Yes, the Late Night with Jimmy Fallon house band should not have played Fishbone’s Lyin’ Ass Bitch when U.S. representative and GOP presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann came onto the set on November 21. Yes, NBC was right to apologize, even though Bachmann said it should have come from NBC’s president, not a vice president.
She called it a double standard, according to CNN:
“If a Don Imus or someone does something questionable, they’re thrown off the air,” Bachmann said in her interview with KLIF. “But when it’s done to a conservative, it’s just passed off and forgotten.”
She’s referring to CBS, which fired Imus after calling Rutgers women’s basketball players “nappy-headed hos.” (But “fired” media people don’t stay fired very long; Imus quickly went to work for Citadel Media, now owned by Cumulus Media Networks, whose stable includes conservatives such as Mark Levin and former GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee.)
For media ethicists, perhaps the bigger question is why politicians go on entertainment shows in the first place.
Politicians have been doing it since Richard Nixon said “Sock it to me” on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh In in 1968, in hopes of improving the image of an uptight man who wore wing tip shoes on the beach. Since then, many candidates go onto entertainment shows to loosen their image — or even to make political announcements, such as Arnold Schwarzenneger announcing on the Tonight Show that he’d run for California governor.
It’s true that reporters often seek to rough up a candidate — or at least pierce the carefully shined image of candidates and show the public who’s behind the PR curtain. Even as some candidates say they want to talk about issues in more than sound bites, another refused an extended interview because it would be taped.
By going on entertainment shows, politicians can stick to their PR persona even as they come off glib. They avoid questions from real journalists even as the audience sees questions asked by media people.
But there’s a trade-off. When Bachmann appeared on an NBC entertainment show, there was a problem. But when she appeared a week earlier on NBC’s Meet the Press, there was no problem.
Solution: When you choose to appear on grown-up shows, you don’t have to worry about entertainment slaps. When you choose to be on funny shows, the joke may be on you.