Birthers, Deathers, et al; Oh how we love this dope, and it's so easy to get

I suppose the sooner we confess our addiction, the more quickly we can start recovering from ... Cable-news Freak Shows. We're hooked on them and we're not eating our vegetables anymore and just let's admit it and maybe someday we'll stop. Or not.

The most recent binge started with that one little video. It seemed so harmless at the time; we had no idea just how virulent it was and how much worse it would get. There she stood, on rather wobbly and grainy film, one lone, deranged harpy, shouting down a Delaware congressman at a town hall meeting, demanding to know why he and his fellow Republican lawmakers weren't doing more to expose the illegal-immigrant status of the President of the United States.

Cheers of approval rumbled throughout the gathered crowd. What percentage? No one knows, but it sounded sizable. The important thing, though, was that these people, the Birthers, were laughably, manifestly demented, and even better, crazy angry, meaning cable-news outlets had a soaring-ratings story; and they had it on tape, meaning they could run it and run it and run it until some other frothing, virulent ignorance could run as our fresh fix.

Which, soon enough, came in the form of Town Hall Crashers, and then, thankfully, the Deathers -- the Crashers were starting to wear cable producers a trifle thin (though already they're back; "New and disturbing film right after this"), just as the Birthers had worn out their once exceedingly embraceable welcome.

It's interesting to note, however -- as did the Politico's media correspondent, Michael Calderone -- that "Fox News [gave] relatively little attention to the birthers." Is that because they were a crazy-uncle kind of family embarrassment? That was probably part of it, although it's pretty hard to shame Fox News. But my guess is that it was more a matter of the Birthers being less relevant to the right's planned demolition of Obama's reform agenda.

Things were different over at CNN, where Lou Dobbs specialized for a while in this 48-year-and-counting conspiracy; yet, as Calderone further noted, our dearly daft Lou couldn't "hold a candle to his mocking competitors at MSNBC." There, it seemed, it was all Birthers, all the time, in all the top-rated shows: "Hardball," "The Ed Show," "Countdown," "The Rachel Maddow Show."

In these venues the Birthers weren't just a story, they were the brutally consistent lead. John Reiss, executive producer of "Hardball" and other MSNBC political programming, defended, in a robust chicken-and-egg way, his network's compulsion disorder: the issue, he said, was "part of the American conversation."

Well, yeah, I guess, since you, John, ran the silly thing for days. His collateral defense was just as weak: The Daily Kos had commissioned a poll, he said, and found that "58 percent of Republicans expressed doubts over whether Obama was born in the United States," which buttressed, in his network's opinion, Birtherism's "newsworthiness."

Imagine that. Shocking. Of course the pollsters could have asked if Obama beats his wife and 58 percent of Republicans would have confessed some level of suspicion, just as -- which Chris Matthews, to his credit, recently pointed out -- another poll found that a roughly equivalent percentage of Democrats once believed (or confessed to an uncertainty) in the Bush administration's prior and specific knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. On the whole, this is merely standard partisan-badmouthing stuff; nothing to see here folks, let's move along.

Yet Phil Griffin, president of MSNBC, defended as well his network's obsession: "There's a segment of our population that believes this and keeps bringing it up." OK, so we're back to the amusing chicken-and-egg thing.

But here's another, less amusing and more worrisome thing: Just how much larger is that segment than it would have been naturally, had the cable networks not obsessed? For example in the 1950s there was "a segment" that believed Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist -- they had it all documented, it was undeniable, indisputable, they had the most damning goods on the president -- but they remained a very small segment because responsible journalists dismissed the D.D.E.-as-communist conspiracy theory as the lunacy it was. And there were no cable networks around to inflate the nation's subterranean insanity.

Today? All some notable lunatic has to do to scare, for instance, the elderly population witless, is post on Facebook some gibberish about Obama's "death panels" and cable networks come running -- ruthlessly airing a story in which there inheres an underlying Boo!-factor even though the story is ostensibly designed to debunk the story, which of course wouldn't have been a story had the networks not covered the story to begin with.

But sunlight on insanity is good, right? -- even if it has a photosynthetic effect? Admitted Reiss of his network's Birther obsession: "I would love to tell you that after a week or so of doing this story, we put it to rest." But "I don't think it changed anyone's mind at all."

Ditto -- probably -- on death panels.

Years ago I read a lengthy essay, "A Critique of Pure Tolerance," by the magnificent Herbert Marcuse (of One-Dimensional Man fame), in which he argued that the mere existence of some pushy but tertiary opinion should not always merit -- in a let's-get-everything-out-in-the-open kind of way -- the modern media's attention. Much of it is just plain horseshit, wrote Marcuse, in somewhat more academic language, which any responsible, independent journalistic judgment would wisely ignore.

Not doing so only befuddles the weak-minded, the susceptible and the befuddleable and makes machete-slashing issues out of pinpricky non-issues, such as, let's say, the president's citizenship status, or living wills as mandated death warrants.

But of course it's all a prodigious Catch-22. If MSNBC refused to play the game, then the likes of Fox and FreedomWorks would have the exclusive run of an open field. So MSNBC is stuck, even if, journalistically, it knows better. It's depressing -- the realization, that is, that there's no way out of the network madness -- which is also fitting, since depression is but a symptom of any vicious addiction.