Media-Political Loop Cuts Public Out

One joke making the rounds the last month or so is a variant of the old 1960s anti-Vietnam slogan: Suppose they gave a war and nobody came. Today, it’s, “Suppose they gave an impeachment and nobody came.” That pretty much summed up the situation as the Senate deliberated President Bill Clinton’s fate last week. Yes, CNN, C-SPAN and PBS ran gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Senate impeachment proceedings, and, yes, anyone in need of analysis could find a continuous stream of what Calvin Trillin calls “Sabbath gasbags,” now pontificating every day of the week, but no one really seemed to be obsessing. No one, that is, except the senators, who were obligated to do so, and the media, who were addicted to doing so.

Why so little interest in what the media have called the trial of the century? Conservatives will tell you the public is inured to moral transgression: the “death of outrage” argument that has set them snarling at fellow-Americans. Liberals will tell you the public is less inured than fed up, willfully shutting their eyes while the Republicans make fools of themselves and our country. The media gasbags will tell you, as they have since the Monica S. Lewinsky story broke, that the public just doesn’t get it. This is a great national crisis, for Godsakes. Pay attention.

But there may be another explanation for the Big Disconnect between, on the one side, the politicians and media mavens obsessed with the impeachment and, on the other, the vast majority of Americans who aren’t. It is not that ordinary Americans are apathetic or obtuse. Rather, they fully understand they were never invited to this party in the first place. This impeachment is by the politicians and for the media, and the public is out of the loop. It is a case of two constituencies locked in a symbiotic embrace, stoking each other’s desire while the public sits back in bemused astonishment.

If so, this makes the impeachment less an abrupt departure from our recent politics-as-usual than an apotheosis of it. Though it may have taken the impeachment to remind us, the public has actually been standing outside the political process for some time now, because the political process has been hijacked by the politicians and their media confederates.

It seems ironic that, in this age of instant communication, politicians have become less attuned to their constituents rather than more. Ever since the rise of the Jefferson Republicans, the thrust of American politics has been to democratize the system and empower the public. Thus the move to elect senators directly, to institute a mechanism of initiative and recall, to enfranchise women and black Americans, to force congressional redistricting along the lines of one-man, one-vote and, our current battle, to reform campaign spending by limiting the influence of wealthy contributors.

Nor was democratization impelled only by government policies. Extra-governmental agencies, like the media, also contributed to opening the political process. Partly it was a matter of the press changing from the rabid partisanship that dominated the republic’s early newspapers to objective reporting designed to inform the citizenry and make officeholders more accountable. More important, though, it was a matter of the media bringing the political process closer to the public. With the advent of television, voters could see and hear their representatives, all the better to render judgment on them.

But if the media seemed to aerate U.S. politics, they also had another effect, one far more subtle and, as it has turned out, countervailing to democracy: Savvy politicians quickly discovered the media were not just neutral receptors, conveying one’s positions on the issues. Now that the media, especially television, had become the single most important conduit between politicians and their constituents, those politicians came to realize they would be staging their campaigns primarily for the media and only secondarily for the public, since campaigns that didn’t register on the media screens probably weren’t going to register with the public, either.

This is what the novelist Joan Didion meant when she observed the 1988 presidential campaign and called it “insider baseball.” The whole thing, as she saw it, was a kind of game between the candidates and the reporters who covered them, both sides basking in their sophistication over how they used one another and chortling over our naivete. Politics had become a TV show, and we had become its passive audience, allowed to watch but not participate.

In effect, the means (the media) and the end (using the media effectively) had merged. So-called photo-ops, noisy rallies, staged question-and-answer sessions like those Bill Clinton hosted in 1992, even debates replete with scripted zingers--all were techniques devised expressly for the media. The media only encouraged this by demanding that politicians provide arresting images and effective manipulations or risk being criticized for not doing so, an implicit criticism of the candidate’s ability to govern. The ablest politicians, in the media’s eyes, were those like Ronald Reagan, who could best perform for the media. Thus did the media substitute its own aesthetic standards for our traditional standards of governance.

If this sounds incestuous, it is. Politicians needed the media to get attention. Journalists needed politicians to fill space and time as well as to give themselves the feeling of being insiders. The two clearly had a community of interest intensified by proximity to one another inside the Beltway, where they socialized and shared information--a colossus of political solipsists. As in most communities of interest, the needs fed one another until it was only their needs being satisfied. And that is the point. Though ostensibly this was done for our benefit, in fact we had become irrelevant. The national political conversation stopped at the Beltway.

There was no greater proof of the inbreeding between politicians and journalists than the impeachment melodrama itself. According to the polls, nearly two-thirds of the American people didn’t want the impeachment proceedings to advance in the first place and about the same number wanted the trial to end as soon as possible, yet it went on and on because the politicians and the media didn’t seem to care what it was the American people wanted or thought.

What neither politicians nor journalists could admit, what they may not even have realized, is that just as they have had a vested interest in one another, they both have had a vested interest in the impeachment show. The politicians got exposure. (Never mind that the House managers were getting the kind of exposure that would cause skin cancer, or that the Senate Republicans decided to close their deliberations lest they elicit more scorn.) And the media were getting a great story that sold papers and drove ratings, at least for those All-Monica cable shows targeted at that hardy band of impeachment junkies.

The only ones who didn’t have a vested interest in this sordid affair were the general public, which tuned out. That’s why the politicians and media pundits are really the ones who don’t get it as they flog the impeachment story and decry our indifference. It’s just another result of their having talked to one another for so long that they can’t hear any other voices. The politicians keep marching before the cameras repeating what we have heard dozens if not thousands of times before, and the pundits keep beating the dead impeachment horse again and again--only this time we’re the ones who aren’t listening because we realize it’s just a TV show. Suppose they gave an impeachment and nobody came? Well, they just have.*