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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Social Studies: How to Save Ground Zero: An Immodest Proposal (February 28, 2002) The Twin Towers site needs not a memorial, but memorials, commemorating not the crime but its victims. By Jonathan Rauch. Legal Affairs: Nothing in the Constitution Bars Helping Inner-City Kids (February 28, 2002) Is it morally defensible to deny decent educations to poor children for the sake of a school system? By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: Rewriting the Nation's Enemies List (February 28, 2002) Americans' new worldview suggests a 'Clash of Civilizations' may be becoming a reality. By William Schneider. Social Studies: 'Hello, Mr. Krugman? If the System Is Corrupt, Aren't You?' (February 20, 2002) An imaginary (we hope) dialogue in which a New York Times columnist stands up for his paper's principles. By Jonathan Rauch. Legal Affairs: The Role Of Ideology in Judicial Selection: Test Case (February 20, 2002) The battle over the nomination of Charles Pickering to an appellate court isn't about Pickering. It's about power. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: GOP: We'll Get Back to That (February 20, 2002) War and recession give Republicans cover for not making the surplus and Social Security higher priorities. By William Schneider. Media: The Emperor's Old Clothes (February 20, 2002) The media blob's verdict on coverage of the Winter Olympics—nice job, NBC!—shows how accustomed we have become to awful Olympics coverage. Even the slightest improvement seems special. By William Powers. More from National Journal. |
Media 
Starbucks and YogaAmerica is still at war. But the Olympic scandals, the Oscar buzz, Botox—the kinds of stories we thrived on before 9/11—have come storming back by William Powers ..... There's been a major mood shift in the news media in recent weeks, but to understand it you have to travel back in time a little, to a particular Sunday morning in December. It was the weekend before Christmas, in the middle of a war, at the end of a dramatic year that seemed to have changed society in fundamental ways. Life had acquired a heft and a focus it had lacked for a long time. Even the notoriously lightweight media had turned serious and thoughtful. That morning, NBC's Meet the Press devoted an entire hour to a discussion of what September 11 had to teach us about good and evil, the purpose of life, and the role of God in human affairs—the kinds of questions that are so abstract and troubling, we spend most of our lives avoiding them. Journalists are good avoiders, caught up as we are in the dish of the hour, skimming the surface like a bunch of water bugs. But since the terrorist attacks, we were a changed species, and now here was Tim Russert having a conversation with Rudy Giuliani, Laura Bush, and Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, head of the archdiocese of Washington—a conversation that was, by television news standards, strangely deep. At one point, for instance, Russert asked McCarrick, "Why would a god who's good let something so terrible happen to the United States?" McCarrick began with the standard observation that evil is a mystery, then segued into a much subtler and more interesting thought: "The fact that these things happen to people, to good people, is really a sign of God's great love and respect for us. God allows us to have freedom of will, and freedom of will is a wonderful thing. It makes the difference between people and animals. We can choose one thing or another. And God has so much respect for us that he never interferes with that. And because he never interferes with that, we can have saints. People can do extraordinary things. "You can have a Mother Teresa. You can have people who give their lives for others. You can have the firemen and the police in New York City at the World Trade Center, you can have the people at the Pentagon, who rushed madly into something just because they want to help somebody else. And God allows that because that's wonderful. That's beautiful. That's the crowning of the human personality. The other side of it is, you can choose not to do good things. You can choose bad things. And so, it's part of God's respect for us that he doesn't force us to be saints and allows us to not be saints." A bit later, Russert quoted from something he'd recently read, a remark by a young woman who said: "I haven't been to church in a long, long time, but Starbucks and yoga just doesn't do it anymore." It was the show's most memorable line, because it captured the contemplative spirit that had taken over the whole culture and made this remarkable discussion possible. Back then, there was a feeling that the media might be working on these issues for a long time to come, that the Age of Seriousness was only beginning. But as it happens, the Russert confab was the high-water mark. Immediately afterwards, another dramatic shift began, and it's taken us to where we are today, which is, more or less, situation normal. Have you noticed? The war is still there, but it's playing in the background. And the philosophic searching is gone, supplanted by Enron, the Olympics scandals, Botox, the Oscar race, and a lot of other relatively ephemeral stories, exactly the kind of stuff we used to thrive on before September 11. In the three days preceding the Russert show, December 20 to 22, there were 506 stories in major newspapers with headlines about the war or terrorism, according to a search of the Lexis-Nexis database. From February 14 to 16 (like the earlier dates, a Thursday, Friday, and Saturday), the number was down to 393. In another search this week, I asked for stories from the previous seven days containing the names Bush and Cheney, and Lexis-Nexis came up with 571. When I searched on the Olympic skaters Pelletier and Sale for the same period, Nexis asked me to redefine the search: There were more than 1,000 stories. In short, the Starbucks-and-Yoga society is back, and the question is, why? What happened to the new, improved us that spent three remarkable months staring into the abyss? Several things: 1. Exhaustion. Asking the hard questions is hard work, especially when you have to make it feel like news. In a way, it's amazing that we pondered the cosmos for as long as we did, and that, even in late December, that Meet the Press show didn't seem a little rarefied. It didn't, but it might today. When I watched the tape this week, as I prepared to write this column, it had already started to feel like a newsreel from a lost civilization. 2. No More Attacks. Since the anthrax incidents, there have been no more successful incidents of domestic terrorism, despite several dire warnings. Fear has diminished, and it has taken with it that urgent collective need to get our arms around our mortality. 3. Real Life Intrudes. Enron knocked us out of our ruminations, reminding journalists that while the ultimate questions are nice once in a while, they're a bit rich for our homely trade. We're back into greed, ego, and deception, and that's right where we belong.
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. Copyright © 2002 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. |
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