Authors: Juan Williams
This fragmentation of the media has played its part in the polarization of politics too. While the media has always been interested in controversy, scandal, and conflict, it has become consumed by them in recent years. Major news outlets have abandoned any pretense of speaking for the middle by picking ideological sides—for example, the liberal
New York Times
editorial page versus the conservative
Wall Street Journal
editorial page.
President Clinton’s impeachment added to the media’s embrace of political polarization. There was no time on the top news shows for deliberate discussion of major issues when rumors, political wrangling, and salacious hearings drove ratings. One need only look so far as President Clinton’s 1998 missile attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan, targeting a then-little-known (to most Americans) terrorist named Osama bin Laden. Was our focus on this new threat and what needed to be done about it? No, the focus was on whether the president of the United States was launching missiles to distract the public from his sex scandal. I think, at this point, we can all concede that we were the ones missing the real story.
In the 2000 presidential election, the money available to political extremes had become apparent. It was the first campaign in history where the candidates spent less money on TV advertising than the national political parties. The Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee combined to spend $79.9 million on so-called soft-money attack ads. Those ads, featuring wedge issues, energized their respective political bases and drew in more money. The candidates participated in this politically correct campaigning by holding closely to scripted, politically correct positions for fear of contradicting any of the ads being run by their most animated supporters. Spending by the political parties fit with third-party attack ads, funded again by “soft money” also removed from direct candidate accountability. For example, in the 2000 campaign the NAACP ran an ad falsely accusing candidate George W. Bush of going easy on two white men
who killed a black man by dragging him behind their car until he died. The Gore campaign did not have to respond because it had not run the ad. The truth, however, was that the men had been given the maximum sentence for the crimes they committed. But Bush had strong ties with the black and Hispanic communities in Texas, winning substantial minority votes in his successful campaigns for governor. The NAACP was simply trying to squelch popular support for Bush among blacks nationwide in their attack ad.
In this acid media environment the candidates changed their tactics. The Bush campaign spent its ad money narrowly, avoiding general audiences and open debate in favor of targeting heavily Republican areas, with the goal of getting out as many Republican voters as possible. Even in so-called red states, the GOP did not spend time or money on urban areas with high percentages of young people, minorities, single women, and educated professionals—or, as one GOP strategist described them, Volvo-driving, latte-drinking NPR listeners. They were not in the business of persuading people to vote for them so much as increasing the turnout of known Republican voters. The debate in the media narrowed as the big-city daily papers were attacked as liberal leaning by the openly conservative talk radio and blog universe. Bernard Goldberg’s attack on the socially liberal media,
Bias
, became a top
New York Times
best seller in 2001.
The 9/11 attacks provided a rare retreat from rising political polarization as the country rallied around the flag and the president. The pause proved to be temporary. By July 2003 more than half of the public told pollsters that the news media—meaning big newspapers and the broadcast networks—had a
liberal bias. That was a sharp rise from the 40 percent who had agreed that the liberal press was out of control in 1985. And in 2003 only 36 percent of Americans said they trusted the media to tell a straight story. Separate realities, with Democrats consuming liberal media and conservatives responding to right-wing media, meant stories that attracted headlines on one side of the political divide got no mention on the other side. Conservatives attacked liberal media for questioning the war effort, while liberals attacked the Bush administration for failing to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The result was the new “law of group polarization,” a term coined by Cass Sunstein, at the time a University of Chicago law professor. He made the case that independent-minded voters suddenly found themselves taking sides as they drank in news from echo chambers on the Left or Right that created a clubhouse atmosphere for anyone who shared the host’s political views.
During the 2004 presidential campaign the polarization ratcheted up again around the issue of President Bush never having gone to war. His Democratic opponent, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, had been on the ground fighting in the Vietnam War. As his party’s candidate, Kerry began his speech accepting the nomination with the words “reporting for duty.” In response, Republicans began a surprising series of attacks questioning Kerry’s military performance on swift boats that traveled up Vietnamese rivers to fight the enemy. They questioned the medals he had been awarded and whether he really threw them away later to protest the war, as he claimed. While the Bush campaign kept its distance, Kerry was attacked as a New England elitist who preferred Swiss cheese to Cheez Whiz and windsurfing to clearing brush. The
coded language invited lowly talk as to whether Kerry was less manly than Bush, although it was Kerry who had actually gone to fight the war. Amazingly, the substance of political debate—the nation’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the economy, and the solvency of Social Security—became secondary to the character attacks.
Bush won reelection in another close race that reaffirmed the depth of the nation’s political divide. But cynicism on both sides of the political divide and a deep distrust of government, the media, and political leaders reached new heights. Going into the 2008 campaign, a backlash, a national desire for candidates who could bridge the two sides, emerged. The candidate who best embodied that impulse, Democrat Barack Obama, gained attention for speaking of one America, rather than of blue states and red states, black and white, liberal and conservative. In his keynote speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he famously challenged the country to move beyond blue states and red states and move forward as the United States. In his second book,
The Audacity of Hope
, he called for a civil, constructive dialogue and an end to the labels of “liberal” and “conservative.” After the incendiary sermons of his longtime pastor, Jeremiah Wright, surfaced in the middle of the Democrats’ primary races, he delivered one of the most revealing speeches about race relations in recent memory. In that speech in Philadelphia, he spoke of a racial stalemate where black anger and white resentment have largely become distractions that prevent the nation from coming together to solve real problems.
Obama gave the appearance of a candidate willing to engage in debate, a serious man, the anti–sound bite candidate.
His critics responded that he was being treated as a “messiah” by naive followers who failed to see him as a skilled politician. The criticism did not stick, largely because Obama seemed different. He was elected the first African American leader in a country where, as
Newsweek
’s Jonathan Alter has said, the first sixteen presidents could have owned him as property. The historic nature of his candidacy, combined with his God-given talents as an orator and politician, made him a transformational figure. Because of this gravitas, there was a belief that he could succeed where other politicians had failed in changing the political discourse.
In his inaugural speech, Obama spoke to a desire for honest, real political debate to solve the nation’s problems. It was a message that played well. “On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord. On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics. We remain a young nation. But in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.”
Many hoped that President Obama would form a governing coalition that would break down the barriers that prevent us from talking honestly and openly about the myriad problems facing our country. But either Obama never intended to cross the political divide to really debate the Right or he did not have the political skills to do so. Whatever the cause, many of the noble promises of compromising to reach genuine solutions ran up against the cold, hard realities of a political institution—media, politics, and government—polarized and locked into place.
After the election, conservative columnist Ann Coulter sarcastically wrote that Republicans should show President Obama the same amount of respect that Democrats had shown President Bush over the past eight years—meaning not much. Coulter and others in the conservative media often refer to the president as “B. Hussein Obama.” The clear intention is to cast him as a foreign influence, as someone different and potentially dangerous.
As a result of this polarizing scare tactic, a segment of our country now believes Barack Obama is not a Christian but a Muslim. According to public opinion polls, the number of Americans who believe he is a Muslim has increased since he has been in office.
Another group, the “birthers,” believes that Obama is an illegitimate president because he is not really an American citizen. In their world, led of late by Donald Trump, the president was born not in Hawaii but in either Kenya or Indonesia. The facts are that Obama’s birth certificate and archives of birth announcements in Hawaiian newspapers show that he was born in Honolulu, the capital of the fiftieth state. The birthers maintain that these documents are forgeries, part of an elaborate conspiracy to conceal his true identity. How can the American people collectively make a fair, informed evaluation of President Obama and his performance when a growing number of them are wildly misinformed about the basic facts of who he is? What these extreme groups do is use these tactics as a way of dismissing any discussion of President Obama’s ideas or agenda. It’s far easier to paint them with scandal than seriously debate them on their merits. President Obama himself captured this frustration in April of 2011 when
the White House released his long-form birth certificate. In a press conference held at the time, President Obama said, “We do not have time for this kind of silliness.”
The speed with which the hope and goodwill inspired by Obama as candidate evaporated during his first two years in office has to be one of the more remarkable tidal turns in modern American political history.
Once again it was driven by the power of polarization. The entrenched, moneyed interests maintain fierce control over what we can and can’t say or debate. We are forced to pick column A or column B, one side or the other, limiting the gene pool of our thinking, leaving us with two sides that are equally inbred and unsustainable.
Again, our politicians’ partisan views are bolstered by the money they generate—Representative Joe Wilson benefited handsomely from yelling, “You lie!” during Obama’s address to Congress regarding health care in 2009. New Deal–era criticisms of federal government initiatives have been resurrected as surefire solicitations in e-mails, newsletters, and direct mail because they bring in the money every time. The mantra “big-government takeover” has been applied to actions ranging from banking regulations to the rescue of GM to health-care reform to Internet regulation (i.e., “network neutrality”).
Media, of course, make money from our nondebate too. During the 2010 campaign, Sharron Angle, the Republican Senate candidate in Nevada, claimed that unemployment benefits for people who had been out of work for ninety-nine weeks should not be continued because they would create “a spoilage system,” and she refused to do interviews with any media other than Fox News. Rather than debating the accuracy and merits
of this claim, the media focused on her taunts to her opponent, Harry Reid, to “man up.” Christine O’Donnell endorsed the ideas of partial privatization of Social Security and turning Medicare into a voucher program. Yet the media focused on a comment she had made on Bill Maher’s
Politically Incorrect
panel in the 1990s about dabbling in witchcraft with her high-school boyfriend. These were two far-right candidates who deserved serious scrutiny of their ideas. The media could have and should have examined their views (and to be fair, many on the Left did), which I would describe as outside the mainstream of politics, rather than focusing on their personalities, colorful as those personalities may have been.
The sad backdrop against which this all played out is that seemingly overnight, once inside the presidential bubble, President Obama—the man who many hoped could change the national tone—seemed to lose his focus on his promise to work with political opponents, to seriously engage in debate, and to join hands with anyone trying to solve problems. He became fixated on passing laws by winning the votes of fellow Democrats who held the majorities in both the House and Senate. He lost interest in presenting and debating ideas for the American people. The real shift began as Obama had to bail out the banks and provide a stimulus to the economy. The harsh realities of governing, and the admittedly miserable choices before the new president, began to eat away at his coalition. And the repolarization between Democrats and Republicans was supercharged as Obama launched his health-care initiative. Furor erupted on the Right, and the vitriolic criticism, covered in detail by the media, spread the animus to the political center. Many Americans, with unemployment still high, saw the
government hemorrhaging money and occupying a larger and larger share of the national economy and their personal lives.
That led to “town hall” confrontations over health-care reform, providing the media a bonanza of visceral conflict. Obama’s administration did a poor job of talking to the public about the proposals and focused instead on getting votes in the House and Senate to pass the legislation. The horse-trading, the compromises, the concessions to big business, and the complexity of the legislation drowned out attempts to debate the bill on its merits. But perhaps nothing could have competed for media attention with the ease of airing angry outbursts at “town hall” meetings dominated by seniors who feared reductions in their Medicare benefits and heard scary talk about the plan including “death panels.” It was the perfect storm that wiped away the promise of people daring to speak frankly across ideological lines.