The last Jim-written Morning Jolt of 2016 includes a few winners from the end-of-the-year awards from the Three Martini Lunch Podcast. Greg Corombus and I use the same categories that the (sigh) no-longer airing rowdy debate program, The McLaughlin Group. John McLaughlin was my pick for the “Sorry to See You Go” category in a year when far too many big names left us too early. The McLaughin Group gets blamed for a lot of the problems in today’s political news television, but it was qualitatively different from today’s offerings. The panelists were there for their knowledge, bold thinking, and quick wits, and they actually got along off-camera no matter how loud and heated the on-screen debates could get. At least by my young eyes in the late 1980s and 1990s, the show made politics fun. These days when Saturday Night Live does news parodies, they portray pundits as dumb; Dana Carvey’s funhouse-mirror version of McLaughlin wasn’t dumb, just hilariously insane.
Greg picked the figure I suspect most readers would offer: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
A few of the other picks:
Most Under-Reported Story: The national sports media noticed the NFL enduring a ratings slide, but almost no one noticed that the ratings for college football remained the same. And the ratings for the non-biggest-game of the week were actually 10 percent higher than the previous year, suggesting that it’s something unique to the NFL, not to football, concussions, commercial breaks, too many games, etcetera.
So you put together the NFL ratings slide, the all-women Ghostbusters reboot flopping, enrollment down sharply at the University of Missouri, the short-lived crusade against the hosts of “Fixer Upper” on HGTV, this was the year of the backlash against political correctness, and it didn’t happen overnight. This was building, online outrage by online outrage, for a long time, and it blindsided most of the media. Political correctness was never popular, but you would never know it from the way the media talks about these issues. You would never know that almost half the country doesn’t support gay marriage. You would never know that the majority of people think there are two genders.
The most under-reported story of 2016 is the supreme unpopularity of political correctness and the “Social Justice Warrior” philosophy.
Most Over-Reported Story: I was tempted to go with hate crimes, since so many of them turn out to be hoaxes, but I’m going with Hillary Clinton’s ground game and state offices. In mid-autumn, Politico surveyed Democratic strategists and operatives and three-quarters convinced their party was set to do a better job of turning out their base voters in North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin.
Hillary Clinton’s multitudes of state offices didn’t amount to a hill of beans. Clearly, her team was as blindsided as anyone else. All those data metrics, all those surveys, all that technology . . . In the end, all of that didn’t help her win a race where she was the front-runner all along. What’s more, none of that stuff gave her a clue that she was losing it. There has been a real Cult of Data built in the world of political campaigns, and I’ve genuflected a time or two to the idea that everything can be quantified, measured and calculated.