Patient Americans Pounded by All Hype, All the Time

Several hours after the Florida Supreme Court announced its bombshell decision ordering ballot recounts Friday, UCLA history professor Joyce Appleby couldn’t help but overhear random conversations as she and other passengers waited for a plane to depart the Oakland Airport.

“Some people were very interested in this, several were amused, and some Republicans seemed disappointed,” she said. “But it didn’t stop life in its tracks; it didn’t even dig very deeply into people’s emotions. It certainly didn’t seem to produce a great deal of anger or worry.”

Compare that scene to the hyperbolic reaction of the all-news cable TV networks, where clashing views and bold punditry became more shrill than ever: The nation could be headed for “political civil war,” said NBC’s Tim Russert. “We’re watching total madness unfold,” claimed Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “This whole thing is getting really, really tense,” worried the New Republic’s Michelle Cottle on CNN. “The watchwords of the day?” asked former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “Nightline.” “Bitterness and chaos.”

Once again, a great, yawning divide seems to have opened between the American public and the media at a moment of national controversy.

As with previous national debates--over the 1995-96 federal government shutdown and the 1998 impeachment of President Clinton--there has been no shortage of fulminating in the wake of Friday’s court decision to restart a vote recount and Saturday’s move by the U.S. Supreme Court to halt it. Yet the vast majority of Americans has been going about their business since the election--paying close attention yet hardly holding their breath. And the same appeared to be true Saturday as the nation settled in for yet another weekend of uncertainty.

A slew of public opinion polls has revealed fluctuating public attitudes, with a growing number in recent weeks voicing impatience with the stalemate. But there is nothing in the polls to mirror the harsh partisan rhetoric and personal attacks pouring out of the media.

Appearing on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” John H. Sununu, chief of staff under President Bush, lashed out at the Florida Supreme Court, saying, “I hope the people of Florida understand that these seven hacks have to be removed either by judicial impeachment or recall.” Meanwhile, columnist Eric Alterman wrote in The Nation that in the Florida struggle, “The Democrats use the courts and the law. The Republicans rely on rent-a-mobs, partisan hacks and power-hungry allies in the state Legislature and Congress.”

Taken as a whole, the strident commentary and apocalyptic predictions on cable TV, newspaper opinion pages, network news broadcasts, talk radio and the Internet might suggest a national emergency. But amid these displays, “it’s great that we have patience in the public as a whole, a consensus that we’ll get through this,” said Alan Wolfe, a political science professor and author of “One Nation After All.” “If we didn’t, the system couldn’t survive.”

There are many theories to explain the gap: While many journalists see the story as a life-or-death struggle, fewer Americans are driven by partisan politics than ever, and most don’t feel an intense connection to either Vice President Al Gore or Texas Gov. George W. Bush, according to some experts. Only half of the nation’s eligible voters even bothered to cast ballots in the most recent election.

“This is a very turbulent and sometimes frustrating moment, but I don’t see it as a crisis,” said Columbia University history professor Alan Brinkley. “It might get even uglier in the days ahead, but that’s what politics is all about. And the worst, I think, that is likely to happen is a delay in the presidential transition, which we’ve already experienced.”

The current uproar is nothing compared to the 1876 presidential election, when Rutherford B. Hayes lost the popular vote but won the electoral college--and took office under a cloud, Brinkley added. “But even that wasn’t a crisis. A real crisis is war, a depression or rioting in the streets.”

Another source of the divide is that journalists--especially the growing number of pundits, commentators and other “experts” on all-news channels--must compete fiercely for ratings and often turn up the decibel level of their coverage to attract more viewers. While MSNBC, Fox News and CNN traditionally draw only a fraction of the daily viewers watching the three major networks, their ratings have been soaring since election day.

Indeed, a Gallup Poll released Friday indicated that 53% of the public believes that all-news cable TV coverage has been either extremely or very important to them in the election controversy, far more than any other branch of the media. But there was bad news for the media as a whole, with 65% saying news organizations’ stories and reports often are inaccurate.

Part of the problem is that “the press lives in such a cocoon. They mostly talk with people who deal with the political situation and feel very strongly about it, and they work themselves into a lather over it,” said Larry Sabato, a media critic and University of Virginia political scientist.

Others say a culture that has come to view politics much as it does sports and entertainment, has learned lessons that journalists need to remember.

“If an NBA team leads by 40 points in the third quarter of a basketball game, most Americans realize you don’t count the other team out. You just have to be patient to see what happens and be prepared for a lot of reversals,” said James Fallows, former editor of U.S. News & World Report. “But in this election, the media has tried to call an end to the game 15 times now. They should take a cue from the public and relax.”