Something New on TV

It is by now a commonplace that we are in an epistemic crisis in America, the result of the siloing of the news, so that a big chunk of the country lives in an entirely different reality from the one inhabited by The Rachel Maddow Show on one hand and Sean Hannity’s show on the other.  No possible talking-heads-and-host show can change this, and the crisis might very well doom democracy here. The last time the integrity of the nation was so menaced, of course, was back in the 1850s around the issue of slavery. Between those who thought chattel slavery was insanely cruel and those who thought that it was the best thing for an inferior race, there could be no compromise. There could be clarification, though, which is what the Lincoln-Douglas Debates did. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” as Lincoln pointed out in those debates; it seems to me that our situation is frighteningly similar to his. Somehow the contending factions have to be brought together in a typically American way, which is why I think that television journalism should begin to stage serious debates.

By “serious debates” I don’t mean the somewhat silly ritual of competing one-liners we call debates during Presidential campaigns. I mean real debates, Lincoln-Douglas style, about the great issues that divide the nation.  Wouldn’t you like to see Rudy Giuliani defend “Resolved: the 2020 election was rigged against Donald Trump,” with Chris Krebs opposing?  Ted Cruz v. Elizabeth Warren on the role of government in the US economy? Or a serious debate about reproductive rights, or how to deal with gun violence, or whether climate change is a hoax, or whether masks work to stop the spread of the pandemic, with the most important proponents of differing views defending their positions, using actual evidence?

It will be argued that the current attention span of Americans is too short to support such a program. In response I’d point out that there are 24,000 high schools in the United States and over three thousand colleges, and that nearly every one of them has a debate club. (Both Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren were champion college debaters.) There is in fact a lively formal debate culture in the US, which as far as I know has not been tapped by any media program. Beyond that, Americans love competitions, and it’s not essential to be up on the issues. Think of the millions of people who have been riveted by American Idol, Iron Chef, The Great British Baking Show, and Dancing With the Stars, even though they may know little of music, cooking, baking, or ballroom dancing. Americans will watch any fight, and if it’s staged right, it can be great television. That it might help to save the nation is lagniappe.

Will proponents of the major positions, especially those on the right, actually expose themselves in this way? I think they will, and, (remarkably!) the more extreme the more willing. When Deborah Lipstadt trashed the scholarship of the Holocaust denier, Clifford Irving, in her book, he volunteered to defend his theories in open court and under oath. While there’s still Holocaust denial, I think we can say there’s no longer respectable Holocaust denial; Irving largely vanished from decent intellectual society after that trial. But Lipstadt took a risk—the trial could have gone the other way; and liberals have to take a risk too.  

In fact, being open to opposing views seems to me the bedrock of liberalism; and liberals should back such a debate show as the ultimate answer to the canard that liberalism is just another name for cancel culture. We can’t just say that the views of millions of Americans are merely stupid. If we think our fellows citizens are in error, we owe it to the nation to allow the exposure of such errors in open, formal debate. Besides being great television, it would be new! And if libs are also making systematic errors, these should be exposed too.

Obviously, program design is a task.  There would be judges, as in competitive debate, but who would these be? Famous people or obscure ones?  How chosen, how many? Would they hold up scores, as in ice skating, or would the judges offer a brief analysis of the performance, as on American Idol. Would debaters lose points for, e.g. ad hominem arguing, or straw-men, or Irish bulls, or post hoc error? Would there be real-time fact checkers, and would their findings be incorporated in the score?  As we all learned a lot about baking on GBBS, we will all learn something about what constitutes a good argument, another thing the nation could use.