Recent commentary from National Journal: The Campaign: The Sweet Science Is Only Sweet If You Win, by Carl M. Cannon (September 26, 2000) Try following the presidential race like a prize fight. You can score each week for either Bush or Gore. Legal Affairs: Gore's Shameless About Posing As a Populist, by Stuart Taylor Jr. (September 26, 2000) Gore has been one of the most assiduous solicitors of special interest money ever to seek the presidency. Social Studies: Want to Elevate Politics? Accentuate The Negative, by Jonathan Rauch (September 26, 2000) Stigmatizing attack ads dumbs down campaigns and hobbles challengers -- exactly the wrong thing to do. Political Pulse: How Al Turned the Corner, by William Schneider (September 26, 2000) When the campaign market for new leadership tanked, George W. lost his lead. 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. The Campaign: On the Air -- RATS, Ratings, Hyprocisy, and Tiny Tim, by Carl M. Cannon (September 19, 2000) Politicians are beginning to point out that television is the emperor wearing no clothes. More from National Journal. Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte.

Media: Money on the Brain The money media (print division) may have a wealth-obsessed heart, but they have a brain, and it works by William Powers September 26, 2000 It's so easy to snicker at the money media, all the chittering, twittering outlets like CNBC that "cover" Wall Street in much the way that NBC is "covering" the Sydney Olympics. Lots of cheerleading and humbug, not much real journalism. Once you get past The Wall Street Journal and a very few other intelligent outfits, the world of financial news looks like a pretty barren place. Stock tips have their place, but how many times a week can a human being read or listen to the delphic mutterings of the omnipresent Abby Joseph Cohen of Goldman Sachs and the other peculiar stars of this genre? Howard Kurtz's engrossing new book, The Fortune Tellers, exposes their racket for all it's worth, and when you reach the end of his tale, you're sure it ain't worth much. But to dismiss the money media out of hand is a mistake, for a few reasons. First, we live in a money-obsessed age, a time when, as Barron's reported last weekend, the number of millionaires has been increasing by an average of 16 percent a year, for a total of 7.2 million Americans who last year had at least $1 million in "investable assets" (not including the value of their homes). In an age of money, the media serving the monied class have a lot to tell us about who we're all becoming. In the same Barron's article, which is about the "Wealth Revolution," we learn that rich young women in New York City are shopping at Catherine, a downtown shop "known to carry sexy boots and expensive handbags trimmed in peacock feathers." And that America's wealthy are currently buying $2,500 "robot dogs" and snowboards by Mercedes-Benz. Trivial facts, perhaps, but in a materialistic culture like ours, the decadence is in the details. The second reason that we should watch the money media is that, once you get past the stock tips and the wealth porn (Fortune's current cover story is about the 40 richest Americans under 40, "How They Got That Way. How They Live"), there's some really good stuff in the financial press. And press is the operative word here -- I'm talking exclusively about the print media (many of which also have Web sites). Just in the past week, I've encountered in business or financial mags some unusually fine pieces on subjects one doesn't associate with the money media. For instance, the editor's letter in the Sept. 25 issue of The Industry Standard, a weekly about the Internet business, is the best piece of commentary I've read on the current debate about Hollywood violence. Jonathan Weber argues that politicians "are betraying their constituents by grandstanding" on entertainment violence, a problem they can't really do much about, while failing to adequately support the one institution that could help American kids: the public schools. "It's remarkable -- and disgraceful -- that in the midst of what might be the greatest economic boom in history, our country has failed to meet this basic mission," he writes. "One result is that many schools and universities are now selling the attention of their students to marketers, via everything from hallway Coke machines to 'free' computer systems that require kids to view advertising. A report from the General Accounting Office released late last week details the extent to which schools, supposedly a place for high-minded pursuits, have become a prime venue for the advertising industry. That report -- surprise, surprise -- received far less attention than the FTC's." Maybe others in the nonfinancial press made that connection, but I hadn't seen it. Meanwhile, in the Oct. 2 issue of Forbes, publisher Rich Karlgaard writes that half of the Silicon Valley business types he knows are planning to vote for Al Gore, because they feel "Al's smart and he 'gets' technology." Karlgaard devotes the rest of his column to examining this proposition, offering a spot-on portrait of Bill Clinton as the kind of man, a "riffing freelancer," who is comfortable with entrepreneurial culture. He contrasts Clinton with Gore, who "for all his technoposing," is too attached to "central planning" to ever really understand the chaotic creative spirit that makes Silicon Valley go. The piece is well written and provocative in a way that little of the recent political coverage of these men has been. And in the October issue of Fast Company, a hugely popular monthly about the new economy, there's a good set of interviews by Alan M. Webber with candidates Bush and Gore, in which each man talks extensively about what he thinks of the Web. I've never seen a piece in which the candidates are allowed to go on at such length -- the answers run to multiple paragraphs -- on this subject, and their responses are kind of wild. Both are Web enthusiasts but in starkly different ways. Gore delivers an elaborate oral monograph about federal management, in which he posits that the U.S. Constitution "could be seen as a piece of software" that "needs to be debugged regularly." Bush, true to form, is casual and rambling, and at one point says simply, "The Web is freeing people." Nothing earthshaking, perhaps, but in all of the above pieces there was a freshness, a sense that one hadn't seen this take anywhere else, and that it was worth seeing. The money media may have a black, wealth-obsessed heart, but they also have a brain, and it works. 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. William Powers is media columnist for National Journal. He recently spent three months in Japan as a Japan Society Fellow, studying the role of reading in Japanese life. 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.