and this would be a great way to start.
