• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, July 17, 2024

Whatever you choose to call it -- rhetoric or vitriol -- recent calls to “tone down the rhetoric” will not suddenly have everybody actually doing that.

“Can we all get along?” pleaded Rodney King in 1992.

No, we can’t. Which is why few will heed the pleas by some in the last few days to tone down the TV talk-show anger and social-media tantrums that have become a national pastime.

The operative word is “some,” which in this usage is synonymous with “few.” It is not as if the calls for peaceful discourse with our neighbors have suddenly cooled the heat that surrounds everything these days.

Why is this subject being covered in a TV Blog? Because the pleas to curb the vitriol -- and the vitriol the pleas are referring to -- play out every day on TV.

The power of TV as a great influencer cannot be denied by anyone even vaguely familiar with television. 

If the medium had no influence, the advertising business that has underpinned the whole thing for 70-plus years would make no sense.

Thus, it is not unreasonable to blame TV -- in this case, our cable news channels -- for contributing to our culture of finger-pointing, be it the middle finger or the index finger. 

The use of the word “rhetoric” is interesting here. Classically speaking, the word does not necessarily refer to “harsh criticism” or “mean tweets.” Merriam-Webster defines it first and foremost as “the art of speaking or writing effectively” and “skill in the effective use of speech.” It can also refer to “insincere or grandiloquent language.”

An end to insincerity and grandiloquence would be nice. But now “rhetoric” is being applied in reference to the recitation in public forums of half-truths and no-truths, name-calling and other forms of “vitriol.”

When I looked up “vitriol” in the dictionary, I learned it refers primarily to a caustic substance found in some metals.

Its use as a reference to angry speech evolved from that. “Something felt to resemble vitriol especially in caustic quality; virulence of feeling or of speech" is how the dictionary puts it.

So why dive into these dry definitions of “rhetoric” and “vitriol”? Some might insist that everybody knows them when they hear them, right?

But that is not the case. Who can say what the boundaries are between speech that is “rhetoric” or “vitriol” and what isn’t?

It reminds me of the old FCC’s attempts to regulate or control “obscenity” on TV and radio (mostly the latter). 

The Commission would level fines at, say, Howard Stern, and then sometime later, the company that was fined would win an appeal in which it argued that the fines were unjustified because no one was able to define what the obscenity actually was.

In the wake of the calls for toning down the negative speech following the assassination attempt on former President Trump, there seems to be some reaction in that direction on TV.

But it won’t last. Vitriol and anger are the foundations on which the cable news channels have built their businesses. 

They are not going to gut the very content that they depend on, especially right now in this hot summer of Biden vs. Trump.

Or to put it another way, if the talk shows on Fox News Channel, CNN and MSNBC cooled their “rhetoric” to be less “vitriolic,” no one would watch them.

It reminds me of a time back in the late 1990s (I think) when syndicated daytime talk shows were controversial. The one that consistently made the most headlines was “The Jerry Springer Show,” on which fights broke out every day. For the show’s fans, the fights were its best feature.

For a time, the fights even propelled the “Springer” show past the perennial daytime frontrunner, “Oprah Winfrey,” in the ratings.

But under pressure from the media and probably sponsors and maybe even threats from the government, the company that owned the “Springer” show vowed to do away with the fights, and did so.

But the fight ban was short-lived. Before long, the fights were back, and the “Springer” show lasted for 20 more years.

As the years went by, the world moved on and nobody seemed to get exercised anymore over the “Springer” fights. They became the norm. The same will happen on TV.

Vitriolic TV is the norm today. After this recent call for lowering the temperature of our discourse, the world will similarly move on, and the vitriol will return (if it ever left in the first place).