Never let reporting get in the way of good theater

These days in our divided nation, it sometimes seems as if nearly every issue ultimately is politicized. Then, there are election years, like this one, when every issue is politicized -- immediately.

By and large, the press ritually decries this process but plays along. The reasons for that are several, but the most important is sloth.

A politicized story is easier to cover than a story that’s about something real. It’s far less strenuous -- and far more entertaining -- for example, simply to transcribe one candidate’s charge that his opponent despises the elderly and wishes to see them neglected, than it is to write in any knowing and accessible way about the economics of a prescription drug benefit. An infidelity story? Well, that’s a reportorial walk in the park.

In an election year, even genuinely significant issues become a kind of painted backdrop before which the political drama is enacted. The press plays the critics’ role -- preoccupied with plot and character. The result? Not always theater of the absurd, but usually absurdly theatrical.

This week brought a couple of notable examples:

One was the preposterous sight of U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft convening a nationally televised news conference to announce the indictment of four people in the Bay Area who allegedly provided steroids and other “performance enhancing” drugs to professional athletes and, perhaps, international track and field competitors. Now, for the record, nobody with the sense God promised a green-lipped mussel thinks it’s a good idea for athletes to take drugs that make them look like hillocks with heads and turn their internal organs to mush.

Still, when was the last time you watched the attorney general personally announce the indictment of four guys nobody’s ever heard of in a city 3,000 miles away. Does he suddenly have time on his hands? Has the administration captured Osama bin Laden while the rest of us weren’t looking?

No, the reason for Ashcroft’s appearance could be found in a deadpan paragraph somewhere near the top of every account of his news conference. In his recent State of the Union address, that paragraph said in one way or another, President George W. Bush said it was time to get steroids and other drugs out of professional sports. At the time, it seemed an odd, somewhat tangential digression, one that raised an analytic eyebrow here and there. Now it isn’t very hard to figure out how it got there. As the White House speechwriting team geared up to assemble this year’s State of the Union message, out went the requests to all departments of the executive branch for talking points and accomplishments to be cited. Back from Justice came a long memo that included something like, “and we’re about to secure indictments in a sports doping investigation out in San Francisco.”

You can almost see the gleam in the speechwriters’ eyes. Here’s a chance to show the president’s concern for the commonplace, as well as the lofty ... maybe even get a couple of commentators to recall that he used to run a major league ballclub, by gosh!

So in it went. And no Washington gridlock here! The President says get the drugs out and, in less than a month, his administration’s top prosecutor has indictments to announce.

Of course, in the interim -- if anybody really cared --somebody in the press corps might have taken a look at how the Texas Rangers handled drug problems when the president had a chance to deal with the issue firsthand during his lucrative tenure as the team’s proprietor. But that would have been dreary and factual and might have spoiled the flow of the story.

Then there is the apparently never-ending outrage over Janet Jackson’s bared breast. This week, the breast that launched a thousand quips was the subject, as every politicized issue must be (particularly if it involves entertainment, always sure to lead the evening news), of the inevitable hearings before committees of the House and Senate.

“The now famous display during the Super Bowl halftime show, which represented a new low in prime-time television, is just the latest example in a growing list of deplorable incidents,” Michael K. Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, told the senators. Later the same day, he told the House, “I share the displeasure and fatigue of millions of Americas about the erosion of common decency on television.”

The high point, though, was listening to Mel Karmazin, president of Viacom, which owns CBS, imploring the FCC. “to undertake rule making on the subject of indecency, so people can operate with responsibility and have a clear-cut road map for what constitutes indecency.”

Until that occurs, Karmazin can probably take the events of the last two weeks as strong evidence that most people’s definition of indecency includes topless dancing at the Super Bowl.

What renders both the Ashcroft news conference and the congressional decency hearings such sterile exercises and the media’s reports on them so generally unhelpful is the willful neglect of complexity and context.

Any serious consideration of drugs’ malign role in competitive athletics, for example, has to include some discussion of the way in which popular taste and the economics of television have conjoined to transform professional athletics and, increasingly, high-level amateur competitions -- like the Olympics and college football -- from sports into spectacles.

With the amounts of money at stake in salaries, endorsements and advertising revenues today, is it really all that surprising that millionaire athletes are driven to seek a drug-assisted edge or that their insecure coaches and avaricious employers look the other way? Why do we think every communications conglomerate worth its Wall Street salt owns a couple of sports teams? Modern stadia aren’t arenas or fields, they’re soundstages and the events staged there aren’t games or matches, they’re content. And there’s little or no evidence that the television sports audience -- and that audience is what sports are all about these days -- wants it any other way.

Similarly, before the FCC starts promulgating new decency regulations, somebody might want to consider why it is that tens of millions of Americans pay a premium to make sexually frank and frequently vulgar and profane shows like “The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City” such highly watched shows.

It’s a complicated country out there, even if our politicians and most of those who write about them don’t want to take notice.