Analysis : Bird Appears at Odds With Her Criticism of the Media

Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird spoke to church worshipers in Los Angeles Sunday, decrying the broadcast media for trivial portrayals of events and for a “new type of lynch mob approach to unpopular figures in our society.”

The embattled liberal leader of California’s Supreme Court, as is her practice, did not refer directly to her own 1986 reelection, but told nearly 300 people at First Unitarian Church services that the written word is losing prestige, power and influence in the age of instant communications. “Is it any wonder that our appellate courts, which must speak through written opinion, are facing increasingly frequent challenges to the authority of their decisions?” she asked the worshipers.

Even at a time when critics of the news media, and of television in particular, are as abundant as they are zealous, Bird’s scolding of the media and what she called the “instant society” ranked with the harshest. Twice she directed her remarks at newspapers, not just television, including reminding the audience that the Washington Post was awarded a 1981 Pulitzer Prize for a story that was fabricated.

Lack of Reflection

Most often, media critics are political conservatives focusing on perceived bias in news coverage that they believe legitimizes unconventional elements of society. Bird criticized the media from the liberal point of view for what she said was a lack of reflection on events and “saccharine-sweet oversimplifications,” among other things.

“We know in detail what happened today on the other side of the world, with bulletins at 5:30, eyewitness reports at 6:30 and film at 11. But we often cannot remember the events of 10 years ago, much less begin to correlate them with today’s occurrences,” she said from the pulpit.

This leaves a society, she said, which “demands instant answers to the most complex problems and is willing to implement startlingly radical ideas after little or no reflection.”

The technology of television, she continued, “makes possible a new type of lynch mob approach to unpopular figures in our society. Instead of hanging them from the nearest tree . . . we can assault them in every home throughout the country by putting them in television’s public stocks, mocking and torturing them.”

In several instances, however, Bird’s blunt critiques contained more than a touch of irony.

She complained of an emphasis by broadcast and print media on personality--”Whom do the politicians date, do they jog?” and so on. “A barrage of intrusive trivialities is substituted for any discussion of ideas about matters of public concern,” she said.

Yet, this is the same chief justice who has refused interview requests on matters of her official duties from those who cover the Supreme Court and her reelection. At the same time she has granted an interview to the Vegetarian Times magazine to discuss the difficulties of avoiding meat at banquets and other interviews to “soft,” personality oriented broadcast shows where she has spoken of her admiration for working mothers.

In Sunday’s speech, Bird also criticized pop culture, while at the same time, like other political figures, she lionized the current hero of pop, Bruce Springsteen. Bird said today’s society is “easily seduced by fads and emotionally dependent on television . . . a culture craving instant gratification and addicted to increasingly higher doses of visual stimuli.”

Quotes Springsteen

She called for leaders and commentators to speak out and keep things in perspective. Such a commentator, she continued, was Springsteen. She quoted a line he often uses to introduce a song at his concerts: “There are a lot of people feeling like the America they believed in sailed away and left them standing at the dock.”

And then, too, there were her complaints abouts politicians creating an image to sell themselves to voters. Bird said that in this age of modern, instant communications “politicians are inexorably caught up in the business of selling an image of themselves.”

It was hard to avoid noticing that the Bird who stood at the pulpit of the West 8th Street church had just recently completely redone her hair and makeup to make herself more attractive, and had distributed glamorous Hollywood-style photographs to the media to emphasize this new look.