CNN hired a couple of journalism professors and Ben Wattenberg to examine press election coverage, and they found great fault with the exit polls, although the polls accurately called Gore as winner in Florida. That Republican Supreme Court justices, Republican lawyers, and the Florida co-chair of the Bush campaign (acting as Secretary of State) threw the presidency of the United States to the loser of both the popular vote and the electoral college did not invalidate the polls or the network calls. The press was far from innocent, however. That Bush came even close was the product of the abysmal ignorance of the electorate in all of the states. The media did it.
In Congress and legislatures across the country, Republicans routinely introduce and pass legislation at the behest of assorted corporate contributors. Often the bills are written by the contributors’ attorneys, and representatives regularly vote passage without bothering to read the texts. Since they cannot publicly use this raison d’etre as a campaign platform, Republicans solicit the votes of those whose economic interests they betray— lower income fundamentalists— with attacks on homosexuality, abortion, public schools, gun control, pornography, flag desecration, recreational drugs, and minority rights. While they routinely favor taxing the masses to benefit elites, they automatically accuse opponents of being “tax and spend liberals”. The press dutifully plays along with this by ignoring the actions of governments and their consequences for the electorate while genuflecting before fundamentalist claptrap on the so-called social issues.
For a presidential candidate, Republican fat cats funded George W. Bush, an ignoramus with an unblemished record of failures bailed out by friends of his father and the Texas taxpayers. He was fed focus-group slogans about Social Security, drug insurance, and taxes with no serious programs or intention to deliver on them. The press, however, ignored the reality of the party and reported the slogans as the candidate’s positions.
Although Gore’s qualifications need no recitation, the press treated him as suspect because the Democrats solicit campaign contributions (less successfully than Republicans) and are supported by “special interests”— blacks, women, gays, teachers, and working people (roughly three-fourths of the population), unlike the Republicans, who only take from the top one per cent. Although Bush may not have delivered one completely true or coherent comment at any time in his life, the press mocked Gore for an incorrectly attributed comment on the internet.
This was not, I suspect, a conspiracy to support the oligarchy, but a desperate attempt to equalize the candidates by covering up for Bush and running Gore down, in the interests of “neutrality” and “objectivity”. The effect was to feed the masses with continuous disinformation.
In all of this, the real issues were completely excluded from democratic consideration. The Social Security “crisis” was fixed years ago when contributions were increased to provide surplusses now against baby boomer retirements in the future, but the press continues to warn of coming disaster. Military spending eats more than half of federal spending (exclusive of the trust funds), but the size of the Pentagon relative to potential threats is never examined. The biggest current foreign policy issue is Washington’s automatic support of any territorial claim Israel may make and of any force Israel may use to continue and extend the dispossession of the Palestinians. (A policy, by the way, that creates the hostility that we consider to be unprovoked “terrorism”.) The new global economy provides for price competition in wages, which hurts the poor, and monopoly pricing of electricity, heating oil and gas, and medical care, which also hurts the poor (and everyone else). The “crime wave” and need for more police and prisons is entirely due to prohibition of recreational drugs, which does nothing to help the drug dependent and does nothing to reduce consumption, but the press feeds irrational fears with sensationalist crime reporting. Indeed, this is often the only news on local television. Here again, the press is at fault, since the steady stream of disinformation on these matters effectively intimidates the remaining liberal Democrats from raising alternatives.
Now that Republicans control all three branches of government, there is no need for the oligarchy to hedge bets by contributing to both parties. Indeed, we can expect them to use the spare cash to increase GOP margins in Congress and take over more state governments. The Democrats will disappear like the Whigs and David Broder will attribute it to their failure to disown the left.
All in all, the power of vast contributions and spending on lobbies, the supine press, and the ignorant electorate have combined to reduce elections to the ephemeral significance of the Super Bowl. Perhaps media attention to polls and the “who’s ahead today?” obsession is appropriate after all, since nothing of substance is now susceptible to political control. Film at eleven.