OxBlog

Friday, May 16, 2003

# Posted 6:39 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

SELF-LOVE: It's important to take articles like this one with a grain of salt. Now, the NYT is probably right that the Bush communications staff is among the best ever. But that doesn't mean that slick production values make the President's message any more persuasive.

Consider the last sentence of the article in question:
Or as Mr. Deaver said he learned long ago with Mr. Reagan: "They understand that what's around the head is just as important as the head."
This is a message that the media has been broadcasting ever since Reagan first took office -- that Reagan was a fool who compensated for his lack of insight with his good looks, charm and poll-tested rhetoric. Or, stated more generally, that the medium is the message, that image is more important than substance.

But it just isn't true. As the historian Michael Schudson has argued rather persuasively, Reagan earned his reputation as The Great Communicator as a result of hard fought legislative victories, ones which relied to only a limited degree on his telegenic presence. As the media saw it, however, his telegenic presence was responsible for his success.

Moreover, the media was somewhat alone in its perception of Reagan as more beloved than his predecessors. Whereas as polling data demonstrates that Reagan was one of the most divisive presidents of the 20th century, the Reagan-era media systematicallly misrepresented such data in a manner that portrayed the President as a charismatic unifier who transcended partisan politics.

Now, it is true that Reagan's media staff was better than any of those that came before it, with the possible exceptions the JFK and FDR operations. But it was Reagan's conservative ideology that made him so attractive to so many voters -- and so repulsive to so many others.

How, then, did the media get its story so wrong? Perhaps the most important reason is that the media constantly overestimates its own influence. Especially since Vietnam and Watergate, the media has cultivated an enduring belief in itself as the ultimate arbiter of national politics. Thus, when Reagan's communications staff began to outperform the media, journalists drew the "natural" conclusion, that Reagan's communication staff had taken over its role as judge, jury and executioner.

It is also important to consider the elitist ideology that has become so pervasive in the American media. As scholars such as Stephen Hess and Herbert Gans have consistently shown, journalists consider themselves to be the only citizens who are well-enough informed to recognize that political rhetoric is just a facade for ulterior motives. In contrast, the man in the street is nothing more than a potential victim of the spin doctors.

In fact, most Americans are not all that susceptible to manipulation. Most individuals possess fairly stable political preferences that lead to support one party or the other. And even those in the center are capable of judging whether this or that candidate will support the sort of programs that a given independent voter prefer. And regardless of what party they support, most voters believe that politicians are liars.

The media can still play a decisive role, however, especially in close-run elections or congressional votes. It is precisely because a 1-2% in voter preferences can decide the fate of an election or a legislative program that politicians invest so much in their communication staffs.

From a partisan perspective, this revisionist view of the media's role in politics has quite interesting implications, especially with regard to Reagan. Whereas Republicans tend to cherish Reagan's reputation for being a popular president and a Great Communicator, there isn't much evidence to back up such claims. On the other hand, Democrats don't have much of a leg to stand when it comes to their standard argument that Reagan's success was a product of wholesale deception (even if that was the M.O. of prominent officials such as Bill Casey and John Poindexter).

Whereas Republicans often become defensive when Reagan's intelligence is attacked, they should remember that Reagan's ideas were the foundation of his success -- even if he was no rocket scientist. On the other hand, Democrats tend to get defensive when confronted by the fact that such a profoundly conservative President was more popular than almost any other. But he wasn't.

More or less, the same arguments that apply to Reagan also apply to George W. Bush. His success rests more on substance than image, even if that same substance often antagonizes voters as well. The administration hasn't exactly shied away from deception, but such practices are not critical to its success.

Especially for bloggers, it is important to recognize that the media is not the ultimate arbiter of American politics. Since we spend so much of our time criticizing the media, we often start to buy in to its delusions of grandeur. Which isn't to say that we shouldn't invest so much effort in deconstructng the New York Times. On specific issues, media coverage does often have a decisive effect.

But in the broader scheme of things, ideas are what matter most. So let's argue about ideas.

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