Authenticity & the vote:
McCarthy, Abigail
Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy WHY WE STAY HONE AUTHENTICITY & THE VOTE THIS WEEK political experts, scholars, and commentators are meeting with the Committee for the Study of the American...
...Communication and leadership are mysteriously interwined, as are language and personality...
...One of the strangest effects of the mass media, Walter Cronkite pointed out, is that the closer the office-holder is to us, the less we know about him...
...This is not to say that he should be a candidate for high office, but that candidates for high office should speak, as he does, with their own voices...
...It occurred to me that the perception of this congruence on the part of the public may be the reason that Walter Cronkite is called the most trusted man in America...
...But it is not necessary for the American public man to speak or write with the erudition of his British counterpart...
...They trivialize the news, and inspire cynicism...
...Local community is blotted out...
...The conviction of this came home to me again a few weeks ago when Walter Cronkite gave the annual endowed lecture to members of the board and guests of the Washington Journalism Center...
...Cronkite is known for writing and rewriting the material with which he goes on the air, and one had confidence in listening to his thoughtful, well-crafted talk that, although he probably had help with research, etc., it reflected the concerns, the opinions, even the crotchets, of the man himself...
...Democracy requires that the relationship of citizens to leaders be that of persons to persons...
...ical professionals at Harvard...
...It no longer connects the real with the real...
...He cited the number of English parliamentarians on the other hand whose work he could publish with confidence, and who could also write on subjects other than politics...
...It also signifies deeper problems within the American system...
...When the words we hear are not those of the man who speaks them a basic falsity is at the root of the relationship between hearer and speaker...
...He also professed scorn for the local news show presided over by elegantly-coiffed ("and I mean male," he said) "giggling" newscasters...
...Much of the loss of authenticity has to be attributed to the power of the television medium...
...If we can reverse the trend to the synthetic candidate and use the media, rather than let ourselves be used, we may restore authenticity to the act of choice . voting is meant to be...
...Oh, one can hope that they and their candidates are not completely without conviction and idealism, but the emphasis is bound to be on form rather than substance...
...I believe that the most fundamental cause is that voting is no longer perceived as an authentic act...
...Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy WHY WE STAY HONE AUTHENTICITY & THE VOTE THIS WEEK political experts, scholars, and commentators are meeting with the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, on whose board I serve, to discuss once again the alarming decline of voter participation in our national elections...
...Help may be on the way in the advent of Cable with its twenty-four-hour news, multiplication of channels, and the capacity to zero in on local and particular audiences...
...Television also has falsities that are not inherent, as Cronkite also pointed out...
...The current news format which squeezes all news including campaign coverage into a scant twenty-four minutes means that the contest element in an election is overemphasized and that little attention and analysis is given to issues and programs...
...And the global village, which McLuhan has taught us that television has given us, does not have the solidity and shared experience of the real village of history, yet does have some of the worst of village characteristics: subservience to material success, feudal relationships, hostility to difference, the magnification of quarrels into permanent conflict, the institutionalizing of gossip, and the refusal to admit of greatness...
...They gather-the managers and chairmen and pollsters-to talk of what happened, of how their charges handled, of what worked and what didn't work...
...There is to me something offensive in the already traditional postelection meeting of the new class of polit...
...He has argued for extended coverage...
...The president seems our familiar but we do not recognize the city councilman who may well live on the next street...
...Most of us know some of the factors contributing to the problem: the weakening of political parties and other institutions, the role of the media in elections, the legal and structural impediments still blocking full participation for all eligible to vote, and the disillusionment of the public with politics in general...
...Low turnout, the conveners believe, gives small, intense, and one-issue groups inordinate power...
...A man on film is only the projection of the real man...
...All that is necesssary is that we can discern the voice of the real person, be he or she given to bluntness or mangling the language a bit...
...Voting under such conditions is not making a choice...
...It must be better used within its limitations and technological requirements...
...And are dismayed that only 53.1 percent of the eligible electorate voted to choose the president in 1980...
...Abigail McCarthyy...
...It is not impossible for television to serve the authentic...
...That is the lowest turnout since 1948...
...Abigail McCarthybe...
...There was no essential difference in language and stance between the man who spoke and the man who answered the questions...
...it is buying a product...
...For too long a time ours has been the relationship of persons to packages . .. packages with human face and form-and, somewhere within the wrappings, no doubt, a winning but fallible human personality-but a package put together by pollsters, image-makers, pulse-takers, and speech-writers...
...Most, if not all, of those present see this phenomenon as a danger for the future of democratic government...
...The editor of The New Republic wrote recently that that journal seldom published papers under the name of American political figures because so few were written by the men themselves...
...Any speaker with a grain of sense tries to fit his or her speech to an audience...
...The political person dependent on these professionals, if that they are, is a political person diminished...
...The same is true of the written word...
...But it is quite different for a political candidate to develop opinions and propose programs to fit the desires of the voters, after these desires have been pin-pointed by poll-takers...
Vol. 108 • January 1981 • No. 1
