PLAYING ONE ON TV
by Daren Foster

ALSO ON SITE

PLAYING ONE ON TV
By Daren Foster

If politics is simply just a game, the outcome of elections would not ultimately matter. Sure, your finances may have taken a beating when you over-extended yourself betting that Big Brown was a (horse)-shoe in to secure the Triple Crown with a victory at the Belmont Stakes. He finished last and yet the world kept spinning, day followed night and life as we know it pretty much proceeded apace. As we have seen over the course of the last 7 years or so, when you back the wrong horse in the political arena, shit can happen. Real, boat-rocking, tectonic plate-shifting shit.

Despite the adverse consequences that can emerge from bad, ill-informed choices, the mainstream media coverage of the 2008 Presidential campaign has so far adhered to the light and fluffy tone of sports coverage. And that’s doing a disservice to sports writers everywhere. At least their pages are filled with the salient details of the games they cover -- who did what, how many times and to what outcome. What some people refer to as facts. Political reporting, on the other hand, maintains an absolute aversion to such matters. In politics, facts aren’t always easily accessible. Sometimes work is needed to uncover facts, to ask awkward, maybe even pointed, questions of people whose vested interest it is to keep facts from coming to light. It’s much easier to traffic in opinion, based on rumours, innuendo and spin.

Imagine if a baseball pitcher threw a no-hitter and the next day all the newspapers and TV sports shows only talked about his unseemly wind-up and delivery. Yeah but, he just threw a no-hitter, striking out 17 batters in the process. So what. He looked funny doing it.

Or to put it more bluntly and less baseball-y, election coverage operates on a level no higher than the voice-over in a typical Gossip Girl episode. It’s not what our politicians and leaders are saying or proposing that matters but how they say it or propose it and, more importantly, how they are perceived in media circles saying it or proposing it. Many a reporter has been overheard complaining about how many debates they had to cover during the `08 primaries. Listening to what the candidates have to say has become an awful burden for the press to bear.

If they’d simply fess up and admit to the fact (ha, ha) that the notion of the objective reporter standing above the fray, doing their best Joe Friday imitation is little more than an ideal, an aspiration more sought after in theory than in practice, I honestly believe everyone would be better off. A truly informed public would stop looking to the press for any sort of truthful presentation of the day’s events. The media could drop the Woodward-Bernstein act of noble Fourth Estate defenders of democracy (certainly Woodward and Bernstein long ago abandoned the mantle) and we could all return to the golden age of tabloid journalism, Grub Street pamphleteers muckraking in the yellow seas of highly partisan politicking.

Judging by the freefall in viewer and readership that major news organizations are facing, the public is doing its part to disengage. But like a jilted lover, the press is desperately holding on tight to the pant leg of its soon-to-be ex in an attempt to stop them from leaving. Even the ridiculously biased Fox News clings fervently to its laughable tagline, ‘Fair and Balanced’.

The denial and deceit goes even deeper than the Fox hacks. Witness the howls of outrage emanating throughout the entire industry in the wake of former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan’s book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. Of the many tales McClellan tells out of school in his surprisingly critical assessment of his former bosses, the one biggie is his admission that the Bush White House relied heavily on propaganda to sell the Iraq war. Much worse to the delicate ears of the press than that claim however, is that McClellan thinks they all rolled over and played dead for the president and all his men, enabling the Administration to carry out its disastrous policies without much oversight.

Ouch!

Now, to be fair, this is one man’s very subjective opinion, loaded up with a heaping, helping side of Texas-sized self-serving. It is probably McClellan’s only opportunity to cash in on his service to the Bush’s presidency. He was, after all, a terrible press secretary. You could see the flop sweat every time he took his spot behind the podium to face the White House press corps. Stammering and stuttering, the man was so obviously obfuscating that it was possible to feel a twinge of compassion toward him. Ari Fleischer, his slick and oily predecessor, had the easy job of foisting the Iraq debacle on an American public and press itching to strike out blindly in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks. He split before the jig was up, leaving the task of explaining the truly unexplainable to the feckless McClellan.

But until McClellan came clean in his book, nearly two years after resigning, the mainstream media liked to pretend that they hadn’t assisted in helping to sell a war under false pretences. Despite facing McClellan on a regular basis for over three years, the White House press corps would have us believe that they never realized they were being duped and taken for fools. By the president’s press secretary. In an interview with McClellan, Martha Raddatz, ABC’s chief White House correspondent, expressed shock and disbelief at his apparent disingenuousness during his time as -- again -- the president’s press secretary. When he told her his job as press secretary was to serve the president, she opined that maybe in his position as -- once more with feeling -- the president’s press secretary, his job was also to serve the public. Clearly not wanting to offend anyone who might help him sell books, McClellan bobbed and weaved instead of hitting back at Raddatz, suggesting that no, as ABC’s chief White House correspondent, that was her job.Are these people so out to lunch or just so cynically ingrained in playing the game that they actually try convincing us, those dimwits like me who still take the time to listen to what these people have to say, that the role of the White House press secretary is to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Although this particular administration has raised the bar exponentially for operating in lies and deceit, has this ever been the case with any press secretary? Their duty is to get the story out as effectively and intact as possible. It is the job of the press to dissect what they are being told and to hold the administration accountable for any discrepancies they find. If Scott McClellan was a terrible press secretary, then you can only conclude that the press was really, really bad. I’m talking stinky awful. Lethally ineffectual.