Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 23, 1992 TAG: 9201240596
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
PERSONALITY POLITICS
AMERICANS just don't seem to care about politics anymore. Political apathy is so bad that no more than half of eligible voters go to the trouble of casting their ballots.Who's to blame?
There are plenty of culprits, including the politicians themselves. But another good place to start might be news organizations that spend more time probing political candidates' personalities than they do covering the issues that are important to citizens' lives.
Social critic Christopher Lasch blames America's news media for abandoning their historical role as forums for public debate.
He says the result is that most citizens take in information passively - if at all.
That spells trouble. Without healthy debate, there is no way for citizens to test their beliefs - or to feel that they have a stake in the political system.
It's probably no coincidence that participation in the political system was at its peak from 1830 to 1900, when a highly partisan press ruled.
But American journalism began changing early in the 20th century, as owners and editors pushed a "professional" model of reporting that emphasized objectivity instead of debate.
In the 1920s, columnist Walter Lippmann provided the philosophical argument to support this movement. He believed public opinion was so easily swayed by simple slogans and symbols that it could not be trusted to run government in a complex industrial society.
That duty, he argued, should be given to government administrators who could rely on scientifically tested information. In his view, this made debate unnecessary - and the media's only role was to serve as an unquestioning conveyer belt for official information.
But, Lasch says, publishers discovered that an "objective" newspaper attracted the kind of well-heeled readers who might be turned off by down-and-dirty political arguments.
Newspapers began taking this more passive approach to covering the news just as the advertising and public-relations industries began their rise. They began to increasingly influence what was printed in newspapers and, later, what was broadcast over the airwaves, Lasch says.
The result has been political debate that is increasingly dominated by an elite class of media commentators and political insiders.
James Boylan, founding editor of Columbia Journalism Review, says the people quoted in political stories these days usually are limited to candidates, consultants and "free-floating quotesmiths" who seem to care little about the issues facing the nation.
This flood of "experts" has pushed average citizens out of the political debate. Television viewers are now twice as likely to see think-tank academics and other free-lance political experts interviewed on network newscasts than average voters. In fact, the presence of voters in network presidental-campaign coverage dropped from more than 20 percent of "sound bites" in 1972 and 1976 to no more than 4 percent in 1984 and 1998.
Voters can't help but be turned off by the "insider journalism" that results. Boylan notes that the decline in voting during the past three decades has been matched, almost year for year, with a similar lag in newspaper reading.
In response to such trends, Washington Post columnist David Broder has suggested that reporters break free of the political insiders by starting each election cycle by going to voters.
Their concerns, Broder says, should set the media's agenda and determine what questions reporters ask the candidates.
One thing is clear: Unless candidates and reporters can find ways to talk about the issues confronting the nation, more and more citizens will see politics as a dirty word.
\ AUTHOR Mike Hudson is a news reporter for the Roanoke Times & World-News. A version of this appeared originally in Utne Reader.