THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, August 1, 1995 TAG: 9507290029
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 49 lines
Though they were in different and distant places, Gov. Pete Wilson of California and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, thanks to television technology, sat side by side chatting with David Brinkley and his ABC colleagues.
The topic: affirmative action.
Most people probably know or can guess where each stands in this deeply rooted controversy over whether minorities should receive special consideration in hiring. Jackson, a liberal Democrat and probably the nation's most recognizable civil-rights figure, is for affirmative action. Wilson, a conservative Republican, is against.
So we don't think anybody expected a lovefest. But whatever viewers expected, they deserved enlightenment on a volatile, complex issue that raises fundamental questions of fairness, freedom and enforcement. They didn't get it.
Jackson talked first. He called Wilson corrupt, then linked him to Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman who was convicted of killing her two sons but initially told police the boys had been kidnapped by a black man. Before Brinkley bade them farewell, Jackson also had tied Wilson to ethnic cleansing - in other words, to the war criminals in beleaguered Bosnia.
We're not here to defend Wilson. A canny politician, he knows the game is called hard ball, and he plays it like the pro that he is. Rather, the trouble today is a political climate polluted by people who disagree so disagreeably. And so irrelevantly.
A viewer needn't have been a Wilson fan or even an affirmative-action doubter to have felt insulted and cheated by Jackson's belligerent distractions. Given this nation's unhappy race-relations history, a differently focused Jackson could have made a strong case for the concept. He might have won some converts.
But slinging mud is so routine many viewers probably didn't even realize they were being affronted and shortchanged.
One indicator of how commonplace such negative action is came some weeks ago when President Clinton and Newt Gingrich, sharing a platform in New England, were civil to each other. The media treated it as really big news.
However the debate over race-related affirmative action ends, civility in the public arena is a kind of affirmative action we need more of. by CNB