MEDIA BEAT
by Norman Solomon SPINNING POPULISM IN AMERICAN NEWS MEDIA
A specter is haunting America--the specter of populism. Now that Patrick Buchanan has left the Republican fold to seek the Reform Party's presidential nomination, a lot of journalists will be analyzing his denunciations of the bipartisan establishment. In the months ahead, many pundits are going to throw brickbats in his direction.
But Buchanan is largely a media creation. During the last two decades, he gained wide visibility and national clout through the good graces of CNN and other television networks. Despite his vehement biases against gays, blacks, and non-European immigrants, Buchanan's colleagues on the chat shows did little to challenge his assorted bigotries.
While arguing with Buchanan on CNN's "Crossfire" one day in 1988, I had no doubt that I was sitting next to someone with pro-fascist inclinations. But through the years, his laudatory comments about such dictators as Spain's Francisco Franco and Chile's Augusto Pinochet seemed to raise few media eyebrows.
On Feb. 16, 1995, when Buchanan revealed that he was leaving TV punditry to prepare his '96 campaign for the GOP presidential nod, he made the announcement on "Crossfire." Fellow co-host Michael Kinsley, supposedly on the program as a counterbalance, responded by helping Buchanan to hold up a sign showing his campaign's 800-number. With the toll-free number displayed on the screen, the moment symbolized how members of the punditocracy have enabled Buchanan to attain national prominence.
In early 1996, Buchanan's "populist" campaign gained strength in the opening GOP primaries. George Will and some other pro-Republican commentators--fearful that Buchanan's momentum threatened the party's prospects--suddenly objected that he seemed to have a soft spot in his heart for fascism.
Even then, Buchanan could rely on plenty of unfiltered air time and print space to make his case. "The truth is, I've gotten fairer, more comprehensive coverage of my ideas than I ever imagined I would receive," Buchanan acknowledged in March 1996. He added: "I've gotten balanced coverage and broad coverage--all we could have asked."
When he conceded defeat at the 1996 Republican convention, a big media seat was waiting. In the midst of a live interview with the vanquished candidate, Larry King relayed an invitation from CNN president Tom Johnson, asking Buchanan to return: "It's official--he wants you back on `Crossfire.'"
From corporate Amerip;ca's vantage point, Buchanp;an is just about ideal as a national candidate waving the populist banner. Buchanan is hobbled by heavy far-right baggage--which he grips with white-knuckled defiance as he equivocates about Nazi Germany and routinely denigrates people for failure to be white, heterosexual, and Christian (as he defines Christian).
Meanwhile, Buchanan mouths anti-corporate rhetoric but doesn't support basic union rights of American workers. Significantly, he opposes a raise in the minimum wage. And he scorns the environmental movement as an affront to holiness. "Easter's gone," Buchanan declared angrily a few years ago. "Now it's Earth Day. We can all go out and worship dirt."
Buchanan's brand of populism has never had much difficulty getting access to mass media. But progressive populism--stressing labor solidarity and human rights for everyone while challenging corporate power--is a very different story. Mostly excluded from the media frame are populist advocates who explicitly reject scapegoating and directly confront the undemocratic power wielded by large corporations.
Of course, there's a glut of media commentators who support the gist of Democratic and Republican party policies without seriously questioning economic globalization, pacts such as NAFTA, and the World Trade Organization.
Overall, mass media are offering the public either mainstream pundits who differ on how to shore up the status quo, or right-wing demagogues like Buchanan. The narrow range of discourse, from the near left to the far right, gives the impression that there are basically two positions worthy of consideration--either the two-party establishment or Buchanan-type populism. It often seems that strong anti-corporate political views are only deemed fit for wide media distribution if they're laced with a right-wing agenda.
It's not quite true, however, that you have to be on the far right to garner sustained media attention as a "populist." Exceptions are made: Many news outlets have gone crazy for the occasional pseudo-populist billionaire. In 1992, Ross Perot basked in a great deal of favorable media coverage for several months, until evidence of his wackiness became too weighty to ignore. Now the billionaire developer Donald Trump is the bogus populist of media choice. It's enough to give populism a bad name. And that's a real shame.
MEDIA COVERAGE OF BUDGET POLITICS
After weeks of bitter partisan wrangling over budget issues, the federal government began its new fiscal year on October 1. Such political confrontations have become routine in Washington. As strategists work overtime, news accounts provide us with ping-pong journalism--informing the country about the latest shots that top politicos have slammed across the net.
Lost in the media's play-by-play are some grim facts. While leading Democrats and Republicans fire off more rhetorical salvos, neither of the warring parties wants to preserve even the current (woefully inadequate) level of social spending. Neither party even has the decency to insist that federal programs for low-income Americans be adjusted for inflation.
Meanwhile, the nation's military tab--already exceeding three-quarters of a billion dollars per day--is scheduled to rise by more than $100 billion over the next five years. On Capitol Hill and in the news media, there are some heated debates over exactly which jet bombers, battleships and missile systems to build. But few journalists probe why Congress and the president are so determined to fatten Pentagon pork while slashing domestic programs.
From all appearances, the current beating of plowshares into swords hardly causes a ripple of concern in the national press corps. Instead, corporate-oriented policy wonking is so pervasive that journalists and government officials seem pleased to be speaking the same jargon while winking at the same assumptions.
But when it comes to focusing on federal budget priorities, what would happen if mainstream media outlets pulled themselves out of timeworn ruts--moving beyond the usual discourse among elites and opting instead for some semblance of democratic debate involving the country at large?
In this hypothetical media world, it wouldn't matter how much big money was arrayed behind the advocates of certain policies. Reporters, editors and producers would conduct themselves as facilitators of democratic discourse--not mouthpieces for the most powerful institutions clustered along Pennsylvania Avenue and Wall Street. To media professionals, the human voices representing grass-roots constituencies would matter more than any big-money amplification system. "Dream on," you might say. Agreed, it's hard to imagine political media coverage tilted by civic participation rather than capital accumulation. But let's try.
In the midst of an intense national debate over federal budget priorities, TV networks could broadcast live from food stamp offices, emergency rooms at public hospitals, day care centers, school breakfast cafeterias, drug rehabilitation centers and nursing homes for elderly Americans on fixed incomes. Speaking as participants in national policy debates rather than as subjects of fragmentary feature stories, people could talk about how their lives are directly affected by Washington's budget crunchers and political calculators.
Instead of merely airing the conventional perp;severations coming from pundits like George Will, Cokie Roberts, Mark Shields, and Paul Gigot, the networks could bring us the views of Americans who are working longer hours--under more stressful conditions--to make ends meet.
The new commentators wouldn't be old hands at sitting in TV studios. But they could talk about what it's like to be a worker who's paying higher and higher health-care premiums for deteriorating medical coverage. And they could discuss many other daily manifestations of economic inequities.
The fresh policy analysts would have more than fleeting interest in assessing the huge gaps between America's rich and poor. So, it wouldn't be a one-day story when updated figures from the Congressional Budget Office supplied more evidence that America's prosperity has been hijacked for the wealthy.
Last month, the budget office provided some telling numbers. Since 1977, the 1 percent of Americans with the highest income have boosted their incomes by a whopping 119 percent. But when we look downward on the nation's income ladder, the gains dissipate--and then actually turn into losses.
The one-fifth of the population with the highest income gained 38 percent since 1977. The middle one-fifth lost 3 percent. And the bottom one-fifth--the people least able to afford setbacks--actually lost 12 percent of their incomes in real terms. To the vast majority of the famous journalists who tell us the meaning of the latest budget maneuvers in Washington, such figures are not of great consequence. The renowned pundits are good at echoing themselves. Most of the rest of the country is left out of the discussion.
--Norman Solomon's latest book is "The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media." Help yourself to a dose of honest journalism! Published by Common Courage Press, P.O. Box 702, Monroe, ME 04951. <www.commoncouragepress.com>