So I'm watching Peter Jennings on ABC tonight (without cable, we make these decision based on things like reception quality), and I am struck by two contrasting features of this broadcast.

One, is that infotainment drives the production values in these sorts of things. Just as John Stewart reamed the Crossfire crew (filmed a block from my office) for privileging entertainment over political discourse, the broadcast here has the sorts of bells and whistles--fancy graphics, a map that Peter Jennings can color with all sorts of hypotheticals. This is politics as spectacle at its best.

And yet on the other hand, there are all sorts of little production gaffes--cutting to a commentator still in shadows, camera angles that aren't set up right, asking questions of correspondents who aren't expecting them, etc. To some degree, this is the necessary side effect of such an extended live broadcast, but I wonder if these under-produced moments don't add to the effect, heightening a sense of urgency, constructing an authenticity to the effect. These gaffes suggest that this is real, real-time, and connected to its audience. These features of liveness are where the newsmedia derives its image of credibility.

Poor production values as rhetorical spectacle? In this case, yep.