Pundits’ Adventures in Meta-Land: The Bitter Battle Book
posted by Frank Pasquale
I’ve been subjected to a lot of TV the past few days (long story), and I’ve been pretty amazed by the debate over Barack Obama’s riff on “What’s the Matter with Kansas” themes at a fundraiser in San Francisco. Pundits gnaw on the topic like a raw bone. Absent, of course, from any of this Dumbo Politics is substantive discussion of whether Obama’s policies would actually help the people he’s accused of condescending to. What’s far more interesting to them (and, of course, requires far less research or original thought) is the question of what will “Joe Sixpack” think of the comments, which in turn is driven by what journalists say he’s thinking, which is based on their view of how their views will influence him.
As political reporting loses its legitimacy via this horserace-coverage hall of mirrors, we shouldn’t be surprised if most Americans simply give up on following campaign news at all. The hive mind of “objective journalism” may be collateral damage, as Eric Alterman’s historical perspective suggests:
[In the early 20th century], many newspapers remained committed to the partisan model of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American press, in which editors and publishers viewed themselves as appendages of one or another political power or patronage machine and slanted their news offerings accordingly. (Think of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton battling each other through their competing newspapers while serving in George Washington’s Cabinet.) [Only later did] newspapers strive for political independence and attempt to act as referees between competing parties on behalf of what they perceive to be the public interest.
The [more recent] transformation of newspapers from enterprises devoted to objective reporting to a cluster of communities, each engaged in its own kind of “news”––and each with its own set of “truths” upon which to base debate and discussion––will mean the loss of a single national narrative and agreed-upon set of “facts” by which to conduct our politics. News will become increasingly “red” or “blue.” [T]he American scene [used to be] dominated by brazenly partisan newspapers. And the news cultures of many European nations long ago embraced the notion of competing narratives for different political communities, with individual newspapers reflecting the views of each faction. It may not be entirely coincidental that these nations enjoy a level of political engagement that dwarfs that of the United States.
Recent campaign coverage has left many commentators despairing about the “objective model,” for good reason. . .
For example, one needn’t agree with all the details of Glenn Greenwald’s analysis to see the recent “bitter battle” as an “othering” of Obama:
[Over the past several days,] [t]here was virtually no discussion, at least on any of the news shows to which I was exposed, of the obviously consequential revelations of the President’s direct involvement in the creation of America’s torture regime. Instead, the vast bulk of attention was paid to depicting Barack Obama as an effete, elitist, deceptive enemy of the Regular Guy — exactly the way that every national Democratic politician in recent memory has inevitably been depicted (including Hillary Clinton, particularly when the media and the Right thought last year that she would be the nominee).
Our elections are dominated by the same tired personality script, trotted out over and over and over. Democrats and liberals — no matter how poor their upbringing, no matter how self-made they are, no matter how egalitarian their policies — are the freakish, out-of-touch elitists who despise the values of the Regular Americans. Right-wing leaders — no matter how extravagantly rich they are by virtue of other people’s money, no matter how insulated their lives are, no matter how indifferent their policies are to the vast rich/poor gap — are the normal, salt-of-the-earth Regular Folk. These petty, cliched storylines drown out every meaningful consideration and dictate our election outcomes, and they are deployed automatically.
When this script has been played so many times–for Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, Edwards, and now apparently Obama–no one should be surprised if many people just tune out the mainstream media. Media theorists like Cass Sunstein may lament that the resulting “narrowcasting” leads to a fragmented society that has no common focus on current events. In this, as in so many areas of American politics, the right (as Alterman notes) has taken the lead and shown the way:
[The objective/professionalized journalism] model received its initial challenge from the political right. Many conservatives regarded the major networks, newspapers, and newsweeklies—the mainstream media—as liberal arbiters, incapable of covering without bias the civil-rights movement in the South or Barry Goldwater’s Presidential campaign. They responded by building think tanks and media outlets designed both to challenge and to bypass the mainstream media.
The Reagan revolution, which brought conservatives to power in Washington, had its roots not only in the candidate’s personal appeal as a “great communicator” but in a decades-long campaign of ideological spadework undertaken in magazines such as William F. Buckley, Jr.,’s National Review and Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary and in the pugnacious editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, edited for three decades by Robert Bartley. The rise of what has come to be known as the conservative “counter-establishment” and, later, of media phenomena such as Rush Limbaugh, on talk radio, and Bill O’Reilly, on cable television, can be viewed in terms of a Deweyan community attempting to seize the reins of democratic authority and information from a Lippmann-like élite.
A journalistic elite more concerned with the echo chamber of the “bitter battle” than with actually covering what candidates have to say about the myriad crises the US now faces is losing what little credibility it once had.
April 15, 2008 at 12:20 am
Posted in: Politics
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Responses (4)
Paul Horwitz - April 15, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Frank — interesting post, as always. Can I ask a couple of questions? Address any, all, or none of them as the mood strikes you.
1) What is your definition or general sense of what constitutes legitimacy for political reporting? Legitimacy in what sense? 2) What agency do you attribute to the candidates themselves? Hillary Clinton, for instance, has spent a good deal of time talking about Obama’s speech for the last couple of days now, and of course Obama has spoken back. Are they either not responsible, or only somewhat responsible, for focusing on these horse-race aspects of the campaign — because, after all, that’s the only way they can squeeze onto the media’s agenda — or are they fully responsible for their own decision to put their time and attention where they do? 3) Isn’t it possible to be both a self-made egalitarian from a poor background AND something of an out-of-touch elitist? Is it, I suppose, also possible to be both rich and insulated AND, by nature, Just Plain Folks? [Whether and how much we ought to care about any of this, of course, is another question.] 4) You quite reasonably note that there are all kind of scripts out there — Greenwald presents some of them but you don’t suggest those are the only ones. When you look at media depiction of significant conservative and/or Republican politicians in the last 20 or 30 years, do you also find evidence of “scripted” portrayals of their characters that are truer to the script than to either a particular reality or to any deeper consideration of the substance of their policies? Say, the lasting popularity of the image of George Bush senior as having been “born with a silver spoon in his mouth” — was that a real description, or a caricature; and was it the right thing to focus on in the first place? What about Reagan as Amiable Dunce? Or descriptions of various conservative politicians as “harsh,” or “hard-liners,” or “ultra-conservative,” or descriptions of them as not caring or knowing about the problems of the poor, when they care deeply about the poor but favor private and not statist solutions to their problems? Or depictions of the current Bush as being indifferent or oblivious to the welfare of soldiers currently serving in Iraq? For that matter, do we run the risk of being captured by our own script if we think in categorical terms like “journalistic elites?”
These questions may seem more combative than they are. I do welcome your reactions.
Frank - April 15, 2008 at 6:47 pm
1) Legitimate reporting would follow the tradition of civic journalism, which tries to compare the policies proposed by the candidates, their likelihood of actually getting those policies in place, and the effect of such policies.
2) As for Clinton, my last link (on “echo chamber”) has a good perspective. As for the general preference of journalists to simply focus on what political elites think of given issues, see the nuanced and sophisticated argument of Jon Mermin, Debating War and Peace.
3) I am quite familiar with being “a self-made egalitarian from a poor background AND something of an out-of-touch elitist,” but the multivalence of the term “elitist” is the key problem here. I used it playfully to describe the journalists involved (which should address your very last question). The very fact it can have so many meanings (a Bach connoisseur, a purist vegan, a hedge fund tycoon, etc. might all be “ideal types”) means that it’s a useless label to try to pin on anyone. But that very slipperiness is the main reason why it’s so much fun for the various bloviators on TV to keep bandying it about.
4) The Bush Sr/Reagan things may well be part of an unfair script as well.
As for the current administration “not caring”: I don’t know where you’ve been seeing those depictions. One might certainly draw them as subtext from, say, the documentaries “Iraq: No End in Sight” or “Alive Day Memories” (especially when one stoic soldier observes that Humvees are transport, not military vehicles); but I doubt I have ever seen a depiction on CNN or Fox for the big news networks of an Administration that “does not care” about wounded soldiers, except perhaps for the Walter Reed issue (which I’m sure will be made into a 30-second attack ad by the Club for GRowth about the dangers of nationalized health care). (Admittedly, I don’t watch much TV).
5) as for those who “care deeply about the poor but favor private and not statist solutions to their problems,” I’ll quote an old post of mine on SCHIP–if you believe that “private initiatives and community empowerment” will solve the problem, please give some sense of exactly how those work and how they will be funded. And if “tax deductions” are a potential solution, how long will we give that to work? As Keynes once quipped, in the long run we’re all dead.
Paul Horwitz - April 16, 2008 at 12:07 am
Thanks, Frank. To be clear, I’m not stating a view on most of these issues, including #5. Nor, as it turns out, do I watch much TV either — actually, that’s a lie, I watch tons, but none that don’t involve cranky fictional doctors. I’m not as much of a fan of civic journalism as you are, I think. And I don’t think the uncaring administration trope was anything I got from unusual or non-mainstream sources.
Stokie - April 16, 2008 at 10:01 am
Actually the most likely reason why this story has struck such a chord has remained – as far as I know – unexamined. The real problem with the “What’s the Matter with Kansas”/”they cling” Obaman sociological analysis is that while it is condescending, and while it is flawed, it is also hypocritical. And America is unforgiving of hypocrites.
The “Kansas” analysis (I note that I found much to commend in this readable, smart book) posits that working-class Americans have been duped into voting “against their economic interest” by the Republican noise machine, which urges them to focus on social issues in lieu of economic issues. The problem – and the hypocracy – implicit to this analysis is that relatively well-off and well-off liberals (e.g. movie stars, law professors, etc.) can be accused of voting “against their economic interests” when they vote for typical high-tax, high-spend Democrats because, for example, that Democrat shares their views on abortion, immigration, or gay marriage. But when the liberal votes against his economic interest, he is enlightend. When the working-class person does so, he is “duped.”
Just as the well-off liberal would not appreciate it if he were accused of “clinging” to left-wing policies because they, e.g, made him even richer, got him laid in college, or caused his impressionable students to swoon when he entered the classroom – or that he was somehow “duped” into these beliefs by the New York Times, Air America, or the Dean of Faculty – nor do conservative working class people appreciate it, either. Nor is accusing such people of “clinging” or being “duped” a step towards bringing people together.
Note that this counter-analysis puts aside the liberal who votes for the tax-and-spend Democrat because he thinks that, ultimately, such policies will leave him better off economically (on the notion that they’ll expand the economy, cause a rise in the stock market, etc.). Bill Mahr, for example, in every one of his programs (in which, once more, there is often much to commend) makes sure to observe “these people [the working class] are voting against their economic interests!,” as if doing so is proof positive of the con. Bill Mahr, a noted hedonist, obviously cannot imagine doing something other than that which leaves him -Bill Mahr – better off. Fortunately – and obviously, according to the “Kansas” analysis – many working-class Americans, and other Americans, are less selfish than Hollywood liberals.
Obama would be better off rejecting the “Americans are dupes” line of argument – regardless of its currency among San Francisco donors – and instead use the notion that all types of Americans are willing to sacrifice their interests in the cause of the greater good, a quality that many on each side – even on the extremes – share with one another. Tapping into that quality can help bring us together, it ought not be used to divide us further, through condescension and hypocracy.
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