Dear America,
Diane Sawyer (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In my last letter I bemoaned the presence of Louis Gohmert on the ABC news program This Week. And in the past, just as I have questioned the merits of George Stephanoupolis's judgment on such choices, I have questioned that of Diane Sawyer, the current Peter Jennings epigone trying to bring ABC back to its hegemony in the news business. But she seems to hit a new low every night when it comes to the substance and merit of her reportage, and it is coming back to haunt the network. On another news program yesterday, a reporter interviewed a protestor in Cairo who was a supporter of the military leader of the intervention that removed Mohammed Morsi from power about two months ago. That general, General CiCi of the Egyptian army, installed the former vice-president as interim leader of the government when Morsi either failed or was disinclined to take steps to ameliorate the problems being protested by his detractors in the millions, but there has been no abatement of the civil disobedience in Egypt...just a reversal as to who is the rebel and who is the establishment against whom the rebellion is being waged. The issue, at its root, is whether, or at least to what extent, Egypt will be governed in conformance with Muslim principles like Sharia Law, and both sides claim a popular mandate. In the past few days, over 600 civilians have been killed in violence waged by the military authority in an effort to quell the civil strife that was killing civilians before the military began doing so, but Sawyer barely noticed. She did inform us that post par tem mothers could save over $2,000 a year by negotiating the fees that their gyms charge them. Apparently viewers of ABC pay enormous amounts to go to gyms whereas people like me, and you too probably, pay only about ten dollars a month for their gym privileges, but putting aside the frivolousness with which Sawyer conceives of her stories and the shallowness of the viewers she seeks to attract, there is the fact that even abroad, American news agencies are dismissed as partisan, chauvinistic and unreliable. In that interview with an Egyptian protester, the interviewer described a banner being flown by the anti-Morsi protesters calling CNN and ABC liars, and the protester he interviewed denied that the military had killed all those protesters; it was the Muslim Brotherhood, Morsi's party, that had killed them, he said. He believed rumors rather than the reportage of the two most prominent popular media news outlets in this country, but if he was watching Sawyer last night, he at least knows that he can negotiate his gym membership.
But frankly, I am more concerned about that attitude in this country than I am about Egypt's problem with popular myth guiding its history. When Mitt Romney's campaign was in its final days, ABC News reported polling information that had him in a dead heat with Barrack Obama, but only after changing their polling affiliation from its regular pollster to a notably conservative one that had reported The President to be in a comfortable position. Obviously, the polling data on which they had been relying before the change was accurate, but accuracy seemed...at least in retrospect... to be a secondary concern. The consequence is that people like Louis Gohmert continue to say things that get reported as fact, and the same reliance on myth creeps into our political discourse just as it seems to be doing in Egypt. For example, Gohmert took to the floor of the House of Representatives during the Republican debate season before the last election and reported that the EPA had promulgated a regulation that was violated if a farmer kicked up dust on the dirt road leading to his farm house. And despite the preposterous sound of such a claim, it gained sufficient credence that Newt Gingrich repeated it in support of his claim that regulation was at the heart of the great American recession, and Gingrich was not the only prominent figure to promote the apocryphal regulation as proof that efforts to control our degrading environment had gone too far. Of course the claim was almost immediately debunked, but while it had been reported as news initially, no one ever made much of the revelation that no such regulation existed...or ever had. And similar myths fuel popular disdain for Obamacare, which admittedly is not without limitations and flaws, regulation in general, the need for "energy independence" through drilling everywhere when we are shipping much of what we pump and refine to other countries, and so on. The cavalier attitude of the entities that are responsible for informing us all are not doing what they are meant to do, but are rather allowing discord to be fomented by the misinformed and the devious, and in the case of ABC for example, even promoting myth as fact by treating people like Louis Gohmert like they were credible and possessed of expertise that qualifies them to influence mass thought. When the Tea Party promoted the notion that Obamacare included "death panels" that would determine whether our grandmothers would get medical care or be allowed to die when the law actually does no more than require health insurance to pay for counseling for those who wanted it as to what treatment at the end of life was palliative and what was ameliorative, virtually nothing was said about Sarah Palin, for example, spreading the canard. And the consequence--at least in part--is that to this day, Obamacare is in disfavor while no one talks about the fact that it is the only thing that could be passed because the conservative in the Republican Party would not allow a single payer system. In fact, when such a system was being considered as a solution to our medical care system's tendency to omit care for the poor and marginally endowed during the Clinton administration, those same conservative Republicans proposed what became Obamacare...and Romneycare in Massachusetts...as an alternative, but partisan mythology has been allowed to taint the half loaf that conservatives could not stop. It is the news media who have failed in that regard, and it may well be that some day, the fate of Egypt today will befall us in consequence of our refusal to demand more of them. And the failure to inform our populace is not just the responsibility of ABC, but rather of all of the media outlets including the mainstream networks like Fox and CNN, and perhaps even NPR and PBS from time to time. Democracy depends on an informed electorate, and the alternative has reared its ugly head time and time again in world history in the form of nations in which tyranny and injustice are institutionalized with the consent of the governed. If something doesn't change, we are doomed to take our place among them.
Your friend,
Mike
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