Media Neither candidate offered voters a dream
By RAYMOND A. SCHROTH
I vividly remember walking out of
the Democratic Convention, which had just nominated Michael Dukakis in Atlanta
in 1988, and suddenly realizing that I was walking right next to Al and Tipper
Gore. What a fine looking man! What a handsome couple! I couldnt help
thinking -- indulging briefly that romantic fallacy that imagines a symmetry
between outward appearance and inner quality -- as in Washington, Wilson, and
FDR.
Here I was, I thought, six inches away from the future president
of the United States.
What went wrong?
Not since the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 has the
country been in such a miserable fix: So said David Broder, considered the
dean of political journalists, in The Washington Post during
Thanksgiving week; and he repeated it on Meet the Press. At least
then we made a quick transition from JFK to Lyndon Johnson.
Yet, Anthony Lewis had said, on the news and in his New York
Times column, that the system was working just fine; although George W.
Bush had been very unpresidential in his excoriation of the Florida Supreme
Court -- using the same words that other Southern governors, such as George
Wallace, had used to defy courts that had ordered desegregation.
One way to explain the mess, insofar as it is a mess, is to blame
the media. And there is plenty of blame to go around.
Their policy of calling elections before the votes are
counted this year has been responsible for misleading the viewers in several
elections, with Florida only the worst example. The wrong call can do
incalculable harm -- not just to the egos of candidates but to the public
perception of the democratic process. And why do they call early? To hold
viewers, to jack up ratings, to sell more and charge more for their ads.
Now a quick break. Dont go away. Well be right back
with the latest blah blah blah. Ad for GE. A CEO leaves his opulent office,
drives to the airport, flies to a big city, hops in a fancy car, drives to a
skyscraper -- all the while gabbing on his cell phone while driving his car
with one hand! Break the law. GE is with you. Cool. Now to Dade County
The media, which were once news organizations, are now
cash cows for multinational corporations, such as GE, whose CEOs have but one
purpose: maximize profits for shareholders. As Mark Danner wrote in the Sept.
21 New York Review of Books, American politicians have been forced
to become a species of bagmen who collect money from the wealthy and deliver it
to television in order to sell themselves to the voters. And voters, seeing the
mounting piles of money and the access and influence gained by those who supply
it, grow less and less willing to participate.
Thus there has been no incentive for the networks to cover the
election in any real depth. A terrific issue of the Columbia Journalism
Review (November/December) spells out the mainstream press failure to
document the relationship between the economic boom and the rise of inequality.
This should have been the election issue, but it was in neither
candidates interest to raise it.
So we got a year of barking and braying about tax cuts and
prescription drugs.
So the press, especially TV, let the candidates set the
agenda.
Whom else do we blame? I blame Al Gore.
I voted for Gore and I relish the competition among columnists to
best characterize the befuddled W. Bushs attempts to make himself look
presidential during these weeks. To several, he is the deer caught
in the headlights. To another, he is the 5-year-old on his first day in school.
To another, he is pleading with Dick Cheney and Colin Powell to give him his
own parking space in their new administration. To Jim Dwyer in the New York
Daily News, he is the man who refuses to notice that he is losing the
popular vote by over 370,000 votes -- while Bush and his surrogates call on
Gore to admit that he has lost.
A study by The Miami Herald has shown that if the
Florida election had been run correctly Gore would have won by 23,000 votes. I
am confident that within the next several months journalists, through the
Freedom of Information Act, will gain access to Floridas votes and
document that the majority of Florida voters either voted for or attempted to
vote for Gore. The nation will blush and go on.
During the campaign, as the journalists pounded out their
biographies and character analyses, several Gores emerged: the boy struggling
for his fathers approval, the reluctant but dutiful soldier, the would-be
reporter and short-time seminarian, the chameleon adapting his earth-tone
wardrobe to the color scheme of his environment.
Yet I stayed confident that his basic decency, intelligence and
experience, plus the common sense of the people, would make him president.
The queasiness in my stomach started during the primary debates
with Bill Bradley over who was more militantly pro-abortion. Gore had taken a
stand years ago that the fetus was a living person. I could have respected an
honest attempt to explain how he changed his mind, but no, he treated that once
principled position as if he had never held it.
Second, when Tim Russert, combining two hot issues, asked him on
Meet the Press about executing a woman who was pregnant, he asked
for a day to think about it and finally answered that he would uphold the
womans choice. Where was the journalist to ask follow-up
questions like: How would you feel about electrocuting a woman eight months
pregnant -- basically a double execution -- if that were her choice?
Third, why could not Gore bring himself to create some distance
between himself and Bush on capital punishment? Because they are convinced that
popular support for the death penalty is so strong that they will risk nothing
-- not one vote -- to discuss one of the main moral issues of our time. Here
Gores dishonesty was intellectual: He said he supported the death penalty
because it was a deterrent. Yet a man of his intelligence must
know, if he has studied the question at all, that is not a deterrent. It is
simply revenge. Gore would not even go to bat for innocent people on death row.
And gun control, which he had backed in the primaries, quickly disappeared from
the discussion.
Fourth, pandering to the Florida Cuban-Americans, Gore separated
himself from the administrations position on returning Elián
Gonzalez to his father and his Cuban home.
Ironically, when the Thanksgiving week mob intimidated and shut
down the Dade County vote counting, cutting off access to the pool of ballots
that could have given Gore the lead, those shouting and shaking their fists
were the very Cubans whom Gore had tried foolishly to placate in the
Elián fiasco.
Finally, Gore became a political parrot that had trained himself
to recite a six-word vocabulary for all occasions: Prescription drugs,
womans right to choose, SQUAWWWK!!!
Not one speech on either side tried to lift the electorate above
its narrow self-interests. The candidates dreamed no dreams and saw no visions.
And neither did we.
Jesuit Fr. Raymond A. Schroth is the Jesuit Community Professor
of Humanities at St. Peters College in Jersey City, N.J. His e-mail
address is raymondschroth@aol.com
National Catholic Reporter, December 15,
2000
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