Apr
25
The Failure of the Mainstream Media
April 25, 2008 | | Leave a Comment
By Tia Tian Chi
The campaign rhetoric continues to heat up, especially after the Pennsylvania primary campaign that can only be described as verbally violent. The negative attacks by Senator Clinton’s campaign that have been aimed at her opponent, Senator Obama, have done what appears to be significant damage to his previous image as the obvious next President. This has impelled Senator Obama to cross his own lines of running a positive campaign to making subtle attacks against his opponent. His frustration with his inability to end Clinton’s campaign has led both campaigns into a verbal fight that persists. Certainly, it’s not counter for a democratic election to talk about differences in issues among candidates and which one should be the nominee for legitimate reasons, but the dialogue changing into irrelevant and shameful attacks on meaningless issues is harmful not only to each candidate, but to the political discourse as a whole.
In an interview with The Real News Network, Tom Hayden, an author and activist, stated that with Senator Clinton’s increasingly relentless assault on Senator Obama, “she becomes swamped with more negative numbers as well … And so you have a death spiral, a downward death spiral going on here. But you’d have to be foolish to think it doesn’t give a huge advantage to John McCain…” In effect this statement agrees with many other observers that are finding that the back-and-forth attacks by both campaigns on meaningless issues such as Senator Obama’s “elitist remarks” and his Reverend Wright controversy or Senator Clinton’s Bosnia controversy are simply giving John McCain and the Republican Party more advantages to take. According to political “analysts” this is simply old-fashioned politics, and Senator Obama needs to come out a little bit tougher. But is this the kind of roughing up that should be involved in the presidential election?
This anger over the direction of the political discourse within both the campaigns and the media was clearly on display at the end of the ABC debate in Pennsylvania, in which Charles Gibson, reacting to widespread booing and hissing by the crowd, jokingly remarked “the crowd is turning on me.” It is very realistic to believe that people were displeased for legitimate reasons, especially with an economy on a downward trip, the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan not faring much better, and a global image that is tarnished. Glenn Greenwald from Salon.com rightly states that “the guardians of our political discourse … traffic almost exclusively in puerile, vapid fixations with these types of petty conflicts and substance-free controversies. They’re the decadent ringleaders of the freak show which dominates our political discourse and dictates the outcome of our elections.”
The “spin doctors” in the media and in the campaigns have for decades exercised this power of twisting words and meanings to make them beneficial for their own purposes. Jon Stewart cited on CNN’s Crossfire that political analysts in campaigns and in the media, immediately after any controversies or debates, head down to “spin alley”. He then asked them “don’t you think that, for people watching at home, that’s kind of a drag, that you’re literally walking to a place called deception lane?” This deception that the media and political campaigns often devolve into is further emphasized by Glenn Greenwald’s remarks that “[i]f you look at our national elections over the past three decades — the petty sideshows that dominate them, the ways they are almost entirely bereft of substance, the control which dirt-mongers and vapid media stars exert over them — what is there to be “proud” of?”
