More Lessons From "Lioness"
When Morgan Freeman speaks, listen
[This post is a continuation of my New Year’s binge-watching recommendation, which was cut for length. But, it still works now because we are still deep in the heart of binge-weather….]
If Lioness’ third episode in its second season touches on American political dysfunction, the seventh, “The Devil Has Aces,” delivers a sermon on it. Early in the episode, CIA Deputy Director Byron Westfield (Michael Kelly), boss of CIA senior supervisor Kaitlyn Meade (Nicole Kidman), is visited by Secretary of State Edwin Mullins (Morgan Freeman), his boss, during non-work hours. As Mullins enters the room where Westfield is watching the news, Westfield moves to shut off the TV. The secretary tells him to leave it on, which leads to a fascinating dialogue:
Male TV pundit: There are 64 million Latinos in America.
Female TV pundit: Latinos? Do you think that’s an appropriate term in our current climate, Dan?
Male TV pundit: So, what should I say? Should I say Latinx? I should just invent a term.
Mullins: Oh hell, I stand corrected. Turn that s—t off. How the f—k are we supposed to seek solutions when we can’t agree on what language to use to discuss the problem?
Westfield: If you want my opinion, sir, news stopped being news when they started doing it 24 hours a day.
Mullins: You got it.
Westfield: It became entertainment and a poor form at that.
Mullins: Court jesters who have fallen out of favor with the king. Now they’re mocking the court itself. Before long the court’s gonna start chanting, “Off with their heads,” and they know it. In a decade, no pillar of journalism will exist in its current form. New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal… they stopped reporting the news and started telling us what they think the news is and what our opinion of that news should be. Americans have always been gullible, but they’re not stupid. Lie to them enough, and they won’t trust you to tell them the sun’s rising.
There is so much good in this commentary. Take Mullins’ observation that the country can’t solve problems if it can’t agree about how to talk about them. Not only is he right, he’s downright anti-partisan in his comprehension that, for our politics to really work, it has to be driven by the objective of solving problems, not winning partisan battles.
Westfield’s response sounds like it could have come from AWDHEO’s call-out of the news media from last week. His analysis is spot on. Once cable news launched as a round-the-clock enterprise in the mid-1990s, it had to justify its airtime with viewership. It faced an imperative to chase ratings on a much larger scale than nightly newscasts or weekend news programs.
So, cable news networks played up political controversy in every story they covered, an effective tactic to attract eyeballs. But, in using political conflict as their lure to draw in viewers—as an entertainment ploy, in other words—the networks reinforced and institutionalized polarization in what was already a polarized nation.
Mullins’ court jester analogy is a bit over-the-top, as is his prediction that, within 10 years, legacy news outlets will no longer exist as legacy publications. But, his diagnosis of why Americans lack faith in news coverage is spot-on. At some point, the majority of journalists stopped functioning as news reporters and became news curators who began to dictate “what they think the news is and what our opinion of that news should be.” By attempting to stage-manage what information and perspectives should be presented to the country, the media lost the country’s trust.
Later, in the same exchange, Mullins reflects on the deterioration of national unity by contrasting the way America responded after 9/11 to the way we reacted to Covid.
Mullins: Where were you on 9/11?
Westfield: I, uh, I was a junior case officer in Islamabad
Mullins: In the middle of it from the start, huh?
Westfield: Yes, I was.
Mullins: I was in my third term in the House. If you will recall, there was some question about the legitimacy of the election of our 43rd president. So much so that we decided his first term would be his only term. So, to that end, we stonewalled—every appointment. And I’m not just talking about the Cabinet. I’m talking about bench appointments, U.S. attorney appointments. If he tried to get a kid into the Naval Academy, we figured out a way to block it, petty as that is.
Then, 9/11, and instantly Congress, the press and everybody in the United States turned to him as our Commander-in-Chief. We relied on him to lead us, to speak and act on our behalf, and he did. When he spoke to Congress September the 20th, he scared the s—t out of every leader in the world, terrified them into behaving for a decade. Say what you want about what about what he did after, but you can’t say anything about a man who stood before Congress and emboldened the nation to come together. We needed a leader, and a leader arose. We trusted him to rise.
What eroded that trust? What got us to where we are today? I don’t know all the ingredients in that soup, but I know some. And nobody’s innocent—not one president, not one member of Congress, not the press, nobody.
Two-thousand, nine-hundred and seventy-seven people died on 9/11. And I’m not including the f—ing hijackers in my count. But, we came together. Over a million died in Covid. Almost tore us apart.
Evidently, Mullins had been a Democratic congressman when George W. Bush was elected. But, over the years, he seems to have evolved into an anti-partisan type who understands that Americans share common purposes that transcend politics.
The secretary’s depiction of the national climate after Bush’s Sept. 20 address to Congress is accurate; Bush’s approval ratings hit 90%, and for a brief window, one that hasn’t been reopened since, Americans put politics aside and came together.
Mullins’ terse, contrasting analysis of the way the U.S. handled Covid is also on point. Covid did tear us apart—or it would have, if we already hadn’t been torn apart long ago. A shared threat that should have united us, as happened with 9/11, instead ripped us apart. Because, unlike with 9/11, we didn’t put politics aside.
Special Ops: Lioness (2023) was created by Taylor Sheridan and streams on Paramount+
Portions of this post have been inspired by my book The Anti-Partisan Manifesto: How Parties and Partisanism Divide America and How to Shut Them Down. Buy the book here. For the time being, it is only available digitally. To read, download the Kindle app to your phone, your iPad or tablet, your Kindle device or your computer.
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