Is the future of American politics then to be dominated by the search— by journalists and political actors alike— for narratives that are timely, clear-cut, terse, easily described, dramatic, colorful, and visualizable? Are political actors increasingly judged by their success as performers, judged by journalists with their own particular set of criteria rather than by policies that work? Can journalists break out of this? Can politicians? Can Citizens?

Timothy E. Cook ‘75

Governing with the News

Introduction

The mass media, especially television, is undeniably the major forum for political action in the world today. Television has become the crucial intermediary between leaders and their people. Never before have leaders had such direct and immediate access to so many citizens. We live in a media saturated age dominated by “a 24-hour news cycle” and the CNN curve. The events of the last four years are a case in point.

The horror, anger and confusion following from airliners being turned into flying Molotov Cocktails and flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was experienced by most Americans, and indeed most of the world, in almost real time through television. Televised images shocked Americans back into a global world. The public’s inattention appeared to be a naïve and dangerous luxury. After scurrying from military base to military base— an image that conveyed weakness— the president returned to Washington and reasserted the authority of the imperial presidency.

The pictures before our eyes contradicted the usual assumptions about American, New York, and especially the Wall Street financial community as harboring Caucasians sitting at the apex of power and wealth. Pictures of multi-hued and multi-ethnic victims and survivors pouring into the streets crushed these smug presuppositions. The events of September 11 were proclaimed a turning point in American history by politicians and pundits alike. On September 20th, President Bush declared an unceasing war against international terrorism.

From the revelation of President Clinton’s illicit relationship with Monica Lewinsky in the Washington Post on January 21, 1998 through the President’s acquittal after an impeachment trial before the Senate on January 12, 1999, the Nation was inundated with reports, rumors and commentary in the print, electronic media and on the Internet. Arguments and rhetoric about the President’s alleged misdeeds were not confined to the House and Senate. The investigation and impeachment trial were public events dominating the news and sending the ratings of cable TV channels through the roof. Indeed, much of the rhetoric was not aimed at the Senators who were to try President Clinton but the American public generally. In a sense we all participated vicariously through non-stop TV coverage, endless discussions on talk shows and the inescapable staged confrontations between jousting “legal experts and former federal prosecutors. We were all captives as this drama played out public ally as the dominant news story of the years.

· The following year after what many regarded as a lackluster Presidential campaign, America was once again in the grip of a shared media national drama when the Na tional Election Service mistakenly called Florida for Vice President Gore. The networks and cable service duly reported this. But within an hour the media reversed itself calling the State for Governor Bush and then report that Florida was too close to call. For thirty-seven days the news was dominated by what Chief Justice Rehnquist would later characterize as “the seesaw electoral battle.” Television audiences were again overwhelmed by round-the-clock images of reporters doing standup reports from ballot counting stations and Florida courthouses against the usual demonstrations ginned up for the cameras. Hour after hour Americans heard the details of arcane election jurisprudence deconstructed by lawyers and commentators.

· Through television, leaders attempt to mobilize support and engineer consent for their policies. Most of us remember that masterpiece of imagery— the 1994 gathering of three hundred Republican Representatives and candidates for the House on the steps before the National Capital to proclaim their Contract with America. This photo-op set in motion one of the most momentous shifts of political power in American history. President Clinton, not to be outdone, marshaled a legion of uniformed police officers as a backdrop to denounce republican delays in passing the appropriations to “add 100,000 new police officers.”

· On Wednesday, September 2, 1998 Joseph Lieberman, whose association with President Clinton goes back twenty-eight years, took the Senate floor to warn of the “moral consequences” of the President’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and his lying to his political associates and the American People. On Sunday, September 6, Senator Lieberman appears on Face the Nation seemingly signaling a “domino effect” wherein the certainty of impeachment hearings becomes the focus of political discourse in the politically influential media. President Clinton feels compelled to respond to media reports of “declining political support” at news joint conferences with Russian President Yeltsin and Irish Prime Minister Ahern. How and why did the perception of an American President riding high with job approval ratings at plus sixty percent become a wounded political creature struggling to retain control of his party and the government?

· Television also constrains the options of political leaders, as the Clinton administration learned when United Nations Iraqi arms inspector Scott Ritter resigned in protest. Ritter alleged that the administration was undermining the task of discovering and destroying Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. When Ritter began to appear on talk shows, Secretary Albright and National Security Advisor Burger were forced to respond publicly. The result was to put Iraqi compliance with the 1991 Cease-fire Agreement on the political agenda with potential damaging consequences for the Clinton Administration.

· Indeed, as conventional wisdom has it, politicians and diplomats have lost control:

Governments watch history with their publics, losing the luxury of time to deliberate in private before the imperative to “do something” stood on their doorsteps. Instant information, accessible to anyone with a television and a cable, has removed a sheath of mystery from the mantle of leadership, costing politicians some measure of respect.

Not everyone buys the mantra that leaders have become captives to the “CNN Curve.” Johanna Neuman, Foreign Policy editor of USA Today, contends that changes in modern communications technologies have not supplanted the role of leadership and strategy in international relations.

These changes are marvelous and sobering and frightening and dramatic, but what my reading through history demonstrates is that they are not new. The changes information technology has visited on the worlds of diplomacy and journalism in the late twentieth century are little different from the price exacted by technology in earlier eras. Many predict today that cyberspace will empower the disenfranchised, putting information directly in the hands of people, unfiltered by governments. **** True, each new media technology dislodges the middleman, bringing the audience closer to the stage, offering the potential for wider dissemination of information. This too is part of the pattern, one that is repeated, absorbed, and soon unnoticed. But the 550-year history of media technology suggests that democracy’s triumph is not inevitable.

From the appearance of the first newspaper in the American colonies in 1690, until our own time— a world with CNN, C-SPAN, the internet and talk-radio— the media have always played a central role in the nation’s political process. Today the media is the battleground on which every sort of partisan and policy conflicts are played out. Television today, is a major influence on what kind of leaders we select, on how effectively they govern, on the policies we enact and on the success of those policies.

Indeed, much of our political culture is defined by the news media. Five examples illustrate this point:

1. Less than a decade ago a little-known but brash Congressman from Georgia commandeered the covers of the leading national news magazines and dominated the airways, far overshadowing the more senior and respected Republican leader in the Senate and muscling aside the President of the United States as the dominant figure on the political landscape. This was no surprise to Pulitzer Prize winner Hedrick Smith. In 1985, he recognized Newt Gingrich’s skills to exploit the media as the path to power in national politics. (See his book The Power Game.) But at the outset of the 1996 election cycle Gingrich had largely withdrawn from center-stage. His high visibility and negative ratings are seen as threatening to many of the Republican House members elected in 1994. One of the major political books of 1996 was entitled, Tell Newt To Shut Up! It chronicles the changes in Gingrich’s treatment in the media and his changing political fortunes. By 1999, Gingrich left Congress and retreated from the headlines and the TV screens.

2. In 1991 and 1992, the Los Angeles television stations incessantly reran portions of video tape showing Rodney King being beaten by police officers. A jury acquitting four white police officers charged with beating King set in motion events leading to one of the most serious civil disorders in American history. The media reported the event in real-time from every angle, including helicopter photography. Indeed, the coverage was so compelling that President Bush responded to the verdict in the first “Rodney King verdict,” promising that the federal government would peruse the charges. Later, when the officers were again tried on federal charges, the media were poised to photograph and report expected outbreaks of violence.

3. To a considerable extent, freedom of expression in the United States has been developed through episodic conflict between the courts struggling to preserve the right of an accused to a fair trial and the media’s demand to report every aspect of criminal investigations and trials. From June 15, 1994 through the fall of 1995, Americans, indeed the whole world, were the audience for “O.J. Mania.” O.J. Simpson’s arrest after the bizarre escape attempt in the now famous white Bronco was witnessed by millions of viewers throughout the world. CNN and seven of the local television stations in Los Angeles preempting highly profitable daytime programs televised the preliminary proceedings. The Simpson murder case spawned a boom in the publishing industry, was tried before a mock jury on Geraldo and turned the judge, the defense lawyers, the prosecutors and ultimately a number of the jurors into celebrities.

4. In the December 1999, the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle became the scene of street demonstrations and protests. The protests provoked strong police response including arrests and tear gas. The “Battle in Seattle” quickly became the story de jour. The demonstration attracted continuous coverage on TV. The criticism of the WTO and global economic policy received extensive coverage. The protesters and their complaint got an international forum and the police response itself became a source of controversy. The WTO adjourned without any agreement and eventually, the Seattle chief of police announced his retirement.

5. On January 10, 2000 the purchase of Time Warner by the ISP, AOL became the hottest international business story. This merger symbolized the technological and organization convergence in the digital age. Within a year of this bold stroke of consolidation, the bloom was off the rose, and many began to view the consolidation and massification of technologies and production activities as risky business ventures.

The Power of Television

Television is a unique and more powerful form of communication than any earlier medium. It appeals not only to the mind but also to the primal and visceral emotions. It has a capacity to move people more forcefully than the written word. Increasingly—

√ Public office holders and candidates seek to shape public opinion and to define the political agenda by controlling the media;

√ Citizens depend on the media— primarily television— to “know” their public officials and “know” the world beyond their neighborhood and their immediate experience.

The Challenge

In theory politics in a media age should greatly enhance democratic control. Television should provide citizens with more information about public officials and public policies. Theoretically, they have greater freedom to hold public officials accountable at the ballot box. But the barrage of images and messages presented to the voter through television present a major challenge for democratic governance. As the Wall Street Journal noted in an editorial on July 10, 1996:

Modern American politics has taken some odd turns. Because so much of it takes place on television, our politicians have made themselves TV-like— apparently real but not too very far out of the ordinary lest the audience shrink. It, is undeniably entertaining at times— the focus-grouped agendas, the Sunday punditry, and the college-like polls. The professionals apparently have assumed that most voters don’t care that the new politics doesn’t often require authentic political courage and leadership in the men running for the nation’s highest office.

Politics as Entertainment. This is especially true as the line between news and entertainment becomes increasingly faint. A number of your readings and the videos you will see make this claim. What we see on television is not a portrayal of objective reality. We see only snapshots of reality. These snapshots can be manipulated.

Entertainment as Reality. Television is the most compelling medium. We are more likely to believe what we see more readily than what we read or hear. Thus television is the frighteningly seductive medium.

When analyzing politics on television we must always ask: Is what we see on television “reality”? Is it the whole picture? Is it in context? Are we being manipulated or mislead? As our colleague, the late Professor Brian Stonehill pleaded in a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece:

We must retrieve the integrity of images by coping with their abundance, for abundance wrecks the value of any currency, be it diamonds, cash or pictures. What we need is “visual literacy”— a critical awareness of what we’re watching, on a case-by-case basis, to sort the counterfeit from the correct and to tell what’s worth nothing from what’s worth something.

A number of works you will encounter this semester raise similar caveats. For example, Santo Iyengar suggests another important paradox “... surprising, as independent news organizations have become the principle channels of political communication, the electoral accountability of political officials has actually decreased.” James Fallows’ widely discussed book Breaking The News maintains that the subtle corruption of journalistic independence is an important reason for this. In Dirty Politics, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, one of the Nation’s leading media critics, makes the following point:

... television has granted the manufacturers of campaign discourse some svengalian powers that print and radio lacked. Specifically, its ability to reconfigure “reality” in ways that heighten the power of the visceral appeal. Its multimodal nature makes analytic processing of rapidly emerging claims all but impossible. And its status as entertaining wall paper grants television the privilege of surrounding us with claims that education has taught us to reject were they lodged on the printed page. Finally on both radio and television, the identity of the unseen voice-over announcer is unknown and in that anonymity not accountable in any useful way for the claims he or she insinuates into our consciousness.

Fixing responsibility for problems affecting our media-saturated world is difficult and troubling. Why does the full promise of modern communications technology for enhancing democracy remained unfulfilled? Does the failure to achieve our democratic promise lie with the political process, the political leaders, and the media or does it lie with the audience— the citizens?

Course Objectives

The aims of this class are to make you visually literate—

√ Understand the impact of the communications revolution on American politics over the past four decades;

√ Develop skills in careful, critical analysis of the portrayal of issues and the presentation of public personality on television;

√ investigate the economic forces, organizational incentives and journalistic culture that shape how television presents politics and public officials;

√ understand how politicians and their media specialists use the mass media, and especially television, to mold public opinion and to engineer support for themselves and their policies;

√ collaborate with other members of the class to produce a video analyzing an aspect of current American politics. This video tape of five to seven minutes should demonstrate the operation and influence of the media in politics or how politicians use the media;

Participation and Attendance

Your attention, interest and active participation are indispensable for making this course an effective learning experience. Accordingly, your participation will be a component of your final grade. You must stay up with the readings and participate in class discussion. I will not take attendance, but if you are not in class you cannot respond when you are called on.

Grading

Grading components:

· Team projects (September 23, 25 & 26)= 150 points

· A critical book analysis (November 20)= 100 points

· Midterm examination (October 14)= 150 points

· Individual Video Project & presentation= 250

· Participation =100 points

· Final Examination (December 17 at 2 PM)= 250

Last evening, the networks and the cable channels began their remembrance of 9-11 the day that changed America forever.” During weeks two and three of the course: September 9 through September 18, each of you will be assigned to a group. Your group will work together to monitor the coverage of the “remembrance.” Other groups will monitor the development of “hard news” coverage during these two weeks. Your task is to watch TV and cable coverage. Each of you will be assigned a group to work with and be given a specific assignment at our September 9 meeting. Your group must prepare a log of what you watched and produce a two page, double-spaced paper analyzing what you observed. Your will also prepare a PowerPoint or video presentation of your findings. The paper and log must be submitted before class on February 7. This project will be worth 150 points [25 points for the log, 50 points for the presentation and 75 points for the analytical paper].

There will be a midterm examination Monday, October 14. The examination will be worth 150 points and will be comprised of multiple choice, short-answer and essay questions.

Each of you must select a book from the recommended list. With my approval you may substitute a book of your choosing. I will circulate the book list September 23 for you to select a book. Submit a critical analysis of the book on November 20; this project is worth 100 points. The analysis should identify the author’s principal argument(s) and evidence. You should appraise the contribution of the book in terms of the themes or other readings in this course. Your review must not exceed three pages, double-spaced.

There will be a final examination Tuesday, December 17 at 2 PM worth 250 points.

Alternatively to the final examination you may produce a video or web-based presentation. If you, or a team of two or three, elect to produce a video project rather than take the final examination, you must submit a detailed project proposal no later than

Individual video Projects

~You, or you and another member of the class, will select a topic from a list of topics which to be circulated by September 20. You must sign up by September 25. If you choose to work in a team; you must get my permission before signing up. When your project is approved, you may videotape television coverage, capture discussions or presentations on the Internet, record talk-radio programs or you may use archival video in the departmental collection.

~Each project analyzes recorded programming, edits tape recordings into segments and add a dub-over narrative script interpreting the edited segments or the project can be a PowerPoint presentation with embedded video clips..

If you choose to work with a classmate, your grade for this exercise will depend on your ability to motivate and coordinate your fellow students— an essential ‘real world’ skill.

The project will be evaluated on the basis of the quality of research, the depth of analysis and the effectiveness of presentation. You must connect your project to the themes and readings of the course. Video Project 250 pts.

For reference

You may want to consult the primer on visual literacy provided in Chapters 1-4 of Jamieson & Campbell’s The Interplay of Influence, 5th ed. Pay particular attention to pages 114-117. Downes & Miller, Media Studies, Lincolnwood, IL.: Teach Yourself Books, 1998.

On-line Materials

For your research project you will want to be sure you know how to use Nexis/Lexis to search for relevant materials, especially transcripts of T.V. and radio programs. Of particular interest to this class are the programs carried on C-SPAN, notably “Road to the White House 2000” at 3:30 PM every Sunday. A detailed C-SPAN schedule can be accessed through a link on the Office of Information Technologies Home page at http://www.OIT.Pomona.edu/announcements/index.html

You can also access the schedules for C-SPAN, CNN, PBS OR NPR as well as the New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today through the OIT/lab home page at http://www.OIT.Pomona.edu/announcements/index.html . http://www.courttv.com/

Other web sites include The Pew Research Center for The People & The Press http://www.people-press.org ; Campaigns and Elections Resources http://iliad.duke.edu/pdmt/resources/ CNN/Time All Politics WWW.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/ The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at http://www.vanishingvoter.org/ The Media Partnerships and Studies projects of the Kaiser Family Foundation at http://www.kff.org/

Relevant television programming

CNN has a rich assortment of political programming including “Inside Politics” at 2PM weekdays, “Larry King Live” at 6 PM and 10 PM weekdays and of particular importance to this class is “Reliable Sources”— a critical assessment of the media’s performance at 3:30 each Saturday and 6:30 AM Sundays. Increasingly, Fox News Network (calling itself “fair and balanced”) and MSNB (styling itself “America’s News Channel”) are challenging CNN as the authoritive news channel

PBS offers “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer” weekdays at 6:00 PM; “Washington Week in Review” Fridays at 8 PM; “The Charlie Rose Show” nightly at 5:30 PM; “Life & Times” [providing the best coverage of regional political issues] Fridays at 7:00 PM and “To the Contrary” [a lively and informative feminist perspective on the week’s political news] Saturdays at 1PM.

The networks have a wide variety of public affairs programming, most notably “Face the Nation” at 9 AM Sundays on CBS, “Fox News Sunday” at 8 AM Sundays; “This Week,” at 10 AM Sundays on ABC; “Meet the Press” at 8 AM Sundays on NBC; CNN Late Edition, 9-11 Sundays or “Nightline” at 11:35 PM weekdays. Some of you may wish to monitor the political coverage on youth-oriented MTV.

Required Texts (available at Huntley Bookstore)

Cook, Timothy E., Governing with the News, Chicago, IL.: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Gitlin, Todd, Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives, N.Y.: Henry Holt and Company, 2001.

Yeric, Jerry L. Mass Media and Political Change, Itasca, Illinois: F.E. Peacock Publishers, Inc., 2001.

Continuity of readings

The assigned readings, materials and topics covered in lectures may sometimes diverge. I have selected a number of works presenting coherent interpretations and argument related to the contemporary media. I will use the lectures to introduce information not covered in your texts. The divergence between lectures and readings is an unfortunate, but inevitable, consequence of teaching a course for which a textbook has not yet been written. Please bear with me.

Areas of Dominan Influence (ADI)

Advertisers normally purchase time on a program based on time of day and the geographic boundaries of the media market. The United States is subdivided into 212 media markets (ADI’s). New York is the largest market with approximately 7 million households and 15 commercial television stations.

In 1990 a 30-second spot cost roughly $14,000 or $1415 for one rating point. California has 15 ADI’s. Los Angeles is the nation’s number 2 ADI with 17 commercial stations serving 4.8 million households.