You have the right to be misinformed
BERKELEY, California - Eighty percent of Americans get their information from Fox News, according to a recent University of Maryland poll. Not included in this estimate are the usual customers at the Free Speech Movement Cafe in one of the top US universities, dedicated to a Berkeley student leader-icon of the 1960s, Mario Savio (1943-96). Buried behind waves of laptops, stealing a glance toward a flat-screen TV not tuned to Fox, an international elite at the cafe skateboards to academic - and professional - glory. Wherever you look around - Cory Hall, the Campanile, the library - at least 50 percent of the students at the University of California, Berkeley are from Asia, the future elites of China, South Korea, India, Singapore, Malaysia.
According to a new Harvard University study, young people are much more interested in substance concerning the 2004 presidential election campaign than in previous US elections. An informal survey in Berkeley reveals that for the absolute majority of students, in view of the miserably poor planning of the war on Iraq, the current chaos and an unending series of recent scandals, Washington has definitively lost the battle for hearts and minds of Iraqis, the people of the Middle East, and Muslims as a whole. This is what they're discussing at the cafe, and this is what they read in, among other places, the Daily Californian, established in 1871 and an independent student paper since 1971.
To compare the students' view with what academe is talking about, nothing could be more appropriate than the recent annual Travers Ethics Conference on "Media, Democracy and the Informed Citizen" - a stimulating debate after conversations with students and professors on campus had revealed that California's intellectual elite is appalled at the transformation of elite newspapers to "attack dog journalism" or "lapdog journalism". Howard Raines, former executive editor of the New York Times, has spoken widely about the current "stenographic function" of the press.
Mark Danner, who writes for The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, cannot understand "how seven in 10 Americans became convinced that Saddam [Hussein] was involved on September 11 [2001], without the government explicitly saying so". The only answer he can find is that "we've had no political opposition. The press itself, increasingly commercialized, cannot function as an opposition voice."
For Jay Harris, a presidential professor at Santa Clara University and a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board of directors, the whole problem is centered on "corporate ethics ... The news media are now a large part of big business. They are more concerned with how much profit they make, not with how to best fulfill their role." Because these corporations invariably resort to "propaganda techniques to shape mass opinion", the "distrust of news media is at a dangerously high level": they "are not seen anymore as being disinterested". Harris complains, for example, that TV networks "don't even acknowledge that have-nots exist in American society". He despairs that "corporations will not heal the wounds of democracy".
Douglas Kellner, who holds a chair in philosophy of education at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and has written, among other books, a delicious study of the 2000 election (Grand Theft 2000: Media Spectacle and the Theft of an Election), places the whole process in terms of an orgy of infotainment and tabloidization. He is seriously worried about the "effects of the Iraqi spectacle" on the 2004 election. Kellner says, "We have better information sources than any country in history, but everybody is misinformed." His solution: go and find accurate news sources on the Internet and in the blogosphere, a process that is "great for democracy".
John Zaller, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and whose next book studies how the conflicting interests of reporters, politicians and citizens shape the news, is also worried about the "ratings obsession". But in his take on "celebrity politics" may be the answer to rescue politics as usual from the abyss: "[Arnold] Schwarzenegger was a good thing. Because he is interesting. They like to watch him. Even before he started in office [as governor of California], eight networks established bureaus in Sacramento [the state capital], which they've never bothered to cover."
Do ghosts cross the Pacific?
Sandy Close, executive director of Pacific News Service, believes a ray of light can be found in the work of ethnic media. In California, there are 40 Vietnamese publications in Orange County, 14 Armenian papers in Burbank, 15 Thai papers in the state. "This is new, vibrant, hungry media, sharing information about each other's communities." For these media, the story of an obscure Vietnamese in San Jose is big news. Close insists that in a state where one in four people is an immigrant and 40 percent of the population speaks a foreign language at home, "we can't use the [phrase] 'public opinion' in California anymore without considering other languages than English".
Political scientist Lance Bennett, a professor at the University of Washington and director of the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement, has been studying the phenomenon of the "unelectability" of former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean. He started with the first long character-assassination profile in the Washington Post ("he was depicted as arrogant, disrespectful, fiery, red-faced", as compared with a "brilliantly cranky" Donald Rumsfeld). Dean upset insider Democrats. The press linked his anger to electability. And the growth of the Dean anger story led to "voters are angry, down, Dean is angry, up." Then the media clinched it with the contrast with John Kerry, "electable, and not angry". With "electability" as the story frame, even Dean "going into news rehab" was not enough to save him.
So this is how it works, says Bennett. 1) Opposition spin and/or candidate slips prompt "insider" views from press. 2) Press corps recognizes a good story and decontextualizes everything that does not fit. Bennett is absolutely sure Kerry will be the next victim, tagged as a "rich, liberal elitist".
Darry Sragow - a character who looks as if he stepped out of Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas - brings a political-insider perspective to the debate. He is one of California's leading consultants to political campaigns: he has managed five of them, statewide. Sragow complains, "There's no interest for campaigns, apart for the big circus for president." He believes Dean was indeed out of control, because "he is an out-of-control guy. In the beginning they didn't even have a communications director" - certainly a not-so-subtle way to plug his skills. Sragow insists that the Kerry candidacy now "has to grow. Voters feel they are in a rudderless ship. But a lot of the debate will be focused on who is less risky."
Sragow's perception scares the hell out of Democrats. Many are horrified that Kerry's campaign has been so out of focus that even with President George W Bush's credibility being undermined practically on a daily basis - especially by Iraq fallout - Kerry has not been able to open up a lead, either on a national level or in key swing states such as Arizona, New Mexico, Ohio, Michigan and Florida. If he can't manage to do just that in the crucial month of June, he'll be in deep trouble. Not only at Berkeley, but in Los Angeles and all over California's huge infotainment industry, the regime-change-in-Washington sentiment is overwhelming. Kerry will most certainly win in California. But at the same time there's a feeling that the ultra-cautious and exceedingly boring Kerry campaign simply can't keep droning on like this. "Kerry has not focused his message. And he has not offered a broad vision for our future," says a Korean-American student.
Sragow compares the US presidential election to "a tennis match between two opponents". And he insists negative ads do work. So in the end US democracy seems to be reduced to a system of two tennis players running after big checks to pay for a barrage of negative ads. Is there any way out of despair for a concerned citizen? Mark Danner believes so: "Forget Fox News. Read a book! Let a million flowers bloom!"
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