Political Hide and Seek

“Come out, come out wherever you are!”

Truth to tell, we know what’s the problem is but we’re practicing denial. The whole country is out to lunch. Why do I say that? We’ve been operating with half a government and the people don't complain. In fact, they don’t complain about anything. And if that doesn’t make you scratch your head, what does?

Thirty years ago, people would have skinned your hide if said or did anything politically incorrect. There were lawsuits filed up the yin-yang for just about any kind of violation of anyone’s rights you could think of.

Need a yardstick for comparison. Case in point: In the sixties, when IBM tried to work a deal out with Hartford's government to put registration info on the computer, the public outcry was deafening.

Why?

At stake was the battle for privacy.

But today the stakes are even higher. We have seen government troops posted on American land in opposition to the law. (See Posse Comitatus) . We have seen people put on ice in violation of habeas corpus. We have seen people denied access to their lawyers. We have seen people’s personal records violated without a court order. In effect, there is no comparison with what IBM tried to do; yet, nobody speaks up.

Admittedly, we have experienced a reign of terrorism. And it might be suggested that the people if given the choice would rather give up certain rights in return for protection. But if that’s the case, why aren’t they speaking up about the failures in providing adequate protection for the American people? And that will be an issue that will resonate with us for years down the pike.

But our defense of our issues was longstanding; it was not an exception. And in the past, we as Americans defended our right to speak up on the issues, whether right or wrong.

We saw the public protecting its privacy or standing up for the issues it believed in time and time again right through the administration of Bill Clinton. The attacks on Clinton helped further exacerbate the relationships between people whose views became polarized.

But, curiously, afterward, despite a raft of policies, most of which were not designed for the average citizen, there has been little discussion or outcry. How can that be? Sociologists have to be puzzled by the vacuum that seems to exist. One might hypothesize: Is there really a silent majority?

Or are the people to whipped trying to keep their families and lives together at a time of falling wages and falling expectations? Or is it that TV has contributed along with computer games and other distractions to keep people from thinking about government and its role in their lives?

Most assuredly, this debate will go on indefinitely as kind of a watershed in American politics. In effect, with more than half of the population claiming to be Democratic or Independent, many of the current issues have to be incendiary to most people. Yet, the scarcity of voices on virtually any subject beyond the war is mind-numbing at best especially when contrasted to the activism of the past.

One answer might be that the overwhelming majority of people don't know what to believe. That might happen at a time when the voices emanating from all of the cable show's are very hard edged, very subjective. And for the most part, the mainstream media has avoided asking the hard questions. Most certainly, in any attempt to gauge public reaction, the media must be deemed to play a pivotal role. And in this case, the media is under the gun.

By highlighting their own differences with the Administration, the media stands to undergo critical scrutiny by the powers that be that could affect everything from "access" to tax issues. For the most part, there is little advantage to playing that game especially when the government has been so cooperative in assuring that the few superpowers in media will be allowed to continue their acquisition of new media outlets despite the fact that all they are doing is denying a diverse viewpoint to the people.

The long and short of it is that the public is faced with fewer choices when it comes to getting its information and already most of the US claims to get its news from the major networks. That means a meager diet of one half hour a day once a day. And of that half hour, less than fifteen minutes constitutes real and tangible news. That's pitiful compared to the rest of the world. And the fact that for the most part, America does a poor job of covering what's happening through-out the world.

Contrast this with the earlier part of the twentieth century when people in a single city like New York had access to more than two hundred newspapers each offering a different point of view and magazines of every description plus commentators and reporters of note who voiced their own views not to accommodate any Czar who controlled content as we find today.

Added to the diminished streams of independent reporting, there seems to be an undercurrent of disinterest and anti-intellectualism in the culture that causes the media to "dumb down" the editorial product and in so doing diminish the quality of the product. Twenty years ago, you would never imagine that some day you would find lurid articles on people and things on the front page of the august New York Times. It just would not happen but the Times understands that its objective ultimately is to sell newspapers so all of the news that's fit to print, their slogan, becomes all of the news that sells newspapers instead, a compromise to profitability.

If the media in general is right, that we are in a dumbed down culture, there is little motivation to change the product since the ultimate litmus test is "viewers." The cable stations like FOX which is known to have a prejudicial and parochial viewpoint does not seem to have suffered for it; it's viewership is up threatening the larger stations and, clearly, Murdoch has gauged the pulse of his viewership correctly!.... Why is viewership important? It determines advertising rates and that correlates with profitability.. In the end, it's about not rocking the boat and revenues. And by underestimating the public's taste for reliable, fact based data, the cable networks and other media superpowers are laughing all the way to the bank.

les aaron