The federal wiretaps that led to the resignation of New York governor Eliot Spitzer have been a godsend for the US media. Just when fatigue had begun to take its toll on the millions of viewers who have tuned in to the networks’ exhaustingly trivial coverage of the Democratic presidential race, the media were gifted an opportunity to go back to what they know best. The Sheriff of Wall Street, a hypocrite! An escort service that rated girls by the number of diamonds on their web pages. Client number nine’s sexual preferences, his liaison with the hooker on the night before Valentine’s day. The five-foot-five, 105 pound bombshell who wants to be a singer. A tabloid outrage made in heaven, and one that has yielded a week of sleazy details and the prospect of nude pictorials in adult magazines, tell-all interviews, and even a recording contract for the young prostitute.
Meanwhile, according to the Pew Foundation, a mere 28 percent of the American public are aware that “approximately” 4,000 Americans have died in the Iraq war. The Project for Excellence in Journalism reports that only seven percent of last week’s media coverage addressed the deepening US economic crisis; four percent dealt with the Israeli / Palestinian standoff, two percent with Iran, and a minuscule one percent with the tensions between Colombia and Venezuela.
By itself this is worrying enough, but the 52 percent of news coverage given over to the Obama-Clinton horse race is probably even stronger evidence of America’s incurious insularity at the end of the Bush years. Although the media has tried to make something out of the “experience” issue – whether Obama or Clinton has enough to rival McCain – it is hard to see how any level of foreign-policy experience could be too little for an electorate that is so poorly informed about the wider world. By focusing on the personal intrigues around Senators McCain, Clinton and Obama, the mainstream US media has generally ignored or failed to understand the likely policy choices that either candidate will face as president. In some cases it has even overlooked stories that offer insights into the bungled diplomacy which will be President Bush’s real legacy for years to come. Consider, for example, Vanity Fair’s recent article “The Gaza Bombshell” in which the journalist David Rose exposes a secret plan “approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by [Fatah strongman Muhammad] Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power.”
Surely this story – one that some political commentators are already calling “Iran-contra 2.0” – deserves more coverage than the shortsighted rants of Obama’s former pastor, or the possible embarrassment of Senator Clinton’s unpublished tax returns. And yet the American broadcast media continues to chase the easy ratings, filling its airtime with rambling commentary on the candidates’ traction with urban voters and soccer moms, and their various responses to a rival campaign’s latest ploy.
These simplistic narratives have turned American politics into a sort of reality television, an exercise full of meaningless climaxes and disclosures but one dangerously short of real analysis. Even when the personal information has had a bearing on the political life of the candidates – such as the access which a lobbyist’s alleged affair with John McCain supposedly granted her to the inner workings of the Senate – the media has misrepresented the story in order to maximise its appeal. The McCain story, for example, was put forward as a sex scandal when it ought to have concentrated on the far more disturbing possibility that some of Washington’s much-maligned “special interests” may have already compromised the Republican nominee.
Consequently, the public is being swamped with personal information about the candidates even though it remains largely ignorant of the context in which they will govern. This is the real scandal of these times, not the gaudy details about Client number nine, but the way in which armies of well-paid journalists are facilitating the political incompetence, deceit and adventurism of the current US administration, by recycling overheated personal dramas, and deepening the culture of political celebrity and ‘infotainment’ instead of usefully reporting on the ripening crises which the unluckiest candidate will be asked to solve after his/her victory in November.
