Democracy vs. Mediacracy

...Perhaps "drama" is the wrong word...

...In fact, because he emerged as a serious contender only after New Hampshire, there were districts where he did not have any delegates for his slate...

...Unfortunately for Gary Hart, he was the first in line to respond and, being eager to display his quick-wittedness, he opined that he would take a peek through the window of the approaching aircraft to determine whether the people inside were civilian or military...

...Those who would reject this view might ponder the following...

...For a couple of weeks, Hart's accusation and Mondale's response became the issue, even though the matter had nothing to do with the program or principles of either candidate and is a brouhaha that the public understands not at all...

...They don't want to be political ciphers...

...None of this spicey trivia contains any nourishment...

...Through his indirect definition of issues, the moderator is in a position to turn on one kind of voter and turn off the other...

...The television debates, as most of them have been conducted up to now, are hardly more enlightening: Issues are subordinated to images...

...Dotty Lynch, a Hart pollster, described a variation of the process in the Ohio and Indiana campaigns: "We figured out ways to make a bread-and-butter Democrat like Mondale look ineffective by going back to his part in the Carter record, and then had Gary come out with his own positive message on jobs—for 1985, not just for the year 2000...

...Thus, in principle, neither is opposed to Political Action Committees, nor is it illegal for a pac to make a contribution to a Presidential primary candidate...

...Clean scrubbing up dirty old Fritz...

...If the media focused on questions of policy, rather than on who's the front-runner and who's the runner-up, voters would be more inclined to vote "yes" or "no" on what is important...

...If they were civilian, he would be civil...

...In genuine drama the heroes are bigger-than-life, capable of wrestling seriously with matters of state and man's fate...

...When an issue does arise, it gets short shrift...

...A discussion of the issues that should be occupying our attention as we head toward the Democratic and Republican conventions will be forthcoming...

...How much money is in this race...

...This was simply fun and games, entertainment with no redeeming educational features, the sort of stuff one encounters in TV quiz shows loaded for laughs...

...Apparently, however, Hart and Mondale made a gentleman's agreement not to accept pac money in this year's primary...

...At least in their paid political announcements candidates have the option of addressing themselves to what they consider important...

...Hart said his greatest weakness was his limited travel to other lands...

...In some districts, the competition to represent a specific Presidential candidate was lively...

...that Fritz Mondale has no fire in his belly...

...What counts is the box office, the rating...

...The whole bit was politics at its most picayune...

...Thanks largely to the media, ours is an era when elections are far more beauty contests than policy referenda...

...The media, especially TV, not only write the agenda, they select the electorate as well...

...In New York, registered Democrats voted twice when choosing delegates to the party's national convention...

...While the print media are generally more informative than the electronic media, possibly because the former are reaching out for an audience that can and does read, the level of political discourse is not much higher than that in radio and TV...

...The game is only the foreplay f or the orgasm that comes with the clash...

...What was really silly, of course, was the question...

...This is true not only in the debates but also in the news broadcasts...

...But politics, although a game, is much more than a game—or, at any rate, should be...

...So it is not surprising that Hart's crying "foul" because of what he termed Mondale's Political Action Committee (pac) support received a great deal of media attention...

...This prompts backers of the favorite to relax their efforts and fewer of them show up at the polls than would have otherwise...

...even the most complex and weighty question is supposed to be answered with a smart, snappy one-liner...

...Consequently, politics is vulgarized and trivialized...

...money was raised and spent exclusively to promote the fortunes of one individual over another, although both supported the same man to head the party ticket...

...He demanded that Mondale order the labor pacs to lay off...

...It was Hart's victory...

...Both Hart and Mondale have been the beneficiaries of backing by pacs...

...One's first reaction was to cuss out the dumb Democratic Party for allowing such a farce, as if there is such a thing as The Democratic Party...

...What television presents as its election coverage is far more concerned with body contact than with the body politic...

...In past elections for the Senate, both gladly accepted the financial help of labor and other pacs...

...they would not be staying home because they think the race is over, or turning out because they don't want it to be over...

...And, preponderantly, the MCs choose to focus on the personal rather than on the programmatic...

...In any event, Hart shouted "foul...

...It was brought about in two ways...

...Elections appear to be a choice between Tweedledum and Twee-dledee when the spotlight is on style instead of substance...

...For instance, on the Rather show, the more serious portions concerned questions relating to foreign affairs...

...Certainly at sports events involving body contact there are many in the grand stands who eagerly await that primal moment—when one hockey player bangs the other across the pudendum with his stick, or when one basketball player cracks another across the windpipe with his elbow...

...As described by the New York Times, "This is a recent phenomenon in which primary voters start to vote against the front-runner once his nomination begins to appear inevitable...

...John Glenn, seeing a chance to exhibit his astronautical expertise, proceeded to make Hart look silly...

...But, upon reflection, what comes through is the powerful, almost irresistible, role of the media as the evil genius that transforms serious statesmen into laughable clowns...

...Consider, to begin with, the accepted formula for a "successful" TV ad: Take a poll, find out what" they" want to eat, then feed it to them...

...But a voter must read the small type in obscure places to discover the fact...

...By reporting a campaign as if it were a race track event, the media lapse into their "sure-winner" syndrome...

...Yet this question, like practically every question that evening, focused primarily on the candidate as a person...

...it should be a referendum on what the nation must do and not merely on who will hold office, even if very little or nothing is known about what he or she plans to do...

...Whatever the merits of the arguments pro and con on the pacs, this "big issue" remains no issue at all so far as the future of the United States is concerned, domestically or internationally...

...Of those who decided to pull the lever in the last three days before the Ohio primaries, Hart got 51 per cent to Mondale's 32 per cent...

...Because he had been around so long, his positions were too well known...

...He was saying, in effect, that his real strength was his dedication to the "rainbow coalition...

...He then proceeded to mention the many places he had been—a quite impressive list of journeys...

...Politics and policy have the same Greek roots—the polis that is our collective being...

...Whether financial aid to a delegate on a candidate's slate is the same as financial aid to the candidate himself is still officially unresolved...

...First, they pulled a lever for their Presidential choice...

...It cannot be denied, either, that most of us are interested in other people because of the way they look, smile, frown, or growl, and not because of the serious thoughts in their heads...

...He looked like Mr...

...next, they indicated their preferences among the would-be delegates for there were more of them than there were delegate slots...

...if they were military, he would be militant...

...Television in particular, to feed the appetites of that heartless monster deity called Ratings, sacrifices a concern for and consideration of the nation's present and future being...

...Political spots of this kind do little to enlighten the voters...

...The media are further responsible for what Robert Strauss, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, has called the "rejection vote...

...that is in the hands of the moderator, who decides the items for discourse...

...Which jockey (campaign consultant) is riding what horse...

...The popular perception is that Walter Mondale and Gary Hart are in basic agreement on policy...

...Would they try to shoot down the stranger or not...

...The lowest depths were reached in California, where the TV " show" was an irrelevant, irritating, irascible squabble over who did what to whom and how...

...He was clearly implying that his great strength was his interest in world affairs and his globetrotting...

...To cite only one example, on the pivotal domestic economic dilemma—the twin deficits in trade and budget—they are in almost diametric opposition to one another...

...It is not what politics should be in a democracy, where informed voters are supposed to make an informed judgment on policy...

...It is the process through which a free people make policy...

...MEDIACRACY BY GUS TYLER As the Democratic Party's Presidential primary battle moved into its final stages in New Jersey and California, the level of the debates among the three remaining contenders descended to its nadir...

...As in their reporting of sports events, too, the media adore situations where one of the players claims he has been "fouled...

...Television, a branch of entertainment, treats elections as showbiz...

...Jackson said his greatest weakness was his failure to reach a broader constituency...

...Hart was also now in a position to declare that delegates elected with the assistance of laborPACswere"tainted," and would therefore be challenged at the Democratic Party convention in San Francisco come July...

...They are intended to seduce, not to educate...

...etcetera ad nauseam...

...What are the odds...

...For no answer would tell anything about the foreign policy of a candidate, about how he might act in some military crisis...

...By the very act of deciding what is important and what is not important, television determines—or at the minimum influences—who is likely to vote and who is not...

...The "foul play" fuss is about the By focusing on the nonissues, the media leave the impression that there actually are no significant program differences among the candidates...

...What are the touts saying...

...A more considered response would have been to fault the candidates for turning what should have been a gladiatorial contest into a barroom brawl...

...Since Mondale was perceived as the front-runner early in the race, many of his backers hastened to file as delegates, producing numerous contests...

...If they engage in conflict it is in the style of Brutus and Caesar, not Punch and Judy...

...But their agreement was not binding on pacs wishing to act on their own, which some labor pacs did in support of delegates who had pledged themselves to Mondale...

...Some months later, after the field had narrowed down to three Presidential aspirants, Dan Rather opened a dialogue with the request that the participants reveal their greatest "weaknesses," as they saw it...

...that he made himself out to be a year younger than he is...

...What boosts the rating is drama—actors playing roles in a personal conflict...

...Indeed, in the area of policy proposals the debates are less informative than the ads...

...Hart, by contrast, had virtually no such conflicts...

...All three candidates proved they were light on their toes...

...melodrama" would be better, for its characters are simple, stereotypical, predictable, shallow...

...When Reverend Jesse Jackson tried to step in to keep the peace, he was battered by both Senator Gary Hart and former Vice President Walter Mondale...

...The candidate has little or no control over subject matter...

...A change of cosmetics now changes the political cosmos...

...By implication, he was suggesting that Hart was not really telling where he stood and that, in the final analysis, it was Mondale who had the know-how...

...Meanwhile, contrary-minded voters turn out to protest the notion that their vote does not count...

...It also creates audiences in its own image: petty performers projected out of the boob tube...

...Now, it may very well be that the viewers and the live spectators love private brawling...

...that a candidate got a new trainer...

...Although this is a perfectly proper area for political debate, it is generally the sort of subject that most readily engages the interest of the more affluent and better educated...

...Quickly, the conversation became a brawl about "how could you say that or this about me in this place or that when you know how I truly feel...

...The electoral race is reported as a horse race: Who's ahead, who's behind and by how much...

...For the present, let the record show that the way the media currently handle our elections, they turn matters of life and death into trivia, substitute entertainment for education, reduce the quest for truth to a comical quiz show, and convert democracy into a mediacracy...

...I think it can reasonably be argued that the high volatility of the electorate in recent years, and especially in this year's primaries, flows from the absence of a deeply rooted commitment to any program...

...Political contests that are denuded of their policy dimension are circuses—without bread...

...During one of the early debates of this year's primary campaigns, for instance, when the field was still crowded, the interlocutor (I think that is what they called them in the traditional minstrel shows) asked all the contenders what they would do if they were in a plane and an unidentified craft came dangerously close...

...Mondaledidso...

...that so-and-so suffered a Freudian slip on a talk show...

...Each candidate took the occasion to disclose his greatest strength...

...Millions of votes swing on the revelation that Hart's real name is Hartpence...

...This is not so...

...Mondale led off by saying that his greatest weakness was his "experience...

...Common sense suggests that it is not...

...The show, in short, was all personal pique instead of public policy...

...that the momentum has shifted...

...The immediate and pressing interests of the less affluent and less educated are jobs, taxes, homes, public schools, crime— topics that went totally unmentioned...