U.S. President Barack Obama may have won a majority in the 2009 presidential vote, and his Democratic party may enjoy majorities in both houses of the U.S. Congress, but they are getting outshouted, says the NYT's David Carr.
Conservatives, we should note, seem far better at the rather unwelcome task of being the party of opposition, with a very efficient apparatus that can seize on issues, both real and imagined, and turn up the volume and the heat right with it. (During the school dust-up, a commentator on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show said the president was building a cult of personality analogous to Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-il.)
The tendency toward umbrage becomes almost reflexive, so something as seemingly innocuous as telling kids to stay in school becomes an attempt at indoctrination akin to Chinese labor camps.
The administration seems to believe that if all the information on a given issue is on the table — or in this case, on the Web — then the truth, or at least their version of it, will win out. (The president announced on Friday that with certain exceptions, the names of visitors to the White House would be posted for all to see). For all his modern impulses, President Obama’s press operation seems mired in a high school civics debate version of governance, where points are given for logic and argument.
That is not how the media works, however, in an environment that prizes engagement and conflict. The long town-hall process over health care, for example, has given ordinary citizens a voice but it has also produced hundreds of video clips of angry, scared Americans. For every aging secretary who can’t afford prescriptions, there is a small business owner who wants less government in their life, not more. Tropes like “death panels” may lack substance, but they make for pretty compelling viewing day after day.
In part, the outrage and hyperbole work because the mainstream media, insecure about their own status in an atomizing world, play into the tyranny of split-screen coverage where almost any claim — no matter how outlandish — becomes one side in “an interesting debate.” When not listening to talking heads, the traditional news outlets go to great efforts to get a microphone on vox populi. If the people, even if it is some unknown number, are hopping mad, we don’t want to be the last to tell you about it.
Were there 1,000 angry people with guns outside the town halls, or just one angry guy we saw 1,000 times? In all the noise and velocity of the coverage, it’s hard to know. But in the minds of many viewers — and TV hosts — the answer doesn’t matter. What matters is “there’s anger out there.”
Once blood was drawn in the health care debate, there were online and offline tools for tracking and feasting on weakness on multiple platforms. A conveyor belt of outrage developed: video from town halls feed cable pundits and radio talkers, all of which is picked up and amplified by a blogosphere where anything goes. It is a pattern that will be arrayed over many issues to come in this administration.