Why Can’t the Famous Speak Up?
The political punditocracy has decided that the “story” regarding Leonardo DiCaprio’s interview with President Bill Clinton is, in the words of the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz, “How did the network of Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel wind up morphing its journalistic image with that of a Hollywood hunk?”
According to this conventional wisdom, someone at ABC News made a mistake by arranging for DiCaprio to interview the president as part of an Earth Day network special, and ABC News President David Westin compounded the error by fudging the truth, implausibly denying that the network had arranged the session. “It Hollywoodizes the most serious subjects,” intoned Kurtz’s co-host on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” Bernard Kalb. “If we start moving into this terrain, we’re going to offer shallowness.”
Yet, the appropriate “story” the media analysts should be pursuing is why a clique of media insiders should bamboozle a network into a waffling on a reasonable idea. The interview was not conducted for the “Evening News” or “Nightline,” but for the “Planet Earth 2000” special, to be aired this week in connection with Earth Day, which DiCaprio is chairman of this year. Undoubtedly, DiCaprio was briefed in his questions by Earth Day experts just as Sam Donaldson would have been by the ABC news staffer who actually covers the environment.
One big problem facing American democracy is decreasing voter turnout and public ignorance of important issues; and the younger people are, the less likely they are to vote. The political media, whatever their expertise or intentions, have clearly demonstrated severe limits in the kinds of people they can reach. DiCaprio, at 25, is half the age of virtually all ABC’s senior reporters. His youth gives him a different perspective in questioning the president--and also an edge in attracting and relating to TV viewers.
More important, the environment is an issue directly affected by mass public attention and behavior. The point of Earth Day is to focus public attention on an issue that politicians, and the media, underplay most of the year, if only because most environmental problems are complicated and unglamorous, and solutions are slow and incremental.
What is the moral or journalistic benefit of demeaning celebrities who choose to give their time on behalf of civic issues instead of restricting their public activity to the entertainment and fashion pages? If more celebrities got involved with public education, there might be greater interest in public affairs. Of course, if they say something stupid, they should be criticized, but it’s hard to see what is served by the familiar ritual of Washington insiders ridiculing artists and entertainers for having the temerity to care about public policy.
Notwithstanding the frequently excellent work of the best of TV news, such as “60 Minutes” and “Nightline,” Kalb is lionizing the same TV news divisions that devoted one-hundredth as much airtime to the environment as they did to either the O.J. Simpson trial or the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal, not to mention such passing obsessions as Tonya Harding. The glory days of Edward R. Murrow’s standards went out around the same time Dan Rather starting testing different sweaters to see which researched the best, and local newscasts adopted as their unofficial slogan, “If it bleeds, it leads.”
TV news leaders cannot be blamed for responding to ratings pressure put on them by a new business environment, far different from the one that held sway before the age of cable and the Internet. But there is a rigid, incestuous clique that defines an ever-narrower notion of what is “legitimate” news, often crowding out such issues as the environment to fixate on the horse-race aspects of partisan competition. This seems to serve no interest other than preservation of the news elite’s status quo.
It’s an Earth Day special, not the evening news, for which DiCaprio did the interview, or whatever euphemism ABC comes up with to mollify its in-house critics. If ABC News stars such as Donaldson and Cokie Roberts were really as enraged as press reports have it, they were probably jealous of Clinton. Is there any doubt that Sam and Cokie wouldn’t have sought an interview with DiCaprio, as the chair of Earth Day, just as they so frequently feature Charlton Heston as a spokesman for the National Rifle Assn.?
The spiteful, snobbish petulance of the political media was evident in a recent Salon magazine piece, in which a reporter mockingly wrote of DiCaprio, “Beware of movie stars with ideas.” Again, the elitist gets it wrong. The message of this story is: Beware of political journalists who ignore the public, who condescend to average people, who say they love America but have contempt for Americans. *