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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Social Studies: With His Tax Cuts, Bush Pre-empts the Future (April 28, 2003) Bush is a time bandit, encouraging rather than taming politicians' natural tendency to embezzle from the future. By Jonathan Rauch. Legal Affairs: The U.N. Is Often Grotesque, but We Need Its Help (April 28, 2003) The presence of U.N. inspectors would help allay suspicions that the U.S. is planting phony evidence. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: The Wide Partisan Divide (April 28, 2003) Republicans and Democrats are much further apart on this president than on his father in 1991. By William Schneider. Wealth of Nations: America Must Keep Its Word in Iraq (April 22, 2003) America cannot guarantee success in Iraq, but it can and must give success every chance. By Clive Crook. Media: The Post War High (April 22, 2003) The Washington Post of old—gutsy, sharp, writer driven—is back in town. Let's hope it is here to stay. By William Powers. Legal Affairs: How Bush Can Save International Law, Not Sacrifice It (April 22, 2003) The president can eschew wars of aggression while retaining the freedom to confront grave new perils. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: Making Other Countries Nervous (April 22, 2003) Conservatives of the 'World War IV' school see a long global conflict with Islam. More from National Journal. |
Media 
A Great Grubby FestivalIn the great, grubby festival of news, we've slipped back to Situation Normal. Is that so bad? by William Powers ..... Life in Baghdad is inching back to normal, we're told, and everyone takes this as splendid news. Meanwhile, life at home is doing exactly the same thing, especially in the media zone. Yet on that score, many are disappointed. The carnival has reopened, starring Scott and Laci Peterson on cable, and it's giving fits to the guardians of public taste. War is a worthy subject for news, of course. But another wild California whodunit, shades of our O.J. ignominy, isn't. There's a high-minded consensus on such things, and it was enunciated by Howard Kurtz, the town crier of the media business, in The Washington Post this week: "The new zeitgeist was on display the other day when the cable news outfits broke away from a Donald Rumsfeld news conference to go live to a California coroner talking about a body that could be that of Laci Peterson, who disappeared on Christmas Eve—back when television was still obsessed with such cases. Iraq suddenly seemed like ... history. What's next, the return of killer sharks?" Those man-eating sharks are definitely on their way, Howie. They always are. And I wonder if they and all the other elements of the great grubby festival of news, the Situation Normal that we're slipping back into, are really as bad as they're cracked up to be. We're in our old routine again, which means that no single, world-altering story dominates airtime, news hole, and popular attention the way the war did. Rather, all kinds of stories are sprouting in the media's crazy garden, both new exotics and hardy perennials. Thanks to the Peterson case, Mark Fuhrman is back—horrors—in the regular rotation on cable. Then there's SARS, another kind of detective story, though more respectable for the moment because it's not in the true-crime genre that one follows under the sheets with a flashlight. This past week also saw the triumphant return of the Your Health category, which had been positively moribund for weeks. Time magazine had an old-shoe story about heart disease, "No. 1 Killer of Women," on its cover. The New York Times returned to the never-ending hormone-replacement debate. Dr. Atkins died at 72 and his eternally re-examined diet was examined all over again. And The Washington Post reported that this may be the worst allergy season in years. Pull the clips, and you'll see that every year is the worst allergy season in years, according to the media. With flawless timing, Sen. Rick Santorum equated homosexuality with various kinds of depravity, thus buckling himself into the hot seat that once warmed the quivering haunches of Trent Lott. The usual partisan bickering followed, more Washington ugliness that we're all supposed to hate. But isn't there something revealing and valuable in this story? It's nice to occasionally know what our leaders really think. There's a media puritanism that doesn't believe in a certain kind of news, or at least doubts its value, wants it to go away. We're supposed to be covering serious policy questions and important events like war, not scandal, sensation, and the other ephemera that are suddenly returning in force. Yet often those are the very stories that tell us the most about ourselves, and even get us talking about the hard stuff. When we finally got to the Lott story, ugly though it was, it prompted a re-examination of whether we've come as far on race as we'd thought. The Peterson story, and the question of whether two people were killed or just one, has reopened the tricky when-does-life-begin conversation that almost nobody wants to have. And as the war coverage showed, the big stories themselves are not immune to hype and trivialization. I suppose Jessica Lynch's pop apotheosis on the cover of People—and the books and the movie deals and all the rest—was inevitable and even earned. But I've had enough of the Lynch saga for a good long time. One more endearing profile of Buster the bomb-sniffing war dog will push me over the edge. Canny observers of the postwar debate know that what began as a serious consideration of The Future of the Globe morphed quickly into a febrile obsession with the brilliance and ineffable charisma of one person, magazine and TV commentator Fareed Zakaria, the most fabulous Future Secretary of State this nation has ever known. Just as Jennifer Lopez was crowned a superstar at the very moment that Maid in Manhattan was hitting cineplexes, so the rise of Zakaria coincided neatly with—what else?—the man's book tour. High-minded media people can be movie stars, too, and will, if given the chance. This is high comedy. The distinction between worthy news stories and unworthy ones is not half as clear as we like to tell ourselves. There is ego and venality and muck and tawdriness at every level of the news. And fascination. The normal media cycle isn't inferior to what we experienced during the war. It's just different. And it arguably is a more accurate reflection of the brawling, grasping, endlessly layered society that we are. The secretary of Defense said this week that he hopes the new Iraq "will be democratic and have free speech and free press and freedom of religion." The free press part could ultimately bring to Iraq exactly the kind of unbridled media we've grown used to in the United States, the chaotic, sometimes cartoonish profusion of news that has just returned with the war's end. It might even bring killer sharks to Baghdad. Critics will say that the Iraqis could do a lot better. They could also do a lot worse.
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 © 2003 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. | [an error occurred while processing this directive] | ||
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