People who want to be political players are usually eager to seem pragmatic and visionary at the same time. From a media standpoint, that sounds like a winning combination. But the common outcome is a style of politics that values expediency over long-term vision.
A paradox is that progressive social change is routinely incremental in the United States — but the increments of such change are the results of efforts by individuals and groups refusing to settle for slow progress.
The prevalent media terrain offers many enticements for journalists and political figures who play it safe and delay needed reforms. Those who want to gain or retain high political office are constantly looking for solid media ground.
Mainstream reporters and pundits don’t often venture very far past the conventional wisdoms of the era. In the tandem professions of journalism and politics, an upward career arc means reaching for “low-hanging fruit.”
It’s tempting to curry favor with mainline media by stretching to pick the policy positions that are slightly ahead of the curve. That way, opinion-poll numbers are solidifying underfoot while the advocacy seems to be safely cutting-edge.
With the Iraq war nearing the end of its fourth year, the current Democratic majority in Congress is a good example. As this month began, most Democrats seemed to have settled on a tactical approach of ratifying and deploring the continuation of the war. The approach may — or may not — be savvy politics in a narrow sense of gaining partisan political advantage. But it is ultimately destructive.
Most congressional Democrats appear to be frightened by media warnings that a cutoff of war funds would seem like a failure to “support the troops.” So, those skittish lawmakers have decided not to do the one thing that the US Constitution empowers them to do to halt an American war effort — stop appropriating taxpayer money for it.
Instead, the loyal opposition in Congress is displaying much more loyalty than opposition. Convoluted political lines are being fed to the media gallery. The Democratic majority, we’re told, will not try to halt funding of the war. Instead, various legislative moves will seek to symbolically restrict and embarrass the war-making president.
In retrospect, such congressional dithering over the Vietnam War — while attracting sober approval from much of the era’s punditocracy — ended up prolonging a horrific war that could have ended much sooner. On Capitol Hill, pandering to the news media, most politicians were busy trying to pick “low-hanging fruit” that turned out to be poisonous.
A similar dynamic is at work on the matter of poverty. Few national politicians have anything to say about eliminating poverty in the United States. It’s not a goal that interests them.
In contrast, President Lyndon B. Johnson had this to say in his 1965 inaugural address: “In a land of great wealth, families must not live in hopeless poverty. In a land rich in harvest, children just must not go hungry. In a land of healing miracles, neighbors must not suffer and die unattended.” And until his terrible obsession with escalating the Vietnam War killed his Great Society program, LBJ actually backed up his anti-poverty rhetoric with a legislative program to match.
Despite media vilification, Martin Luther King Jr. continued to stretch for the higher values of high-hanging fruit. In 1967, he said: “The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.”
But most politicians and media-touted activists are unwilling to push back against the pressures for expediency. In the short run, taking a safe course appears to be prudent, even wise. On the airwaves and in print, commentators routinely puff up “centrists” and “moderates” while lambasting strong advocates for peace and social justice.
We are now witnessing the results of such deference to the dominant media atmosphere. More war. More poverty.
— Norman Solomon’s latest book, “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” is now available in paperback. To find out more about Norman Solomon and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.
