A failure to communicate

The popular cable news shows, like "Hardball" and Tucker Carlson's show, are having a hard time finding a conceptual niche for the issue du jour, the firing of 8 United States Attorneys by the Justice Department. They keep tripping over the concept of presidential discretion; the President, they say, can fire U.S. attorneys for a good reason or for no reason; therefore, they argue, the only problem Gonzales has is that he didn't quite state things accurately before Congressional committees when he described the reaons for their cashiering. He said they were performance-related. This turns out not to be true.

Since polls demonstrate that most Americans get their information, and the bases for their "opinions," from such cable news shows (more than from networks or newspapers), it is small wonder that the public gets so confused about political issues. If 74% of the American populace believed that there was a connection between 9/11 and Iraq before the March, 2003 invasion (as appears to be the case), then the inability of the mass media to explain or educate the public on such fundamental facts must bear a heavy responsibility for their ignorance. Something simply doesn't happen, something important is completely lost in the process of video images speaking words in the rectangular box about huge issues of the day. What we have here, as the chain gang boss said in "Cool Hand Luke," is a failure to communicate.

The U.S. Attorney "scandal" can actually be exlained with an economy of verbiage. Succinctly, you might say. While it is true that U.S. Attorneys can be "terminated at will," such latitude is limited by the rule that they may not be terminated for an improper reason, such as the unwillingness of a given U.S. Attorney to hew to a partisan political program. That constitutes an unethical and unconstitutional intrusion into the judicial process. A parallel concept is found in discrimination law, where a job (or housing) may be denied for "any" reason (employment "terminable at will"), but not for a racist reason (for example). People like Chris Matthews and Tucker Carlson simply cannot enunciate such a principle. It isn't actually that difficult, but it is beyond them. Their broadcasting imperatives are driven by the "entertainment" principle, and so the focus must be on whether Alberto Gonzales "lied" to Congress. Of course he lied, just as he lied earlier about the extent of NSA spying on Americans. The more important issue behind his lying, however, is why he lied, and this, as I say, is beyond the pundits.

In part I think this is because the style of television reporting requires (in the view of network execs) the repetition of certain superficial catchwords ("lying," "scandal," or [omigod] "prosecutorgate") and any attempt at "depth" is frowned upon as non-entertaining and "technical." Thus, the principle (analogous to discrimination law) described above cannot be used because of its "complicated" form. It is a true statement, it is the actual issue, but it is not infotainment, so it is rarely articulated.

Since the proper functioning of a democracy depends upon informed choices by an enlightened electorate, you begin to wonder how much longer this whole enterprise can go on. The connections and networks in the "organic society" (in Max Weber's phrase) become ever more intricate and technical as electronic communications and data storage, among other scientific frontiers, push forward. Feeling the hopelessness of trying to explain the political and economic artifacts engendered by this complexity, the information is dumbed down to generalized descriptions for mass consumption, but the "generalizations" are often not even related to the underlying factual matrix, as the above case in point illustrates. The decision-makers, such as Congress members and the President, recognize that the battle for public opinion is actually fought on the virtual terrain of this substituted "reality," and thus simplify and distort the issues they are dealing with to conform to the characterizations of the mass media, so that a congruence with public "opinion" can be achieved. Thus, Bush yesterday in his press conference emphasized the "resignations" of the attorneys and the "discretion" he enjoys to hire and fire "at will." Chris Matthews reacted in a telling way: he admired the President's "toughness" but caviled at the the President's "insincerity" in praising attorneys he had terminated. The real issue, as noted, was not even part of the discussion.