The Media's Whiter Shade of Palin

OK, we get it. The New York Times doesn't like Sarah Palin. That includes not just the newspaper's editorial board but also Bob Herbert and Maureen Dowd and other liberal columnists — and even, as far as her qualifications to be vice president go, the conservative-with-a-cultural-smile David Brooks.

Away from the august editorial pages, the media verdict is more mixed. Print tends to be arms-length, reporting and commenting on the national Palin phenom without quite stoking it. Most journalists who write for a living seem to have enough respect for cognitive thought not to be totally swept away by her. Television, however, is a different matter — and television, in the stretch drive of a presidential campaign, is crucial.

Yes, there are print journalists head-over-shoulders, if not head-over-heels, for Palin, but by and large it seems that workaday efforts to present logic as meaningful are just bound to founder on her essential fraudulence. However, not so with television. In fact, we might say that the TV ambiance of American mass culture cannot become too hostile to falsity since so much of television programming relies on it.

In the onslaught of media observations and commentaries about the Palin uproar, I've been surprised not to run across references to Jerzy Kosinski's novel "Being There" (published in 1971), later dramatized as a film starring Peter Sellers (in 1979). By the time Ronald Reagan came along and successfully ran for president in 1980, the themes of "Being There" had jumped off the novelistic page and the satiric screen. The story of a fellow who appears so real on television was a testament to the closed loop that TV-watchers could form with their TVs.

Sarah Palin, talented on television, may as well be a natural in well-scripted TV commercials or made-for-television films.

Only when a real question intrudes — like a rare unaccommodating query from a journalist — might the mask slip and the facade begin to crumble.

I saw more than a little artifice and, arguably, even phoniness at the 2008 Democratic National Convention (which I attended as an Obama delegate), but the political show in Denver was gritty cinema verite compared to the extravaganza put on by the Republicans with Palin as the star.

We're now in the process of finding out just how much craven opportunism the media traffic will bear when it comes to putting forward someone to be a heartbeat away from the chief executive with a finger on the nuclear button.

John McCain has certainly shored up his base, but he may be in the process of discovering that a sizeable chunk of the political center — while prepared to buy the myth of his "maverickism" — will not go along with his VP pick.

Whether that refusal to go along will make enough of a difference come Election Day is another matter. It's an open question whether the overall media establishment of the United States is actually capable of making clear some crucial facts about the Republican ticket of 2008.

The children's tale of "The Emperor's New Clothes" is an endearing paradigm of herd instinct and group conformity to the point of acculturated gross stupidity. Are we there yet? As the saying goes: Stay tuned.

It's hard to imagine a species capable of more heroic grace or more disturbingly suicidal depravity. Apparently, such human conditions have been in place for thousands of years. Woven over time in the tapestry of humanity, it may not be a pretty picture, but it's the only one we've got.

Where journalism fits into all this may not quite be clear, but we can rest assured that it does fit in. That provides a clue as to why the dangerous problems with cowardly journalism are so insidiously widespread, and why journalism's marvelous potential is nevertheless sometimes fulfilled.

Norman Solomon is the author of "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." The book has been adapted into a documentary film of the same name.

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