American Beat: A Media Miss

The result is an electorate sitting around thinking, "Damn those special interests. President Bush is a real leader," rather than, "Hmm, I wonder what's in that proposal that makes so many people question it."

Funny thing is, the Bush ads actually don't exploit 9/11 at all. Even though I consider myself a proud New Yorker--one of eight million who still see pictures around the city every day of the Twin Towers that no longer exist--I wasn't offended by the footage. Instead, I was offended by how empty the ads are, how they rely entirely on platitudes ("Rising to the challenge") rather than policy. Both of the so-called controversial ads end with the treacly, "President Bush: Steady leadership in times of change." (And I was most offended that Laura Bush's only line in the commercials is a sentence fragment. Some librarian she turned out to be.)

I'm not nave. I understand that political ads rarely do anything except cast the candidate in a good light (remember, even Jimmy Carter's ads made you scratch your head and say, "You know, he really hasn't been doing such a bad job."). My problem is not Karl Rove's marketing of the president, but with the media's inability to see through it. The more news stories you read, the more you'll see how coverage of actual issues have been subsumed by commentary on coverage of those issues.

Indeed, the other day, presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry hoped to make news by condemning President Bush's failure to support the democratically elected government of Haiti as he was being deposed by paramilitary thugs (you might have read something about this in the papers; then again, given the state of the media, you might not have). In the context of the president's stated support for democracy in the Middle East (the fallback position after we failed to find those pesky WMDs), Kerry's criticism of Bush's Haiti policy comprised a legitimate attack on an actual piece of American foreign policy.

Of course, that's not how it played out in the newspapers and the news channels the next day. The much-vaunted New York Times barely acknowledged the substance of Kerry's attack, instead focusing its story on how Kerry's critique was "emblematic of how he is already using foreign policy and national security issues in his contest with the president." In fact, the article went on at great length about how Kerry's positions will "play out" on the campaign trail--as if his and President Bush's actual views are irrelevant and all that matters is how they deliver the speech.

Indeed, as the Times--which, one would think, is inclined to treat Kerry fairly--put it, "When pressed for details, Mr. Kerry can veer into the dry, Latin-heavy jargon of policy journals." In other words, he's a thoughtful, learned leader who would prefer not to campaign via sound-bites. Why does the fact that a candidate gives long, well-thought-out answers absolve the media from actually having to print and analyze them?