Newsweek recently launched reality television show, The District (see below) a spoof on the MTV reality show The City (I'd strongly suggest you watch the first sixty seconds or so of The City to contextualize The District; it makes a big difference).
The City features Whitney Pratt, a young blonde leaving all she knows in California to pursue a fashion career in New York City. The District features Barack Obama, leaving all he knows as a Senator in Illinios to pursue a career in Washington D.C. as the United States President.
Each episode is about three minutes long and provides a bubble gum version of the past weeks politics. Footage is created from a mix of news video clips and uses the celebrated Obama impersonator, Iman Crosson (aka Alphacat) for voiceover.
Simplifying politics into a popular format can be a useful way to engage and inform a wider audience. That said, the using the rhetoric of the reality TV show is problematic as it’s dominated by one perspective, here, Obama’s. Politics are and need to be a multifaceted subject, their foundation should be a forum of discussion; this is the very basis of democracy. The District undermines the importance of political conversation by streamlining very complex issues into a shallow, one sided image of the current days issues. The episodes comes off as objective, not subjective.
Politics are never objective. While entertainment can be political, policy is not entertainment. Nor should it be, moving policy into the realm of entertainment risks polarizing it’s many shades of gray into clear black and whites. This is and has always been dangerous. One only need to look to the art of fascist regimes to see how easily one perspective can dominate an entire culture.
To be clear, I am not in anyway comparing Obama’s presidency to fascist regimes; I am a big Obama fan and usually sit on the bluest end of the democratic party. Rather, I am pointing to the problems inherent in mixing political culture with popular culture. It can valorize one point of view as the point of view.
What do you think? I am really interested in hearing other people's thoughts on this.
I find this completely disturbing because it is a further blending of the lines between entertainment and politics. It makes light of serious issues - (like the raping of the american tax payer by the Fed)
We already have an American public generally incapable of distinguishing news from commentary on the evening 'news'
How did they manage to get Obama's voice for the voice over ? A friend assures me it is not really him, can anyone confirm this one way or the other?
Posted by: albert | March 16, 2009 at 06:02 AM