The Media Politics of Decency

What's decent in the politics of media?

If we didn't know it before, we're now keenly aware that paying money for prostitutes by the hour is decidedly indecent — especially if the payment is coming from an elected official. It's even worse when the payer has a renowned background as a no-nonsense get-tough law-enforcement official.

Eliot Spitzer's downfall has a very familiar media storyline. Man gains adulation. He rises to awesome heights — only to be brought down.

All the king's men are pretty impressive in medialand even when they're distasteful or worse. The appearance of power and the reality of it are inextricable in the politics of media. And it can all go away if the spell is broken and the leader — long assumed to be at least remotely virtuous — turns out to have done things that are widely seen as repugnant.

Ironically, a few years ago, Spitzer's predecessor as New York's governor issued a pardon for a long-dead satirist who would have had a field day with the current governor-went-to-prostitutes scandal. In 2003, a couple of days before Christmas, Gov. George Pataki magnanimously pardoned Lenny Bruce with homage to "freedom of speech," which Pataki lauded as "one of the greatest American liberties."

The very belated pardon was for an obscenity conviction. But Lenny Bruce was not fixated on spewing dirty words just for the thrill of it. The guy was constantly making some kind of point — and often it had to do with hypocrisy of the puritanical sort.

A lot of media personages now expressing disgust with the suddenly reviled Spitzer have latched onto the accusation of hypocrisy. Fair enough. When a famed law-and-order fellow goes out of his way to place orders for sex via the illegal enterprise known as prostitution, the disconnect between lauded persona and personal activities is notable.

But, if he were around today, I doubt that Lenny Bruce would be piling on. He might have some fun at Spitzer's expense.

But the moralism that most fascinated Bruce was of the social kind. He'd be inclined to publicly ask why so many people who'd shown great respect for Spitzer were suddenly characterizing him as an immoral creep.

Well, let's stipulate, as lawyers say, that Eliot Spitzer appears to be mired in what might be called "unresolved issues" related to sex. That he has caused pain to his wife is incontrovertible. But people often cause pain to their spouses. And if the public is none the wiser about the infliction of such pain, the news media are pleased to assume that the family man is upstanding. The default position of media coverage is that civic virtue and corresponding private rectitude are nicely synced.

Spitzer has gone counter to the supposition that elected officials, unless proven otherwise, are implicitly good if only because they serve a system that, however flawed, is fundamentally good, too.

And this is where the suppositions of decency are apt to become the stuff of enshrined avoidance. At the national level, with few exceptions, elected officials and their appointees are assumed to be engaged — however ineptly or dubiously — in a quest to serve the public interest, the nation and humanity. Sexual transgressions, if made public, can disrupt the narrative.

Some members of Congress have accumulated a decades-long record of supporting one war after another, with the expenditure of national treasure justified by flimsy claims and outright fabrications. Yet few media voices challenge their fundamental decency,

As far as Lenny Bruce was concerned, sex couldn't be obscene. In contrast, particularly during his last stand-up performances, he tried to confront audiences with an outlook that saw burning people with missiles as truly obscene.

Ultimately, who is more disgusting — a governor who pays for sex with women known to headline-writers as "call girls," or a member of Congress who sees to it that American taxpayers continue to pay for a war effort that keeps bringing pain and death to countless human beings?

Norman Solomon's is the author of "Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State." For information about Norman Solomon, go to www.normansolomon.com, or visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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