Tea at Trianon: The Last Television President

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, February 10, 2025

The Last Television President

From Steam Calliope Scherzos:

Someone will pose the question as to whether I’m accusing TV journalists of being aware of what they were doing. And unmistakably, they did not. I think that journalists are, on the whole, more driven by ideology than money, though if they can find an instance in which the two interests can coincide, they’ll seize upon it. This is because if both they and their bosses are operating on the same wavelength, then things will go more smoothly, even though both parties will be assessing the situation differently. I therefore have no doubt that every TV anchor who was trying to “take down” Donald Trump genuinely wanted to end his political career permanently. But they also failed to recognize that the nuances of whatever message they were trying to popularize would ultimately fail when set in relief against the iconography of Trump the myth — a myth that their medium had been building up for decades.
And yet for all of its importance, and for all of the work it did in steadily expanding Trump’s mythology over time, television is still a dying medium, viewed mostly by the elderly. The median age of all Fox News viewers is 69 years old, and the median age of MSNBC’s viewers is 70. And because of such a lopsided viewership, the TV business is quite strange. Old reruns often get higher Nielsen ratings than newer shows, and newer shows consequently benefit from increasingly low expectations from executives. In professional wrestling, the only televised industry I follow somewhat closely, the All Elite Wrestling owner Tony Khan hemorrhaged viewers continually over the course of a year and yet still landed a surprisingly lucrative media rights deal. More and more people are cutting their cable cords, and increasingly, young people are looking back on the era of cable television with confusion: why, exactly, did people pay for TV? What were they thinking? (Read more.)