By Jonathan Arkin
Jonathan is a graduate student majoring in Specialized Journalism
Panelists and visiting journalists at the Sept. 11 Annenberg Open Forum on Politics, War ... and More at USC Annenberg exchanged ideas, growing concerns and anecdotal stories about current and past presidential politics and how the media chooses to focus on particular players.
Hosted by Geoffrey Cowan (pictured above), university professor and director of the Center on Communication Leadership, the forum featured journalism professors Marc Cooper and Richard Reeves, and included law professor Susan Estrich, who shared recollections of the 1988 presidential election, when she worked as media analyst and campaign manager for Michael Dukakis.
Much of the focus rested on both the uproar over Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s domestic woes – and the disparity in aggression between the two parties’ expected attacks on one another’s records, which has become a hallmark of recent presidential campaigns. Some panelists faulted unbalanced media coverage.
“Comments like ‘Governor Gidget’ and ‘Barbie Girl’ are funny...but it strikes me right now, the sharp line between commentators and supporters doesn’t exist,” Estrich said. “Everybody’s got a right to write. But those comments are being used by broadcast and multiplied out there to give [Palin] a personality among women that is helping her. Women are focused on this attention to celebrity status.”
The cult of personality, according to others, might be short-lived.
“Why is American media willing to be an enabler of a campaign run on personality and not on issue?" asked communication professor Jonathan Taplin. “At some point you can maintain the celebrity for only so long.”
Reeves, who has studied first-hand all the campaigns since Kennedy-Nixon in 1960, compared the old school fighting with the current Obama-McCain slugfest. He said that despite the passage of time, Americans were still concerned with the same issues – and yet the strangeness of the present campaign, and its tone, has created a different kind of candidate image.
“When I look back at John Kennedy, he was a very conventional politician,” Reeves said. “He was able to reassure people that he was a 'cold warrior,' but I don’t think [Palin’s] ideas are mainstream.”
Guests at the roundtable discussion included 10 international journalists from Europe, Asia, Africa and South America who are visiting the
“I was really struck when I watched the [Republican] Convention and I saw the pins that said ‘Hottest V.P. from the
Issues with the tone and content of recent campaign attacks worried many of the journalists. Some, like Cooper, were offended outright by the selection of a woman chosen by McCain, he claims, solely for political gain in a campaign that targets an opposing candidate with scorn – either implicitly or explicitly – for speaking eloquently and for traveling abroad.
“What you’re seeing – and what’s surprising me is how provincial the American body politic is – the whole universe of it," Cooper said. "Not only does race become an issue, not only does gender become an issue, but Obama going to
Feeding this heightened concern – some in the room used the word ‘obsession’ – with the often-nonpolitical actions and faults of those running for office is the growing number of blogs and bloggers – writers and commentators on the Internet reporting on everything from unofficial polls to candidates’ eating habits and waistlines.
“In some parts of the blogosphere you could hear anything," Cowan said.
For some of the young visiting journalists, there was surprise that such issues were important in the first place. Many claimed that, in their respective countries, gender consideration was either a non-issue or not important to voters.
“I’m speaking on behalf of my country and my continent,” said Antoinette Lazarus, producer from the South African Broadcasting Corporation and whose current deputy president is female. “But when it comes to the gender issue, I think in
A journalist from
“In my country, women and politics do not go hand in hand,” she said. “But like they say, it’s not an issue until you make it an issue.”
Echoing sentiments came from the other visitors, who have witnessed the recent personal attacks on Palin and her family – a critical examination of her personal life, not her record as a governor.
“I used to think that here in the
Cooper said that the party-based approach to image destruction was a calculated one.
“They [the Republicans] have tried to marshal and exploit different levels of resentment,” said Cooper, who had a testy exchange with Estrich over the “average American” perception of candidates in the media – especially Clinton and Palin, the two women who seem to appeal to sharply different demographics unrelated to their respective party lines. “They have not flinched from using a strategy that exploits resentment. I think that’s a conscious strategy.”
Ermin Zatega, a visiting Bosnian journalist who is part of the WPI contingent, expressed disillusionment about “how shallow and personal everything is” in the media – particularly concerning the public media’s focus on the candidates’ family affairs. He also said he doubted that any single candidate could fulfill the enormous – and growing – expectations of the American electorate.
“It seems to me that American people are waiting for the Messiah to come solve their problems,” Zatega said.
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