Media and Politics

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The United States is a republic of words and images. Its institutions of power are increasingly dependent on the media, its power-holders and power-seekers increasingly dependent on money and technological know-how to purchase and effectively utilize media resources. Governance, including not just the institutions of government, but also the parties and pressure groups that seek to influence government, involves a complex admixture of persuasion, coercion, and material inducements. Historians might argue that this is as it always has been, but the dynamics of social change have certainly been altered by the introduction, first of the broadcast media, and now of e-mail and the Internet.

Polling is one among the expensive technologies used by proponents and opponents of social change. Opinion polling has revealed, for example, that resistance to social change on a wide array of issues--from educational reform to gun control--could be ameliorated through mediated campaigns for incremental legislation, especially if children could be shown to be the chief beneficiaries. These campaigns could be combined with court challenges--for example to Big Tobacco's historic hegemony--and with bargaining between and among opposing interests (Morris, 1997).

Meanwhile, opponents of change--usually well entrenched and better financed--have successfully fought off reformist challenges on such issues as national health insurance by campaign financing, by infusions of large sums of money for television advertising, by contributions to political candidates (including candidates for elective judgeships), and by various direct and indirect forms of lobbying, including corporate mobilization of so-called "Astroturf" movements." (Lewis, 1996) Even such seemingly "grassroots" movement organizations as the National Organization of Women (NOW) and the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) have become professionalized. All sides in the great power struggles currently make use of survey and focus group research, direct mail solicitations and telemarketing, electronic chat groups and bulletin boards, paid and unpaid publicity. And far from being mere conduits of information and opinion, the mass media--including television entertainment programming and not just news--are forces of influence in their own right.

The conventional wisdom has been that agenda setting is the primary influence of news dissemination. According to this view, news programming assigns importance to some things, not others, telling viewers, in effect, what to think about. Thus, for example, political campaign coverage has tended to be strategy-centered rather than issue-centered. (Cappella and Jamieson, 1997. Yet, in covering the news but "telling it slant," as Emily Dickinson put it, reporters can influence what people think, and not just what they think about. Television viewers are apt to conclude, for example, that the front-runner in a presidential contest has earned his lead, for, as Jamieson's content analyses have shown, television coverage tends to be tipped in the front-runner's favor. (Jamieson, 1992) Competition among news outlets also brings pressure for rushed editorial judgments and self-celebration, the first week of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal in January 1998 being a case in point. On ABC’s “This Week” the question at issue was not whether Clinton would be forced to resign but when–in a few days or a few weeks.

When Americans "think politics," they usually have in mind political campaigns, especially contests for high office between Democratic and Republican Party nominees. But politics in the United States begins with the socialization of children. A traditional function of political socialization has been to promote hierarchical identification: the parent, the teacher, the minister, the almighty, the founding fathers, the current leaders forming in young minds a seamless web of perceived beneficence. Not by accident is George Washington's portrait a fixture in elementary school classrooms.

But mass mediated pop culture now stands alongside the culture of tradition, sometimes reinforcing it, sometimes challenging it, sometimes rendering it irrelevant. As the media entertain they also sell products. And as they entertain and sell products they wittingly or unwittingly promote ideologies of consumerism, materialism, perhaps narcissism--so that even pre-teens form "consumption communities" around products marketed to them on kid's shows. (Barber, 1996). As children get older they are exposed to an odd mix of political melodrama (e.g., Star Wars) and comedic complexity (e.g., The Simpsons). Adults too get an interesting menu of possibilities. News reports of the recent real wars in the Persian Gulf and Kosovo are far more controlled than those emanating from Vietnam in the sixties and early seventies, and provide far better arguments for American exceptionalism. Yet the America of fifties-style family values has been challenged by sitcoms like Ellen and Seinfeld, even as Wall Street Week in Review celebrates Nasdaq-ian techno-capitalism. As cultural conservatives rail against the new culture of permissiveness, and what's left of the left deplores the culture of greed, their offspring seem to have little difficulty reconciling the social liberalism of the sixties with the economic conservatism of the eighties--a marriage of Murphy Brown and Ronald Reagan.

Political campaigns seem increasingly preoccupied with the quest for money. Money translates into media access and also gives candidates bragging rights. Campaign managers prize early money over late money because it comes with fewer strings attached. But the earliest money--the kind that these days comes rolling in to parties and politicians a year or more before the primaries are set to commence--is the most influential money, for it virtually pre-selects the party nominees. Reports Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity, "In every election since 1976, the candidate who has raised the most money at the end of the year preceding the election, and has been eligible for federal matching funds, has become his party's nominee for the general election." (Lewis, 1996, p. 7))

Campaign contributions are used principally by candidates to buy television time. No organization--not the soap or the beer or the car manufacturers--spent more for advertising on an annualized basis than did the Committee to Elect Ronald Reagan in 1980. Yet the $20 million for advertising spent in 1980 to get Reagan elected is dwarfed by the $200 million or more that the Republican and Democratic Presidential nominees are expected to spend in the year 2000 for political spots. Fine-tuning the electorate--targeting swing voters, determining what they want, devising messages tailored to those wants, testing those messages on focus groups and other sample voters before sending them out on a mass basis, surveying again to determine message effects, then using the information in devising new messages--is how the game is played.

Increasingly it is a game of filmic images, symbolized in 1984 by the Republicans' substitution of a campaign film for the customary speech of introduction of the Presidential nominee at national conventions. The emotional weight of that film, "A New Beginning," easily overcame efforts by NBC to place it in critical perspective. The Reagan team had also proven extraordinarily adept at the game of unpaid visual politics, staging numerous displays of patriotism during his first term as President that the news media would feel compelled to cover. Campaign managers had learned long earlier that nonverbal displays could do for politicians what verbal messages could not do, and the visual track in political advertising remains far more resistant to criticism by the news media than the verbal track (Cappella and Jamieson, 1997).

Getting the candidate's message out across the airwaves is increasingly expensive. All told, the candidates in the year 2000 will have spent nearly $3 billion over a two-year period (Frankel, 1999). Other nations require television stations to make advertising time free to candidates, but Congress not only permits communications conglomerates to be generously recompensed for political advertising, it also rewards them, as with a recent gift of $70 billion worth of spectrum space (Frankel, 1999). A near obsession with fund-raising distracts candidates from the issues, motivates both major parties to skirt campaign finance restrictions, and impels those not already in the pockets of wealthy contributors to bend political principles to economic necessities. Thus, does the marketplace of ideas become hostage to the economic marketplace?