Stewart’s Stand
There are people who do things that amaze me. Right now, my co-worker Garrett is one of them because of something he figured out that never would have occured to me, and that I probably wouldn’t have focused on long enough to figure out.
But I’ll get to that in a minute.
In the past couple of days, everyone—and I mean everyone, myself included—has been talking about Jon Stewart’s appearance on CNN’s Crossfire. And, in fact, it was something to see.
To be honest, I don’t watch Crossfire anymore. For a while, after moving to D.C. and taking my first politically oriented job, I was a Crossfire junkie. I watched it regularly for a time, but at some point my viewing fell off.
Perhaps it was due in part to some disillusionment with politics, but I know it was also due to losing patience with the show. I found that after watching it I wasn’t any more informed about the issues at hand than I was before watching, but I was certainly angrier. In fact, I’d get so angry that I’d shout back at the television. It got to the point where I wasn’t even listening to the show anymore.
That, it turns out, is the key. I wasn’t listening.
Crossfire is truly a mis-named show. It should be called Cross-talk. It’s a concept common in mental health and recovery circles, as Jennifer (another coworker) points out in her comment on Garrett’s post. It’s when one person starts talking before another person, who is currently speaking, stops. It involves two things: stepping on the other person’s point, and not listenining.
It’s something that comes up in verbal disagreements, and we’ve all seen it solved on one therapy-like talk show or another. Usually, the parties agree that each will let the other finish speaking before taking his/her turn to speak. Not only that, but before speaking the next person to speak actually repeats, or paraphrases what he/she just heard the other say, and then gets confirmation that he/she has correctly understood what was said.
Before speaking, one has to listen and understand in order for dialogue to occur. The folks on Crosfire weren’t listening to each other, and I wasn’t listening to them. I was merely more pissed off than I was before watching, and I didn’t always know exactly why.
And here is where I think Stewart’s point very nearly gets lost among the crosstalk that occured on when he was on Crossfire and that’s ensued since then. Somewhere along the way, Americans stopped talking to each other, started talking over each other, and stopped listening to each other altogether. Whether this is the fault of the media is debatable, but a case can be made—as Stewart tried to do—that if our discourse is on a downward slide, the media is too often either giving us a shove from behind or greasing the slope ahead of us.
But all of the above is just my opinion. This is where Garrett comes in. I was sitting across the office from him when he was figuring this out or at least talkign about itt, I think, but it wasn’t until I read his blog post about it that it sunk in and inspired me to write this post. Garrett actually took the time to
pull the last 20 transcripts of Crossfire and track how many times crosstalk occured during each 30 minute show.
I pulled the last 20 transcripts of Crossfire and counted up the number of the times that the transcript noted [Crosstalk].
“Crosstalk,” in case you’re not familiar with it, is a term that describes in transcripts spots where more than one person is talking at once, and, thus, the conversation is unintelligible.
Perhaps not surprisingly, crosstalk is a major part of Crossfire. In fact, during the last 20 shows, it occurred an average of 34 times per show—rather astounding given that the show is only 30 minutes long, which minus commercials, intros and news breaks, probably means its running time is closer to 21 or 22 minutes.
That’s roughly one distinct interruption of crosstalk every 45 seconds. Not much room for dialogue there.
Not much room for dialogue, listening or understanding much of anything. But plenty of time to get fired-up without much knowing why. In taking on the hosts of Crossfire Stewart was probably more right than he knew. Unfortunately, it’s likely that the message will be missed by the rest of the media as it apparently was by the hosts (per Garrett’s statistics, Tucker Carlson—with whom Stewart locked horns— is among the worst crosstalk offenders on the show).
However, the laughter and applause from the audience suggests that some of the message got through. Garrett closes with this:
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that perhaps Jon Stewart was saying that he thought America might be better served by a political conversation and debate-style that didn’t involve interruptions more than twice a minute.
I’ll just add that it’s not too much to ask for that we strive for a discourse in which we actually listen to each other, and perhaps even understand each other a little better, rather than talking over each other and only ending up angrier than before. It’s not too much to hope for even. It may even be possible.
Just one question. How do we get there?
October 21st, 2004 at 2:41 am
I think the point that Stewart was making was solely this: People fix on a political position and alter the reality they see rather than altering their position.
So once someone rigidly determines he or she is liberal or conservative or green or for abortion or against giraffes in the zoo, no evidence contrary to his/her position will gain entry into his/her skull. Or, I should say, the evidence will get spun, twisted and riddled with bulletholes until ’round fact’ fits into ’square hole.’
This is why it is not the case that conservatives are against judicial activism while liberals are for judicial activism. [See Bush vs. Gore] Conservatives just want judges to do what they want and liberals just want judges to what they want. Truth becomes increasingly maleable — more and more like overcooked spagetti.