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  Recent commentary from National Journal: Legal Affairs: Let's Make the Federal Hate Crimes Law Broader -- Much Broader, by Stuart Taylor Jr. (September 19, 2000) Why not add to the list of hate crimes those motivated by indifference to life or health? Media: Wallflowers in Paradise, by William Powers (September 19, 2000) Could be that only the ever-so-reluctant press can do something about entertainment-biz violence. Political Pulse: A Duke-Out Over ... Paradigms, by William Schneider (September 19, 2000) Amazingly, this campaign is turning out to be a big debate on fundamental issues. Social Studies: Don't Pardon Ex-President Clinton -- Commute His Sentence, by Jonathan Rauch (September 13, 2000) An ex-President jailed? The spectacle would be wrenching, the symbolism right out of some banana republic. Legal Affairs: Boy Scouts Vs. Gays -- The System Is Working Just Fine, by Stuart Taylor Jr. (September 13, 2000) A thousand points of pressure are being applied to the Scouts to yield to the emerging social consensus. Media: Reality Politics, Anyone?, by William Powers (September 13, 2000) Perhaps the presidential campaigns could take some cues from CBS' new reality-TV series. Political Pulse: Clinton -- Just Doing His Job, by William Schneider (September 13, 2000) President Clinton is sending a message: this campaign is not about me. The Campaign: A Sitting President Cannot Disappear, Nor Should He, by Carl M. Cannon (September 13, 2000) Thank goodness Bill Clinton rode to the rescue and helped set the tone for the campaign. More from National Journal. Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. |
 The Campaign:On the Air -- RATS, Ratings, Hypocrisy, and Tiny Tim The campaign was dominated by television this week, but not televised coverage of the candidates. It has been years since network news stooped to anything as pedestrian as bringing viewers the sights and sounds of live campaign appearances complete with unedited clips of the presidential candidates actually speaking to voters. No, the stories were about television itself: a controversy over a subliminal insult in a TV ad produced for George W. Bush; a much-hyped Oprah show featuring Al Gore; grudging coverage of a study documenting how Hollywood markets violence to young people; and copious coverage of the Emmy Awards the television industry bestowed on itself for a fictionalized drama about the White House. The West Wing, with its evocative music, smart writing, and appealing cast, is not merely a liberal show with liberal sensibilities produced by Hollywood liberals. Aaron Sorkin is more sophisticated than that. His show is the Clinton Administration without Bill Clinton! As President Josiah Bartlet, Martin Sheen is not only liberal, he is also wise, philosophical, monogamous, kind (but tough), and, above all, principled in all things. This is not the first time in recent years that Hollywood -- or Sorkin -- has beamed its own "RATS" message toward Washington and its wimpy tradition of bipartisan compromise. Remember Michael Douglas as The American President? He ignored polls, Republicans (and the Constitution) to push for laws outlawing all guns. Or Kevin Kline as Dave? He guaranteed every American a job. Yet at the very moment in history when Geena Davis made her appearance at the Emmys in a see-through dress sans underwear, politicians were starting to point out that television is the emperor wearing no clothes. Because of his unsurpassed talent for shaking down campaign contributions, Sen. Robert G. Torricelli, D-N.J., may seem like an unlikely messenger of reform. But we take truth where we can find it in this town, and there was The Torch standing in the Senate dispensing a dose of reality. "Over the next eight weeks, candidates for federal offices will spend more money than at any time in American history to attempt to persuade the American people in the casting of their votes," Torricelli said. "There is one simple, compelling reason for this spiraling increase in campaign expenditures, and that is the cost of televised political advertising, the cost of being on the national television networks." Torricelli went on to build his case -- and it is a good one. He pointed out that the network news divisions laud campaign "reform" and assail politicians for spending so much time raising the money, but they never mention that the lion's share of the money goes to them (television will pocket roughly half of the $3 billion spent on campaigns in this cycle), or that money is needed by the candidates more than ever because the networks and affiliates barely cover politics anymore. "Local television in New York and Philadelphia took in a record $21 million from New Jersey Senate candidates," he said, citing a study by the Alliance for Better Campaigns. "But these same television affiliates of the networks devoted an average of only 13 seconds per night in the final two weeks of the Senate campaign to actual news." In 1992, a Harvard study showed that the average candidate soundbite on the evening news -- a candidate's uninterrupted quote -- was 9.8 seconds in the 1988 campaign. Twenty years before, it had been 42.3 seconds. This year, it is often zero seconds because the network correspondents tend to hog for themselves the brief airtime they are allotted. Cable news is supposed to compensate for this shortcoming, but cable news comes out of the same culture. On Tuesday evening, for instance, CNN's Jonathan Karl began his report on the Republican RATS ad controversy with the lead-in, "This was supposed to be a day for a retooled Bush to talk about health care, not rats." Bush did, of course, discuss health care that day. It just didn't merit network -- or CNN -- coverage, even though Karl found time to point out that Bush put an extra syllable in the word "subliminal." In the midst of all this came a scathing 104-page Federal Trade Commission report charging that the video game, movie, and record industries systematically market their most violent fare to boys as young as 12. Gore jumped on this issue, bluntly warning his Hollywood pals that they have about six months to clean up their act, and that if they don't, they'll face sanctions of some sort. Some think Gore is mostly posturing, but judging from the success the plaintiffs' bar has had against the tobacco industry using the same legal rubric -- marketing to minors -- the FTC may have ushered in a new era in the culture wars. Motion Picture Association of America President Jack Valenti, testifying on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, offered up the tired Hollywood talking point that it's "solely" parents' responsibility to police what their kids watch, and see, and hear, and do. This defense ignored at-risk children, single mothers, two-working-parent families, and other realities of modern American life. In fact, Valenti made his odd assertion that parents can somehow shield teen-age boys from popular culture, on the very day that an Urban Institute study showed that 4 million American children between the ages of 6 and 12 -- one-fifth of the total -- come home after school to empty houses. The implications of this finding seemed to elude the network reporters and anchors who tirelessly peddled the parental-responsibility angle, but it didn't escape Clinton's notice: He seamlessly incorporated it into a speech on Tuesday to bolster his calls for more federal money for after-school care programs. Worse yet, TV commentators ranging from ABC Anchor Peter Jennings to CNN Correspondent Greg LaMotte asserted that no one "really knows" knows whether entertainment industry violence contributes to real-life mayhem. This claim has long been abandoned even by network presidents. For decades, they had appeared at hearings on Capitol Hill and, with straight faces, said that even though their programming could sell everything from razor blades to cars, alter styles of speech and dress in this country, combat racism, end wars -- even make a household name out of Tiny Tim -- it could not, no way, no how, influence the behavior of teens who have witnessed 8,000 simulated murders by the time they have graduated from high school. This claim is fatuous. The facts are these: Since 1954, when Congress held its first hearings on television violence and Hollywood executives theorized that watching simulated violence was "cathartic," this subject has been studied as much as anything in social science. It turns out that watching acts of violence on television are anything but cathartic. For the next four decades, the results of these studies were always the same: A steady diet of visual violence makes people noticeably more aggressive, violent, and desensitized to violence. This phenomenon was found to be true in 1956 for 4-year-olds who had turned hostile and aggressive among their classmates after watching Woody Woodpecker cartoons. It was found to be true in a 1988 study of college men who had watched "slasher films" and who were then measurably less sympathetic to women, even rape victims. "There is more published research on this topic than on almost any other social issue of our time," Aletha C. Huston, the chairwoman of the American Psychological Association's Task Force on Television and Society, told Congress in 1988. "Virtually all independent scholars agree that there is evidence that television can cause aggressive behavior." George W. Bush waded into the fray as well, but he did not throw his best punch. Instead, he pointed out that Gore is happy to accept Hollywood's campaign contributions, the implication being that Gore talks a good game, but wouldn't really get tough with his friends. The networks liked this line of attack. One correspondent even applied a word toward Gore that Bush himself did not use: hypocrisy. But the crowning hypocrisy, Torricelli was good enough to point out, is when TV commentators clamor for politics to be cleaned up while the television industry itself spends millions of dollars lobbying Congress against the one reform that would really free politicians from the odious duty of spending every waking minute raising money from special interests. That reform, of course, is free airtime for campaigns. Goreism of the week: "A bed." (Gore, when asked by Oprah Winfrey what he likes to sleep in.) Bushism of the week: "Don't blame my brother." (Bush, in Florida, responding to a question on why he hasn't locked up the state where Jeb Bush is the governor.) Clintonism of the week: "I love my wife more than life." (The President, after casting his first-ever vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday.) What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. Carl M. Cannon is a correspondent for National Journal. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. All material copyright © 2000 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. | ||||||||||||
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