PUNDIT WATCH
Douglas, Susan
PUNDIT WATCH Susan Douglas The Erasure of Revolt OK kids, here's your monthly civics quiz. Who's got better hair, Kato Kaelin or Heather Locklear? Now choose one. Kato is: a) a good friend, or...
...They even give daily grades to the prosecution, the defense, and, of course, the witnesses...
...Maybe it's better you didn't, because for social activists, media coverage is often more of a curse than a blessing...
...The local New York news described this event as "Flower Power meets Generation X" (for real) and never mentioned that public-school students, including kids from elementary school, accompanied by their teachers and parents, joined forces with the students and faculty of City University...
...In one of my favorite passages from Marty Lee and Norm Solomon's Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media, they ask us to imagine a news broadcast sponsored not by AT&T and GE but instead by the American Federation of Teachers, the United Mine Workers, and Greenpeace, among others...
...Seen any pictures heading the nightly news of poor children laying signs on the Capitol steps reading, Children Are the Leaders of the Future...
...While the electronic news media drooled over every half-baked leak and rumor, Rush and his listeners were beating the drums about welfare reform and a balanced budget...
...The pundits ignored all of this...
...In mid-March, more than 1,000 kids in Washington, D.C., demonstrated against the Republicans' war on children...
...The O.J.-ification of the news isn't just about the triumph of sensationalism and celebrity journalism...
...They were there, but I guess Kato's sandy locks blocked the shot...
...Missed that one...
...Maybe a lot of what got ignored or buried in March would be headline news...
...According to The New York Times, CNN alone has hired approximately 500 legal analysts to help make sense of it all...
...And look where we are now...
...And the final brain teaser...
...Not to worry...
...Take the March 23 demonstration, also in New York, involving at least 10,000 people, who were protesting proposed cuts in education...
...Receiving only the most cursory coverage, if covered at all, were a series of stories cast as separate, isolated, and insignificant events...
...And that's about as innocent as Kato's aw-shucks performance on the witness stand.* Susan Douglas, author of "Where the Girls Are," appears in this space every month...
...As Governor William Weld and the Massachusetts legislature slashed the state's welfare system, protesters stormed the halls of the State House in behalf of poor women and children...
...I have virtually nothing in common with Rush Limbaugh, but last summer, when he adopted as his show's daily motto, No O.J., none of the time, it wasn't just shrewd marketing, it was smart politics...
...But if you link them—actually tie them together in a "news frame" as the press and pundits have done about the "rage of the white male"—you might see the beginning of a social movement in which blacks and whites, children and adults, the poor and the middle-class are making common cause...
...They were too busy interviewing Pete Wilson about his possible Presidential bid...
...As a witness, Mark Fuhrman was: a) a winner, or b) a loser...
...The only story that rivaled O.J...
...Some networks sought to resist making the trial the lead story night after night, but in the same week that the House passed welfare "reform," the Senate approved the line-item veto, the CIA was exposed, yet again, for the murderous organization it is, and Governor George Pataki of New York decided to allocate more sidewalk space as low-cost housing for the mentally ill, what we seemed to get was all O.J., all of the time...
...Yikes, we can't have that on the screen...
...Kato is: a) a good friend, or b) a bad friend to O.J...
...Stone and Edward R. Murrow must be spinning...
...It's also about the erasure of revolt...
...The Times suggested that most of the 14,000 students who boycotted school in support of the rally did it to get a day off (the parents who missed work that day must have had the same motivation...
...Kato Kaelin's great shocks of moussed hair obscured a rather important emerging story: the growing, increasingly organized rebellion against the Contract on America...
...Not sure about the correct answers...
...Never heard about it...
...Demonstrations, it turns out, are no longer newsworthy...
...was the Japanese subway/sarin disaster, which had a certain, smug, "Ha, you think we're so violent, now you're getting yours" tone to it...
...The network news channels have either ignored these stories, or given them six seconds of coverage, as they did when Patricia Ireland and other NOW members were arrested in the Capitol rotunda for demonstrating against the cuts in welfare...
...So if you can get Kato's hair out of your face, see if you don't start to glimpse a pattern...
...This got four seconds of air time on the Boston stations—hey, you got to leave room for the murders and car crashes...
...In the very same week, the Rainbow Coalition staged a march from New York City to Albany to protest Governor George Pataki's evisceration of every program that assists poor people, children, the elderly, and the mentally ill...
Vol. 59 • May 1995 • No. 5
