The Media Culture of Rhetorical Slugfests

There were, I suspect, few "good old days" in American politics. Sure, we can find instances of lofty debates and erudite discourse between candidates for president. But, stretching back into the earliest days of the Republic, the now-historic towering figures of this nation often resorted to vilification via language that stretched truth beyond the breaking point.

In modern terms, as the saying goes, "politics ain't beanbag" — meaning, we're to assume, that when political power is at stake, we should expect that hard-hitting attacks will turn vicious and brutal. And so it goes.

Right on schedule, the Democratic and Republican national conventions were scarcely over before a surge of vituperation approached a high-water (or is that low-water?) mark for the 2008 campaign. And, my fellow Americans, it will only get worse between now and early November.

As someone who was elected an Obama delegate to the Democratic National Convention, I won't claim any kind of objectivity. But what I want to focus on here is the scarcity of media impact as all kinds of half-truths and outright deceptive claims reach tens of millions of people who'll be voting for president this fall.

On Wednesday, Barack Obama had this to say about the efforts by Republican strategists to make an issue of a comment he made the night before. "What their campaign has done this morning is the same game that has made people sick and tired of politics in this country," Obama said. "They seize on an innocent remark, try to take it out of context, throw out an outrageous ad because they know it's catnip for the news media. I'm assuming you guys heard this watching the news. I'm talking about John McCain's economic policies and I said here's more of the same. 'You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig.' Suddenly, they say, 'Oh you must be talking about the governor of Alaska!'"

Obama, perhaps wisely, faulted the news media as he went on: "See, it would be funny, it would be funny except, of course, the news media decided that was the lead story yesterday.

The McCain campaign would much rather have the story about phony and foolish diversions than about the future."

Whatever you think of Obama's remark — or whatever you think of the footage that emerged shortly thereafter on cable news with McCain using the identical "lipstick on a pig" expression during a campaign appearance — perhaps we can agree that this episode is yet another instance of a negative synergy between mass media and political strategists aching to turn a molehill into a mountain.

We're used to it. So are the candidates, and so are their strategists. The result is a kind of "race to the bottom," where the public is dragged along into a dash toward greater idiocy in which the winners have proved only that they can navigate a tortuous media terrain more deftly.

It may be a cliche, but the ultimate antidotes to this chronic malaise must include a process whereby people learn to think for themselves. This is not to let the news media off the hook. There should be much more journalistic willingness to expose contradictory claims from the same candidate rather than simply uncritically airing the attack line of the day. But we need to become more discerning — and that must include the old but not arcane imperative of thought.

Easier said than done. We're busy — and besides, when so many news analysts and pundits are at the ready to explain the meaning of the latest events, it's all too easy to defer to their presumably more contemplative and well-informed assessments.

"Too easy" is, indeed, too easy.

So, as the autumn unfolds and the mud flies, let's demand something better from the news media in terms of reporting. But let's also demand something better from ourselves — in terms of thinking.

Norman Solomon's books include "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." A documentary film of the same name, based on the book, has been released on home video.

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