Kathleen Hall Jamieson's Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction, and Democracy
Scheuer, Jeffrey
DIRTY POLITICS: DECEPTION, DISTRACTION, AND DEMOCRACY, by Kathleen Hall Jamieson. Oxford University Press, 1992. 335 pages. $25. La perfect world, the media wizards who spawned Willie Horton...
...Her answer is that "the likelihood that campaign rhetoric will prophesy conduct in office plummets...
...clashing visions and principles, as much as factual truth, are systematically cloaked in American political debate...
...She identifies some of the propaganda techniques that political ads use: apposition (equating one candidate with everything good, the other with evil...
...Toward the end of Dirty Politics, Jamieson confronts a nagging question: does it really matter if discourse is dominated by hype, deception, and propaganda...
...But radical remedies, such as mandating response time, though potentially fair, would encounter constitutional barriers...
...Jamieson might better have confined her casework to the 1988 campaign—or even better, to Willie Horton...
...Few of those stories question the truth or fairness of the ads...
...It would demand maximum accuracy and completeness of statements, and banish all symbols or devices intended to manipulate the audience...
...This ideal is worthy if somewhat vague (as are the means of achieving it...
...they also favor the simple over the complex...
...contextual reframing...
...Underlying this critique of the media, however, is the basic character of the electronic image: the defining features of television, which make it so powerful a vehicle of propaganda...
...The media, as Roger Ailes notes, "are interested in pictures, mistakes, and attacks...
...Utopian...
...camera angles and positions...
...Public disgust with the media, for example after its frenzy over Bill Clinton's private life, tends to be uninformed and counterproductive, a strain of know-nothingism, failing both to hold the media to a higher standard and to recognize its critical surrogate function...
...and, less constrained by conventions of accuracy, they are able to use the medium to fuller effect...
...And she indicts the news media for focusing on campaign strategy and ignoring issues, which reduces viewers and readers to mere spectators "evaluating the performances of those bent on cynical manipulation...
...we do need more evidence, argument, and accountability...
...The printed word is an inherently discursive medium, in which fallacies, falsities, and fantasies are relatively transparent...
...It does matter how truthful our political conversation is—and especially to progressives, whose values are, implicitly, far more reliant on the compelling powers of rationality, complexity, and argument...
...Amid the bombast, sensation, and hype, it is still possible to find intelligent political debate on television and in print...
...The problem is that electronic politics doesn't just depart from this ideal of antipropaganda, it's antithetical to it...
...it rewards the vivid, punishes the abstract, and "simplif[ies] the world into Manichean dualities [that] merchandise our hopes and fears...
...But these propagandists are just one feature of a larger crisis of democratic capitalism: the interpenetration of politics, television, entertainment, and wealth...
...In short, all discourse becomes "adlike...
...Ranging from strategic political analysis to communication theory to historical survey, Dirty Politics inevitably comes up short in some respects...
...Television is thus inherently more adaptable to propagandistic ends...
...But if the ideal represents a fairer, more truthful, less coercive form of public communication, then shift we must...
...The problem, for which the media are partly responsible, isn't the lack of such dialogue...
...a higher level of discourse might make government not just more predictable but also more responsive, democratic, efficient, and humane...
...displacement (responding to charges by matching one's opponent in manipulation and bombast...
...On the spinning side, television itself is, for structural as well as commercial reasons, a formidable instrument of propaganda...
...To propagandize is human—and to watch television is all too human...
...The problem isn't that political ads are negative...
...short, densely symbolic statements and images...
...There is no single clear theme or chronological structure, and far too much anecdotal evidence...
...Ads borrow news techniques that give them a specious legitimacy...
...Moreover, there are enormous risks in living in a culture saturated by falsification...
...The electronic vocabu390 • DISSENT lary is artificial, encrypted, and insidious...
...La perfect world, the media wizards who spawned Willie Horton would be out of business...
...Jamieson exhorts the press to abandon the "strategy schema...
...sound, music, and voice-over...
...This is a mechanistic view...
...lighting, color, set design...
...it's the willingness of so many Americans to settle for less...
...Whatever their faults, shows such as "The MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour," "Nightline," programming on C-SPAN, and a wealth of publications offer substance and ideas (if not vigorous ideological combat), largely free of the filtering effects of profit and propaganda...
...false claims "are legitimized by being aired without correction...
...The book is also riddled with minor errors of fact and style, as if written on the fly...
...At the same time, television news stories home in on controversial political ads in ways that accord them free and often uncritical exposure...
...Because they are brief assertions based in dramatic narrative and/or example...
...it's rather that they aren't critically, comparatively, and truthfully negative...
...What's lost," she asks, "in a world in which everything's an ad...
...But even if that is accomplished, television will still dominate the political process...
...She urges more accountability for the content of ads and hopes that more states than the current eighteen might pass statutes governing campaign conduct...
...Television's "multiple modes," Jamieson contends, and its "powerful ability to orient attention can invite strong, unthinking negative responses in low-involvement viewers [and] can short circuit the normal defenses that more educated, more highly involved viewers ordinarily marshal against suspect claims " By implication, it is most effective on the most volatile and pivotal political audience: those who lack strong ideological convictions...
...One aspect of the problem is the blurred boundary between advertising and news...
...Beginning with a lengthy discussion of the infamous 1988 Willie Horton ad, Jamieson sees television as an essentially non-rational and propagandistic medium: one that grants "Svengalian powers" to the makers of political discourse...
...it can juxtapose unrelated or subtly related ideas, such as Dukakis and the furlough program (or Boston Harbor...
...Not least, there is the sheer rapidity with which television can convey information, overwhelming the critical faculties of the viewer...
...and so forth...
...live, recorded, and animated action...
...Politics isn't just about evidence or reasons...
...Her answer to the "strategy schema" is a "problem-promise-performance schema" based on a logic of argument and evidence...
...There is no simple way of shifting on that spectrum without raising standards of public education and critical thinking...
...Television can pair unlike images and ideas, or decouple like ones...
...it "makes analytic processing of rapidly emerging claims all but impossible...
...It bypasses rationality, appealing viscerally and subconsciously, hence manipulatively...
...But while making political discourse more like legal discourse might clarify and verify factual claims, it would only address part of the problem...
...The mixture of cash 'n' camera has eroded civic discourse and brought about what Todd Gitlin calls "an eerie politics of half-truth, deceit, and evasion in which ignorant symbols clash by night...
...On the spending side, money talks—mainly the language of television...
...Ideas can be conveyed nonverbally that would seem absurd, even bigoted, in discursive form...
...It wouldn't adjudicate, or even expose, the underlying moral-political values...
...What Jamieson misses is that a more sophisticated discourse presumes not just wiser journalists and politicians, somehow liberated from the imperatives of profit and power, but also a more sophisticated and engaged public...
...This crisis has two dimensions: the spending side and the spinning side...
...Jamieson maintains that three things are lost in this debasement of public discourse: argument (linking data to claims), engagement (comparison of rival claims), and accountability...
...To fully deconstruct a discourse one must also expose its normative logic...
...They personalize, dramatize, visualize...
...For reasons that Jamieson and others have suggested, television's aversion to abstraction and analytic depth—above all its simplifying nature— make it inhospitable to those values...
...The 1992 election signaled some hope for reform of campaign spending...
...its complex effects on political consciousness and behavior will continue to demand critical scrutiny...
...Ideally, political discourse would be propagandafree, yet still allow for heated partisan debate...
...SUMMER • 1993 • 389 Dirty Politics, Kathleen Hall Jamieson's study of electronic politics, treats how television corrupts discourse once the cash flows...
...Basic change is more likely to come not from strikes of legislative lightning, but from change in the political and social climate...
...ami eson observes that political ads (like commercial ones) are assertive rather than argumentative and rely on highly selective evidence, if any...
...Television, by contrast, offers a plethora of cosmetic tools: pacing, cutting, montage...
Vol. 40 • July 1993 • No. 3
