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The Imperial Press
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13971 |
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EDITORIAL
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2 / 1988 |
1,096 Words |
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Morton A. Kaplan
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The press has been coming in for its share of attacks recently, and I think deservedly so. If freedom of the press is the glory of America, the accomplishments of the press are its despair. The state of public communications in the United States is hardly worthy of the world's greatest democracy.
Most of what the public knows about the political process is gleaned from commercial television. But that medium is show business. Little serious discussion of public issues could survive the accountant's axe. And public television is largely the preserve of the ideological Left.
Newspapers, which no longer serve as the major carrier of information, must struggle for circulation with sports, the comics, and ads. But with the notable exception of a few "national" newspapers, the press no longer takes public issues seriously, although it pretends to do so.
Why then speak of an "imperial" press? The press may not be serious, but it has power, as is evident in the process by which the press (ant TV) anoints or demotes political pretenders. The recent fates of Senators Hart and Biden are cases in point. Few senators or congressmen would be foolhardy enough to take on the Washington Post or NBC, for instance. They know that they would be photographed in the most ridiculous poses and that their comments would be taken out of context and made to seem imbecilic.
Examine what the press did with President Reagan's comment into a supposedly dead mike about bombing the Soviet Union. The remark was supposed to be funny precisely because it was so incongruous with what he might do, but it was presented as if it reflected a lighthearted attitude toward nuclear war. Similarly, the press "did in" President Carter with its account of the ferocious rabbit he supposedly feared.
We would do well to examine the kinds of people who write the stories the press carries. They are almost all well educated and sophisticated today, particularly at the national papers. Is this all to the good? I think not. Professional journalists have absorbed so many abstract and untested theories from professors who have spent little time outside the halls of academe that many no longer understand the larger world in which American and world politics develop.
Let me give one example. During the 1968 presidential campaign, I was interested in cutting down George Wallace's vote. Although I knew that he articulated many genuine grievances held by blue-collar and lower middle-class people, I also felt that he was appealing to their baser motives and that this was bad for the body politic. So I suggested to one national newspaper and one national weekly magazine that they send photographers to Montgomery, Alabama, to take pictures of the state capitol.
These organizations were writing editorials denouncing Wallace that would only have gained him votes from the groups in which he found support. But they could not understand why I wanted a picture of a state capitol in which the state and Confederate flags were riding high and the American flag was almost concealed by trees. They had no idea that middle America had great respect for the American flag--nor could I transmit that idea to them. How could they understand this, when such sentiments had been educated out of
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