BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
New survey data released August 27, confirmed that more than 70 percent of Americans give the economy negative marks. Nearly the same number believes the country is seriously off track and the same number, 70 percent of Americans, believes the economy will be the dominant issue in how they vote.
The Washington Post headline over that story reflected a different reality: “While the rhetoric reflects other issues, economy still dominates race.” In other words, what the vast majority of Americans are most concerned about is not what the news media are covering.
The Post story by Dan Balz and Jon Cohen said the campaign that week was preoccupied with women’s issues because of the antics of Todd Akin, the Missouri Senate candidate, who made such ludicrous remarks about rape they don’t deserve repeating. That didn’t stop the media, however.
The Washington Post–reflecting national print, broadcast and Internet media–in one edition alone, published more than 4,000 words on Akin, little of which actually addressed the substance or complexity of abortion, a “women’s issue.”
In that same paper, the Post ran just 960 words, or 75 percent less coverage, on the unveiling of the Romney-Ryan plan for American energy independence by 2020, one of the major economic challenges of the next decade.
The Post did the same with Clint Eastwood’s address to the Republican National Convention, giving it more coverage than Gov. Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech. The Post wasn’t alone or even close to being the worst offender. Politico, according to news analyst Howard Kurtz, had no less than 17 digital headlines devoted to Eastwood.
The same occurred on ABC’s Sunday talk show with George Stephanopoulos. The roundtable participants actually engaged in a surreal-like discussion of “the letter of the facts versus the spirit of facts” after commentator Matthew Dowd got himself all tangled up in facts and falsehoods regarding an auto plant in Janesville, WI. It was beyond irony that among the roundtable participants, sitting quiet through all of this, was Bill Burton, head of the Obama super PAC, Priorities USA which produced an ad accusing Mitt Romney of complicity in the death of a Kansas woman. How he got on what was once a respectable national news show is curious, or maybe not.
Here’s a dose of reality.
There are historical, monumental challenges facing our country and its President and Congress in the coming year. Not the least of which are a looming national debt crisis; accelerating job creation; putting us on a path toward energy independence; addressing several immigration crises; a crumbling infrastructure; saving public education from mediocrity and neglect; ensuring our national security, including cyber-security, and staring down several real, frightening and potentially explosive international crises, from European debt to nuclear proliferation among rogue nations and organizations.
The media should be helping to educate the American people about all of these issues. They should help them sort out the facts, so that the people can pick the right leaders to deal with them. They should be enlightening and not inciting.
That would be prudent and responsible, but apparently not profitable.
Instead media are saturated with the inconsequential, irrelevant, salacious and savagely confrontational. They are more fascinated by the sideshows, the extreme fringes of politics and society, and relish chasing down any scent of race baiting, religious bigotry, character assassinations, lies, fabrications or exaggerations. They are more interested in Mitt Romney’s income taxes for the past eight years, than Mitt Romney’s plan for the first major tax reforms in 26 years.
What is more troubling is that media have abandoned their role as observers and assumed the role of influencers, affecting change rather than just reporting on it, as though overcome by some delusion that they, and only they, can save Western civilization from itself. It occurs across the great landscape of modern-day journalist from the blogs to the carnival barkers on cable TV. But it has also lured even the deans of journalism, who are also abandoning the basic tenets of a noble profession.
Bob Schieffer, one of America’s venerable broadcast journalists seems to spend most of his time on the air these days just like so many others in his profession, playing the game of charge/counter charge. It’s similar to the older version, he said/she said. Reporters ask a politician provocative questions (usually leading with “I have to ask you this question’ as though it’s not really them asking) until he/she makes a charge against the opposition. The quotation generates a headline. The reporters then go to the opposition camp and elicit a counter charge to the first charge, thereby creating a new headline. The reporters then return to some other surrogate of the opposition camp and stir the pot more until yet another headline is made, and so on and so on and so on, until the subject runs its course and another charge is plucked from the political minefields.
The press has also become more complicit and irresponsible in marketing the messages of partisans, without regard to their validity or veracity. The political professionals call it “earned media.”
Take for example, the Priorities USA ad implying that Mitt Romney was complicit in the death of the Kansas woman. The ad was probably the most despicable since Lyndon Johnson’s mushroom ad implying that Barry Goldwater would start a nuclear war if elected. The innuendo of the Burton ad was so preposterous none of us should have ever been exposed to it. But you would think that USA Priorities spent $100 million running it all across the country.
To my knowledge, at three weeks into the controversy, Priorities USA hadn’t spent a dime on placement and only one television station ran it–mistakenly. Not a dime was spent. You know why? Because the news media played the pertinent parts of the ad free of charge, so no ad buy was necessary. The Obama marketers conned the media into giving the ad exposure without having to pay for it. The Obama surrogates got the coverage the old fashioned way, they “earned” it.
While all of this is mightily entertaining, serious issues are being ignored, voters are being distracted and disgusted, and good journalists can’t break through the briar patch to report real stories on real issues.
A recent Washington Post editorial concluded that, “Instead of dealing with issues, the candidates and their surrogates have been mired in arguments that are extraneous, disreputable or both.”
True, but the editorial said nothing about who’s to blame. The media need to ask themselves about the blame. The media need to take a closer look at the process, get under the hood, as Ross Perot used to say, and do some serious self-analysis. Among the problems they will find is that the media industrial complex of newspapers, networks, cable clowns and anonymous Internet blatherers have become complicit in the gradual, but persistent destruction of our political process. They will find that good people don’t run for public office anymore because they won’t put themselves and their families through the media gauntlet. They will find that good people don’t elect good people to office because they are not well informed and are misled about the qualifications, character and capabilities of the candidates from whom they must choose. The media need to grasp the implications of a presidential spokesman who believes an interview with Entertainment Tonight has as much relevance as a press conference. Then they should ask themselves just what kind of dividend the freedom of the press is paying to the public these days.
The country needs its media back if our political process is to do its job. That means going back to get to the future.
Roll Call reporter David Drucker, very simply but profoundly, told Howard Kurtz when he was asked how the media can make the news of the national conventions more interesting “ it isn’t our job to make it the news interesting, it’s our job to just report it.
Can we have an amen?
Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.