Meghan McCain, like her father Senator John McCain (R-AZ), is the kind of Republican the media adores.
Namely, both father and daughter love to smite their own party.
That offers each a modicum of media protection. The elder McCain’s media shield evaporated when he ran for the White House in 2008, and now his daughter’s force field is ebbing thanks to her new not-a-reality-show Raising McCain on the new Pivot channel.
Matthew Gilbert of The Boston Globe said the show offers “new depths of irritation waiting to be plumbed.”
There are banal insights on issues such as privacy, feminism, and sex. There are forced cutesy sidebars about a mounted deer head named George Jones and faux creative images of McCain holding a camera and filming the person she’s talking to. There are “F” words all over McCain’s dialogue, as she strains to prove that she is cool. There are endless vanity shots of her and her peeps — including her brother Jimmy — that remind us of what the show really is: One big TV selfie.
The New Republic’s Laura Bennett says the young McCain is too fitting a symbol of today’s politically aware types.
But she is also, a bit more troublingly, a caricature of youth political engagement. She comes across as flip, uninformed, and chock-full of unhelpful generalizations about millennials and the political landscape.
Salon dubbed her “The Worst of Millennial Culture” in its headline regarding the new show. The rest of the review is equally unkind.
She has been given 30 minutes a week on an aspirant cable network to prove that she has nothing to say.
Meghan McCain is the epitome of what it is to be not a millennial — a group of individuals of multifarious racial and class backgrounds — but the media perception of a millennial. The media wished that millennials, as a group, could be self-absorbed, entitled and unimaginative; Meghan McCain rose to the challenge.
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