American media must fufill national duty and fairly represent candidates during election season
Joel Dillard
Staff Writer
The clear split in America has expanded beyond ideology to facts. A recent poll by PIPA/Knowledge Networks has found that a large majority of Bush supporters believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the war. Most assume that most experts believe Iraq had WMD and that this was the conclusion of the recently released report by Charles Duelfer. A large majority of Bush supporters believes that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda and that clear evidence of this support has been found. Furthermore, a large majority believes most experts also share this view, and this substantial majority believes that this was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission. Kerry supporters, however, believe the opposite on all these points.
Are Bush supporters ignorant? I do not believe so, but it is clear that they are wrong. No WMD have been found. No evidence of a serious WMD program has been found. Kay, Duelfer, and the rest of the experts on the subject have confirmed this. No clear evidence has shown Iraq assisting al Qaeda, and the 9/11 Commission did not find evidence of support.
How can these results be explained? It remains clear that the Bush campaign is largely at fault for originating these misconceptions to justify the truly bizarre foreign policy of his administration. However, the persistence of these misconceptions in the face of the facts cannot be explained by the actions of the campaign alone.
The media have stopped being concerned with reality in any sense but the most nominal. The primary objective of news coverage is sensation, not information. Most exemplary, CNN has become a 24-hour “reality” TV show. Coverage of presidential campaigns has focused on the drama of this horse race, rather than the issues.
In a recent appearance on Crossfire, Daily Show host Jon Stewart lambasted Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson for hurting America with their partisan hackery. The seriousness of the charge was not lost on the hosts or their audience. The media were accused of playing the politicians game, becoming obsessed with who was winning or losing rather than the facts. The hosts of Crossfire try to win with clever tongues rather than accurate information and analysis.
The name for this is Sophistry: a deliberately invalid argument displaying ingenuity in reasoning in the hope of deceiving someone. This word, however, has a much broader connotation, for it signifies the deception of the masses by the intellectual elite through petty, violent and deliberately misleading rhetoric.
The best example from the debates proved the coverage of the controversy over the phrase “global test.” No one watching the debates could have misunderstood the meaning of the phrase in context. Yet the talking points issued by the Bush campaign after the debate deliberately took the phrase out of context to give it the exact opposite meaning! This is no surprise; the media rewarded this sophistry by parroting the talking points for a full cycle. Instead, the media should have said, “this claim is outrageous, it is clear from the context that Kerry meant the opposite. Do not try to mislead the American people.” The media must not tolerate or reproduce any sophistication in, for arguments and debate are critically important, but purposeful deception is not acceptable.
The media have a duty to the public discourse because the media are the public discourse. This means representing reality with as much integrity as possible. Partisan hacking is sophisticated lying that allows reality to take the form most appealing to the viewer. The success of partisan hacks in the media is not to change minds in any significant way, but to alter the perceived reality of Americans to support their assumptions.
This condition is not unique to Bush supporters or the media, as it can happen to any who become so concerned with scoring political points that reality becomes of secondary importance.
Do not rejoice when Kerry untruly speaks and therefore makes a good sound bite, for there are enough real criticisms of the Bush Administration to fuel the Kerry campaign.