09-02-2004
Media - Bird Brains
By William Powers (E-mail this author)
© National Journal Group, Inc.
The media's job is to report on the world in all its complexity, but that's not what we do most of the time. What we do is take a complex story like this presidential race and reduce it to a series of simplistic narratives, cartoonish character studies, and thought packages that don't look like reality, yet wind up becoming it.
Saddest of all, the pat story lines we vend often aren't even our own. They're based in ancient conventional wisdom, easy stereotypes, lazy thinking. Sometimes we acquire a narrative wholesale from a politician -- "It's the Economy, Stupid," or "Compassionate Conservatism" -- and just repeat it over and over, like a trained bird.
On Tuesday, word came from the Republican Party that while Monday's podium message had been Courage (thus, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani), the second evening's slate of speakers would be all about Compassion. Given that the star speaker was Arnold Schwarzenegger, this was weird on its face. Many words come to mind when we think of Arnold, some quite delightful and nice, but "compassion" is not one of them.
Never mind: We bought it. Media people waltzed around the Garden all day murmuring "compassion" over and over amongst themselves, until it was hard to get anyone to talk about anything else. As the day wore on, Arnold and the other major speakers -- Laura Bush and the Bush twins -- began to seem the very embodiments of compassion, before they'd even spoken. I assumed that a whole new side of the California governor, his hidden Mother Theresa, was about to be revealed to a stunned nation.
Then he gave his speech and issued the now-famous command: "Don't be economic girlie-men!" Funny, in that steely Austrian/Terminator accent, it didn't sound all that compassionate. But what do I know?
Here's The Miami Herald on its front page: "California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and first lady Laura Bush showcased President Bush's softer side at the Republican convention Tuesday on a night that presented a sunny contrast to Monday's emphasis on the war on terrorism."
Here's the Wall Street Journal front: "Republicans showed a softer side on the second convention night. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Laura Bush had star billing, with the California governor reprising his 'girlie men' line to disparage economic pessimists."
What? Do you ever get the feeling political journalists are trying to gaslight you, drive you insane, by reporting stuff that doesn't make any sense while pretending it does?
Why do we do this? Because it's easier to buy into the story line of the day, to stick with the template. One thing you learn early on in journalism is that your audience doesn't want something new. People want a repackaged version of something old, the older the better. So when we get a narrative that seems to work, we stick with it -- forever.
Thus, in the media imagination, the Democratic Party is still the party of young people and the working class, and Republicans are old, white, and rich. Of course, Republicans have been adding younger voters and lunch-bucket types for decades, and the Democrats count a lot of gazillionaires among their members. Demographically, the parties have been converging in some ways, as old ethnic and socioeconomic voting blocs lose their meaning and people vote on ideology.
Don't tell the media that. Even when we report on such changes, the tone is skeptical, as if we doubt it could be true. Here's a headline from yesterday's Washington Post: "Grand Old Party Showcases Its New Diversity: Faces Change, but Ideology Is the Same."
The latest template is Red and Blue America, a reductive trope that will almost certainly outlive all of us.
After he was defeated in 2000, Al Gore gave a speech at the Columbia Journalism School in which he talked about the power of "the meta-narrative," the cliches that media people can't shake. "The meta-narrative," he said, "is that Gore is stiff, Bush mangles his words, and Clinton eats cheeseburgers."
They're just little formulas, shortcuts we rely on to tell a story on deadline. But is the story true?