In the summer of 2012, while I was working on the Obama campaign, my name appeared in this Mother Jones article:
"If you get the impression that the Obama campaign is playing mind games with its incessant fundraising emails, it's because they are. Backof came to the campaign from the Analyst Institute, a secretive, union-founded, Washington research shop that specializes in applying behavioral science to lefty political causes. On his Twitter profile, Backof describes his expertise as 'Building better political mousetraps through randomized controlled experiments.'"
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Monday, June 1, 2009
Experts: The Internet Will Be Tamed
Originally published December 18, 2008 for SpliceToday
If there were a list of the 10 most important books written about the Internet’s social and political impact over the last decade, Larry Lessig and Cass Sunstein would be responsible for half. The two law professors and friends have been visionary in extending the logical implications of radically diffuse communications technologies into traditional social structures, although from two slightly different perspectives. Lessig’s work is closely aligned with Silicon Valley, focusing on deep technical specifics of the Internet and the processes of cultural production. Sunstein (also an editor at The New Republic) is oriented towards the Washington policy world with work that speaks more to accountability, communication, and knowledge-making in a democracy.
When these two thinkers pool their collective intellectual heft and name-recognition together for a common cause we should assume that they’re onto something significant. When they also enlist noted feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum as an ethical center of gravity, we can be sure of it. Such a joint-force operation recently occurred at a University of Chicago-sponsored conference on speech, privacy, and the Internet.* Working against the liberationist theology espoused by many technophiles, the conference sought to ground specific problems created by the Internet in much older problems of ethics and law. The conclusions reached suggest that, like so many frontiers in human history, the Internet too will be civilized.
As a communications technology the Internet unquestionably distributes the tools of speech to more individuals than ever before. It also—unquestionably—has led to more anonymous speech than ever before. These are two fairly straightforward observations, but they are often taken to mean more than what they actually are. Like so many technological revolutions and fads, empirical facts about the Internet are too quickly assumed to reveal something normatively inherent about the Internet (if it has any inherent character at all) that portends some significant change in human nature. It is, after all, far easier to argue for revolution than to engage in the challenging and complicated work of re-stating our eternal questions in the latest jargon.
While acknowledging the many obvious benefits of the Internet, the participants at this conference held that the wide distribution of anonymous speech had significant harms that cannot justify the continued libertarian utopia of free identity now known on the Internet. The example of AutoEmit, a discussion forum for law students, came up frequently. A few years ago anonymous posters repeatedly and viciously attacked two female students in this public space. It was vile, with threats of rape, sodomy, and violence during pregnancy. Clearly, to the extent that restricting expression through threats and intimidation is a crime—and both civil rights law and sexual harassment law provide numerous precedents for this claim—a case can be made that these anonymous posters broke the law. Gangs of hackers that assault and shut down female-written blogs are another example.
According to Nussbaum, these kinds of anonymous attacks also do something even more significant. Objectification, simply defined, is the stripping down of a complicated human identity to a few salient characteristics. These two law students’ public identities were reduced to the worst slander a few deranged minds could imagine. They literally existed in no other way than as sluts and harpies to an overwhelming number of their peers, and they had almost no recourse to recover lost reputations. Putting aside whether such anonymous speech should be illegal, it seems clear that it is deeply unethical.
These conclusions are obvious, but what follows is the whole crux of the argument of the conference. In any other context slanderous objectification, threats of rape, and the like, have an established system of law for the victims to appeal to. Such a body of law does not currently exist on the Internet. Other law is occasionally awkwardly applied, but in the case of these two law students the technology of the Internet prevented the very first step in prosecuting the law: identifying the offender. The students brought a suit against their provocateurs, but AutoEmit did not keep the IP addresses associated with the offending comments.
Identity is the first step towards responsibility. Without a consistent system of identity on the Internet, crimes like this will go unpunished. Identity, however, can be construed in different ways. The conclusion of these lawyers is that anonymity is inherently unsustainable. As more and more people integrate the Internet into their social lives, the more harmful the speech crimes will be, particularly as we look forward to a future generation coming of age with artifacts from their entire lives preserved in digital form. (As Facebook and cameraphone users grow into positions of responsibility, it might be good to know who is publishing the compromising photo from college so that you can ask them to stop.) A regime of pseudonymity offers a possible compromise.
The most successful websites operate under a pseudonymous regime. Wikipedia, Ebay, Amazon.com, the Huffington Post: all insist upon a user’s identity being held, in some way, responsible and accountable to the real world. While Wikipedia, for example, can’t necessarily trace their editors to a specific real-world person, they do insist on a stable identity if one wants to rise to a position of responsibility. This pseudonym is crucial for building reputation and trust over time.
Returning to the two observations about the Internet—its diffusion and anonymity—the Internet facilitated the unethical and potentially criminal activity by the AutoEmit posters. Of course there are other social contexts where one can anonymously threaten rape—the bathroom wall was brought to mind. But there is a body of law that applies to bathroom wall speech. If caught, the writer can be prosecuted for vandalism and held responsible for defamation. The owner of the wall can be held responsible for taking down the offending comment. But putting all that aside, the most obvious difference is the scale in audience. Comparatively few people will ever read a scribble in a stall, yet there is a body of law that applies to speech acts in that medium. On the Internet, one can potentially reach millions with one’s speech, and yet there is no consistent body of law to protect victims. Think about Juicy Campus for an example.
The Internet, the conference participants argued, changes nothing substantive about anonymous speech. It merely changes the degree to which anonymous speech is possible, and questions of degree are precisely the questions where lawyers excel. A few possible solutions were thrown out, including a consistent and portable online identity similar to a driver’s license (Identity 2.0 explains this technological solution). Another idea is to have all web site owners opt in to a tiered liability structure, to hold sites responsible for what they publish and allow users a verified way to gauge the reliability of a site’s information.
The most important conclusion of the conference is that some kind of process is needed for linking speech and responsibility on the Internet. This need not be a direct real-world identity, as most can obviously see how that would take away many of the benefits the Internet provides. Properly construed, we actually see very little anonymous speech in the world except on the Internet, because anonymous speech is typically linked with a responsible intermediary like a bathroom wall’s owner, or a book publisher, or a journalist. By taking on responsibility in the case of libel, defamation, and slander, these mediators allow for a kind of pseudonymity by the speakers themselves.
Any attentive observer will worry that the imposition of an identity regime on the Internet will inhibit speech. But we might ask whether it’s really such a burden to have responsible mediators. Sites like this one take responsibility for the comments on it, as do the most successful and useful websites. Anonymity has an obvious value, but there is no reason to think that anonymous political speech must necessarily be held to an unsavory alliance with juvenile hate speech. Pseudonymity might offer a productive compromise.
Ever since its rise to popular consciousness during the 1990s the Internet has often been referred to metaphorically as a kind of Wild West. The predominant interpretation of the metaphor to date has focused on its positive and aspirational aspects. But respectable people are staking their own claim to the Internet, and just as churches and schools worked their way across the North American west 150 years ago, it appears that laws and institutions are coming to civilize the web.
If there were a list of the 10 most important books written about the Internet’s social and political impact over the last decade, Larry Lessig and Cass Sunstein would be responsible for half. The two law professors and friends have been visionary in extending the logical implications of radically diffuse communications technologies into traditional social structures, although from two slightly different perspectives. Lessig’s work is closely aligned with Silicon Valley, focusing on deep technical specifics of the Internet and the processes of cultural production. Sunstein (also an editor at The New Republic) is oriented towards the Washington policy world with work that speaks more to accountability, communication, and knowledge-making in a democracy.
When these two thinkers pool their collective intellectual heft and name-recognition together for a common cause we should assume that they’re onto something significant. When they also enlist noted feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum as an ethical center of gravity, we can be sure of it. Such a joint-force operation recently occurred at a University of Chicago-sponsored conference on speech, privacy, and the Internet.* Working against the liberationist theology espoused by many technophiles, the conference sought to ground specific problems created by the Internet in much older problems of ethics and law. The conclusions reached suggest that, like so many frontiers in human history, the Internet too will be civilized.
As a communications technology the Internet unquestionably distributes the tools of speech to more individuals than ever before. It also—unquestionably—has led to more anonymous speech than ever before. These are two fairly straightforward observations, but they are often taken to mean more than what they actually are. Like so many technological revolutions and fads, empirical facts about the Internet are too quickly assumed to reveal something normatively inherent about the Internet (if it has any inherent character at all) that portends some significant change in human nature. It is, after all, far easier to argue for revolution than to engage in the challenging and complicated work of re-stating our eternal questions in the latest jargon.
While acknowledging the many obvious benefits of the Internet, the participants at this conference held that the wide distribution of anonymous speech had significant harms that cannot justify the continued libertarian utopia of free identity now known on the Internet. The example of AutoEmit, a discussion forum for law students, came up frequently. A few years ago anonymous posters repeatedly and viciously attacked two female students in this public space. It was vile, with threats of rape, sodomy, and violence during pregnancy. Clearly, to the extent that restricting expression through threats and intimidation is a crime—and both civil rights law and sexual harassment law provide numerous precedents for this claim—a case can be made that these anonymous posters broke the law. Gangs of hackers that assault and shut down female-written blogs are another example.
According to Nussbaum, these kinds of anonymous attacks also do something even more significant. Objectification, simply defined, is the stripping down of a complicated human identity to a few salient characteristics. These two law students’ public identities were reduced to the worst slander a few deranged minds could imagine. They literally existed in no other way than as sluts and harpies to an overwhelming number of their peers, and they had almost no recourse to recover lost reputations. Putting aside whether such anonymous speech should be illegal, it seems clear that it is deeply unethical.
These conclusions are obvious, but what follows is the whole crux of the argument of the conference. In any other context slanderous objectification, threats of rape, and the like, have an established system of law for the victims to appeal to. Such a body of law does not currently exist on the Internet. Other law is occasionally awkwardly applied, but in the case of these two law students the technology of the Internet prevented the very first step in prosecuting the law: identifying the offender. The students brought a suit against their provocateurs, but AutoEmit did not keep the IP addresses associated with the offending comments.
Identity is the first step towards responsibility. Without a consistent system of identity on the Internet, crimes like this will go unpunished. Identity, however, can be construed in different ways. The conclusion of these lawyers is that anonymity is inherently unsustainable. As more and more people integrate the Internet into their social lives, the more harmful the speech crimes will be, particularly as we look forward to a future generation coming of age with artifacts from their entire lives preserved in digital form. (As Facebook and cameraphone users grow into positions of responsibility, it might be good to know who is publishing the compromising photo from college so that you can ask them to stop.) A regime of pseudonymity offers a possible compromise.
The most successful websites operate under a pseudonymous regime. Wikipedia, Ebay, Amazon.com, the Huffington Post: all insist upon a user’s identity being held, in some way, responsible and accountable to the real world. While Wikipedia, for example, can’t necessarily trace their editors to a specific real-world person, they do insist on a stable identity if one wants to rise to a position of responsibility. This pseudonym is crucial for building reputation and trust over time.
Returning to the two observations about the Internet—its diffusion and anonymity—the Internet facilitated the unethical and potentially criminal activity by the AutoEmit posters. Of course there are other social contexts where one can anonymously threaten rape—the bathroom wall was brought to mind. But there is a body of law that applies to bathroom wall speech. If caught, the writer can be prosecuted for vandalism and held responsible for defamation. The owner of the wall can be held responsible for taking down the offending comment. But putting all that aside, the most obvious difference is the scale in audience. Comparatively few people will ever read a scribble in a stall, yet there is a body of law that applies to speech acts in that medium. On the Internet, one can potentially reach millions with one’s speech, and yet there is no consistent body of law to protect victims. Think about Juicy Campus for an example.
The Internet, the conference participants argued, changes nothing substantive about anonymous speech. It merely changes the degree to which anonymous speech is possible, and questions of degree are precisely the questions where lawyers excel. A few possible solutions were thrown out, including a consistent and portable online identity similar to a driver’s license (Identity 2.0 explains this technological solution). Another idea is to have all web site owners opt in to a tiered liability structure, to hold sites responsible for what they publish and allow users a verified way to gauge the reliability of a site’s information.
The most important conclusion of the conference is that some kind of process is needed for linking speech and responsibility on the Internet. This need not be a direct real-world identity, as most can obviously see how that would take away many of the benefits the Internet provides. Properly construed, we actually see very little anonymous speech in the world except on the Internet, because anonymous speech is typically linked with a responsible intermediary like a bathroom wall’s owner, or a book publisher, or a journalist. By taking on responsibility in the case of libel, defamation, and slander, these mediators allow for a kind of pseudonymity by the speakers themselves.
Any attentive observer will worry that the imposition of an identity regime on the Internet will inhibit speech. But we might ask whether it’s really such a burden to have responsible mediators. Sites like this one take responsibility for the comments on it, as do the most successful and useful websites. Anonymity has an obvious value, but there is no reason to think that anonymous political speech must necessarily be held to an unsavory alliance with juvenile hate speech. Pseudonymity might offer a productive compromise.
Ever since its rise to popular consciousness during the 1990s the Internet has often been referred to metaphorically as a kind of Wild West. The predominant interpretation of the metaphor to date has focused on its positive and aspirational aspects. But respectable people are staking their own claim to the Internet, and just as churches and schools worked their way across the North American west 150 years ago, it appears that laws and institutions are coming to civilize the web.
Non-Evasive, For a Change
Originally published on March 25, 2008 for SpliceToday
Barack Obama’s got a problem with his preacher, in case you haven’t heard. The man who presided over his marriage, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has made some astonishing statements, the content of which poses problems for a leading presidential candidate. Highlights include a) the government created HIV to keep the black population down, b) the U.S. got what it deserved on 9/11, and c) God himself should damn this country for its long history of racism.
A major campaign controversy, Obama’s worst to date, surrounding these statements flared up two weeks ago when national media organizations uncovered video clips of Rev. Wright spouting that nonsense. But it was hardly fresh news. These sermons had been in the public record for years, even available for sale on DVD, and Obama has been slowly distancing himself from Wright ever since he announced his candidacy. Newspaper stories from last year documented Wright’s inflammatory nature and Obama’s concerns about how closely he was associated with him. Yet only this month has Wright become a problem that’s hurting Obama in any number of polls.
Something obviously changed recently to spark this cycle of negative coverage. Two things immediately come to mind. One, the medium is the message. An enterprising reporter or rival campaign operative thought that this was an opportune moment to release neatly edited video of Wright’s worst moments. In today’s media environment a 10 second clip of Rev. Wright saying “God damn America” in his angry preacher cadence is going to get far more eyeballs than an article in the middle pages of a newspaper. It plays well because it’s easy to digest.
Two, race and racial difference has metastasized into an effective, if nasty, campaign issue. Hillary Clinton’s campaign has, none too subtly, engaged in race baiting ever since Obama became a serious challenger. She wants race to be an issue because it attracts Hispanics and non-college educated whites, boxes in Obama’s expansive identity claims, and undermines his call for historic change. It plants the campaign firmly in the mud of the past, the only space where she’s still got a fighting chance. Race also feeds the insatiable appetite of the media during this extended layoff between major primaries.
A week ago Obama gave his best counterpunch. He delivered an informed and eloquent speech in which he clearly disowned Rev. Wright’s comments, while also placing them within the historical context of race relations and racial identity in America. (Read it here.) Reactions to the speech have been mixed and he hasn’t been able to slow a slight slide in the polls. It may not have been enough to get momentum back on his side, but it did reveal something important about his character as a leader, something that’s been buried in the rush of reporters and columnists looking to stake their own claim on the sexy issue of Race in America.
Obama showed us that he’s the kind of person who’s willing to publicly confront serious problems in an intelligent way, a rare characteristic for a presidential contender. Predicting presidential behavior based on the bleating and constant tactical shifting of a campaign is a difficult task, but not as worthless as you might think. True, candidates routinely fudge on promises when faced with the realities of actual governing. It’s foolish to read anything more than a general philosophical outlook into policy bullets printed on pamphlets months before a person becomes president. But while the specifics of what a candidate will do as president have proven to be beyond the scope of most crystal balls, insights into the how of a candidate’s presidency are easier to come by.
George W. Bush’s special combination of smarmy smirks and awkward stammering in 2000 foreshadowed an administration that set historical lows for deftness and intellectual nuance. Bill Clinton’s lawyerly equivocating on his extra-marital adventures first graced the national stage during his 1992 run, when the public was given cloudy evasions about Gennifer Flowers that he would stick with for six years, until forced to testify under oath during the Lewinsky scandal. Clear evidence of their character as leaders was visible during both the Bush and Clinton campaigns, evidence revealed during extended exposure to the glare of public scrutiny.
In 2008 that glare has only gotten more intense. A campaign as long and as media saturated as this one is going to result in bad moments for every leading candidate. (Just last week John McCain, flaunting his foreign policy platform on a jaunt to the Mideast, mixed up the Sunni and Shiite groups in Iraq.) The media, as well as opposing campaigns, eagerly distort and devour incriminating sound bites like Rev. Wright’s sermons to suit their own purposes.
Under that kind of constant inspection the way candidates respond to inconsistencies and missteps might not reveal their souls, but it can give us some idea of how they’ll treat the public as President. They might treat us with the befuddled condescension of a trust fund frat boy, or they might debase their own obvious intelligence by asking us what the definition of is is before admitting to lying about a blow job.
Barack Obama confronted his problem, straight up. When a serious issue evolved that threatened his campaign, he carefully thought about it for a few days and delivered a powerful speech that caused the editorial pages of the country to erupt for a week in spirited debate about the meaning of race and the legacy of slavery. Step back for a moment and think about how exceptional this really is. A leading politician decided not to distract us with whatever media spin his consultants cooked up. Instead he expanded the boundaries of the public dialogue and didn't treat us like complete idiots. Yet he’s the one taking a hit in the media.
Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, treats the American people like children and has, at least temporarily, regained some momentum. The skeletons in her closet are too numerous to mention, but one that attracted a middling amount of attention—at least until the Rev. Wright controversy blew up—is the release of her tax returns. Leading candidates for president release their tax returns to the general public. It seems pretty basic: let us see where your income comes from before we decide to trust you with the veto pen. It shouldn’t be a big deal if you’ve got nothing to hide. Obama’s already done it.
Clinton, though, has not released her taxes (nor has McCain). This is vitally important considering that she loaned her own campaign $5 million, and that Bill has made loads of shady money since leaving office as the least affluent former president in modern times. Tim “Gotcha” Russert asked her about this in very clear terms during a debate. Her response? “I will release my tax returns. I have consistently said I will do that once I become the nominee, or even earlier…I have been as open as I can be…I’m a little busy right now…I will certainly work towards releasing.” (See the full video here.)
This is crisis management 101 in classic modern politicking. Step 1: Knowing nod and plastic smile while dialing up a prepared response. Step 2: A distracting positive statement that’s tangentially related (in this case information about how many donations are coming in). Step 3: Present an answer as a moving target while using the terminology of the question to make it seem like you’re engaging the issue directly.
The end result is that, while she embarrasses herself to anyone paying attention, she doesn’t provide enough fodder for an easily digestible story. She doesn’t let commentators pontificate over cool topics like race. And she doesn’t let any easy headlines get written about her or let any 10-second video clips fly around the Internet. It’s manipulative, sure, but when the campaign is reduced to an exchange of flashy accusations, as it is now, she’s effective.
Clinton muddles and dodges and always looks composed. Obama, God forbid, sometimes actually looks uncomfortable talking about a sticky subject. He doesn’t have a ready answer to everything on hand, but with some time he will come back with a thoughtful response that doesn’t duck away from an issue. You may want Obama to completely reject Rev. Wright. You may understand his arguments about context and history. You may, like me, think it doesn’t really matter. But he deserves respect for not responding with a bunch of dismissive half-truths.
Monday, February 23, 2009
New News Out of Africa: Rethinking Media Coverage of Africa
Originally published June 30, 2006 for the Center for American Progress
With better media coverage, the United States and the world would realize that there is more to Africa than death, disease, disaster, and despair. Charlayne Hunter-Gault delivered that message in a discussion Friday at the Center for American Progress.
Hunter-Gault, an award winning journalist currently working for NPR, talked about her new book, New News Out of Africa, with Gayle Smith, senior fellow at the Center. Touching on a wide range of African issues, the event focused on the impact of how Africa is treated in the American media.
“We don’t know enough about Africa,” Smith said, because our current media coverage is reactionary and piecemeal, suffering from the “if it bleeds, it leads” syndrome. As a consequence, the American public has become apathetic to the continent. The perception, according to Hunter-Gault, is that if conditions never change than the issues are not a good investment of time, emotions, and money.
The lack of consistent media attention is obscuring important positive developments in Africa. The most interesting stories, for Hunter-Gault, are not Africa’s problems but the hope and heroism throughout the continent in the face of those problems. “Today there is a second wind of change blowing across Africa,” she said. Pointing to tentative but consistent democratic progress and a growing confidence that Africa can be active in improving itself, Hunter-Gault expressed hope that a more positive image of Africa in the media could emerge.
Hunter-Gault emphasized that understanding the day-to-day stories of Africa means abandoning preconceived notions. Reporters covering Africa should “try to portray people in ways that are recognizable” to Africans. To gain the right perspective, she said, “You have to go there to know there.” With that message, Hunter-Gault’s new book hopes to bring the right kind of media coverage to a dynamically growing continent.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Too Complex For The Highlight Reel
Originally published May 8, 2008 for SpliceToday
There is a sublime kind of genius at work in the production concepts of ESPN. At virtually any time of day a viewer can tune into one of ESPN's many media properties and, within 15 minutes, see some sporting issue neatly cleaved into two opposing perspectives. Sometimes one commentator is forced to provide yes-or-no opinions in a contrived exercise, like the (I'm not making this name up) Coors Light Cold Hard Facts "Six Pack" of questions. More often the contrivance is presented as a debate between two experts. The questions are arbitrary, the answers typically meaningless and speculative, but the experts know their role and play it well. They yell, and insult each other, and try their hardest to never agree. Entire half-hour shows with flourishes like point values, flashy graphics, and running clocks are built around the idea of the dueling commentators.
This constant bombardment of short, snappy bits of synthetic argument is ESPN’s genius. Philosophers from the time of the ancient Greeks have observed the deep human need to have the world explained to us in black and white, good and bad, yes and no. ESPN has taken this old insight, applied it to the information-rich world of sports, and strategically married it to the ecology of modern media. Who had the best draft pick, the Falcons or the Raiders? Are last year's Red Sox the greatest team of all time, yes or no? Nobody involved cares about whether the answers to these silly questions are correct or not. What's important is that sides are taken clearly and concisely enough that the meager attention spans of the audience grasp the terms of the argument without realizing how artificial the set-up is.
As a result sports commentary on ESPN ends up mirroring sports itself and opinions can be divided as clearly as competing teams on the playing fields. This communications style is harmless and even a little fun when the subject is as innocuous as sports. But, as contemporary media technologies continue whittling away our ability to concentrate for more than five minutes, the ESPN-ization of the media is skewing our ability to communicate as a society. Unaccountable and flashy opinion-makers that construct false dichotomies for the sake of argument are fine for football. They’re not acceptable when we need national discussions on complicated issues touching on history, politics, and culture.
For example, suppose we needed a discussion on the electability of America’s first black president. A discussion where we talk about the changing identity roles a black man must navigate as he advances in a white-dominated career; talk about the shifting company he keeps at different points in his life as he grows into a public figure; talk about the occasionally contradictory groups he must appease as he necessarily seeks to be both a product of black culture and to transcend it. Add in a little psychology about the “blackness” of a man of mixed race who grew up across the Pacific rim and whose decendents weren’t slaves. Then talk about the meaning of latent racism and how to deal with it. That’s a discussion that doesn’t break down cleanly into two opposing soundbites. That’s a college semester’s worth of discussion, and our media appears to be structurally incapable of having it.
In our short-fused, artificial, two-sided media environment, anything that takes more than a paragraph to explain gets buried. Anything best understood as shades of gray instead of black against white becomes muted. But oversimplifications, codewords, and outright lies that are consistently repeated stick. Savvy political figures understand this ESPN effect and use it to manipulate the public conversation. It’s been a feature of the 2008 presidential campaign so far, and despite Barack Obama’s remarkably successful efforts to rise above the normal constraints of political discourse, his opponents will continue to hammer their “message” as methodically as a mechanic smoothing out a fender.
Say you’re threatened, scared, or otherwise made uncomfortable by the prospect of a President Obama. You think that associating him with our nation’s historical distaste for angry black men will hurt his campaign. Here’s what you do: find a major media outlet. Set up your own artificial yes/no argument by asking whether Obama must “answer” for attending Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church. Then say yes, ignore Obama’s actual answers, and reference Wright’s angry black bogeyman statements. It’s like having your own Coors Light Six Pack of Questions, except that you’re undermining democratic discourse instead of breaking down a playoff game.
Like this:
George Will, country club conservative: “Wright's paranoias tell us something—exactly what remains to be explored—about his 20-year parishioner.” Ah ha! Something dark and mysterious is out there to be found, like Kurtz exploring the Congo.
Michael Gerson, moralizing former Bush speechwriter: “A smart, passionate pastor such as Wright naturally wants his views to influence his own congregation. He has every right to ask Obama, ‘Have you just now noticed my most basic beliefs? Have you really been asleep in the pew for 20 years?’" See, Obama can’t disagree with Wright, or at least he shouldn’t if he’s a good Christian.
Ed Koch, crotchety old Clinton supporter: “He has not explained why he sat in the church's pews for 20 years without complaint.” That’s not true: Obama delivered an entire speech explaining that.
The kamikaze campaign controversy piloted by Obama’s old pastor is the latest example of a multi-faceted issue of national importance getting distorted in the media for political advantage. Judging by the results in North Carolina and Indiana it obviously hasn’t derailed his campaign. But we haven’t seen the last of Rev. Wright, or other examples of “the politics of division and distraction” as Obama put it in his speech Tuesday night, because division and distraction are operationally fundamental to the modern news media. Division and distraction is its bread and butter, the key to a desperate bid for eyeballs and advertising dollars when so much information is now available for free. Traditionally campaigns, especially losing ones like Clinton’s and McCain’s, are happy to ply the media with disciplined message politics. Obama’s campaign isn’t perfect, but as a candidate he’s shown with issues like race and the gas tax that sometimes principle overrides easy answers.
ESPN’s genius works. For the past decade the sports network has been remarkably profitable, carrying once dominant sister companies ABC and Disney on their back. ESPN has made itself essential to the lives of practically every sports fan and professional athlete by building an empire where nuance is sacrificed for the sake of simplicity, entertainment outweighs accuracy, and the biggest sin is to leave your audience with an ambiguous conclusion.
But sports are diversions, something that can be endlessly and simply argued about becuase the results of a game don’t cost 4,000 American lives in Iraq. Games don’t have anything to do with the executive branch’s erosion of the rule of law, or economic policy favoring the rich at the expense of the poor, or the legacy of racism. Those issues are decided by politics, and in politics sometimes the truth doesn’t fit onscreen in a colorful banner graphic. It’d be a welcome change if our leading media outlets realized the difference.
There is a sublime kind of genius at work in the production concepts of ESPN. At virtually any time of day a viewer can tune into one of ESPN's many media properties and, within 15 minutes, see some sporting issue neatly cleaved into two opposing perspectives. Sometimes one commentator is forced to provide yes-or-no opinions in a contrived exercise, like the (I'm not making this name up) Coors Light Cold Hard Facts "Six Pack" of questions. More often the contrivance is presented as a debate between two experts. The questions are arbitrary, the answers typically meaningless and speculative, but the experts know their role and play it well. They yell, and insult each other, and try their hardest to never agree. Entire half-hour shows with flourishes like point values, flashy graphics, and running clocks are built around the idea of the dueling commentators.
This constant bombardment of short, snappy bits of synthetic argument is ESPN’s genius. Philosophers from the time of the ancient Greeks have observed the deep human need to have the world explained to us in black and white, good and bad, yes and no. ESPN has taken this old insight, applied it to the information-rich world of sports, and strategically married it to the ecology of modern media. Who had the best draft pick, the Falcons or the Raiders? Are last year's Red Sox the greatest team of all time, yes or no? Nobody involved cares about whether the answers to these silly questions are correct or not. What's important is that sides are taken clearly and concisely enough that the meager attention spans of the audience grasp the terms of the argument without realizing how artificial the set-up is.
As a result sports commentary on ESPN ends up mirroring sports itself and opinions can be divided as clearly as competing teams on the playing fields. This communications style is harmless and even a little fun when the subject is as innocuous as sports. But, as contemporary media technologies continue whittling away our ability to concentrate for more than five minutes, the ESPN-ization of the media is skewing our ability to communicate as a society. Unaccountable and flashy opinion-makers that construct false dichotomies for the sake of argument are fine for football. They’re not acceptable when we need national discussions on complicated issues touching on history, politics, and culture.
For example, suppose we needed a discussion on the electability of America’s first black president. A discussion where we talk about the changing identity roles a black man must navigate as he advances in a white-dominated career; talk about the shifting company he keeps at different points in his life as he grows into a public figure; talk about the occasionally contradictory groups he must appease as he necessarily seeks to be both a product of black culture and to transcend it. Add in a little psychology about the “blackness” of a man of mixed race who grew up across the Pacific rim and whose decendents weren’t slaves. Then talk about the meaning of latent racism and how to deal with it. That’s a discussion that doesn’t break down cleanly into two opposing soundbites. That’s a college semester’s worth of discussion, and our media appears to be structurally incapable of having it.
In our short-fused, artificial, two-sided media environment, anything that takes more than a paragraph to explain gets buried. Anything best understood as shades of gray instead of black against white becomes muted. But oversimplifications, codewords, and outright lies that are consistently repeated stick. Savvy political figures understand this ESPN effect and use it to manipulate the public conversation. It’s been a feature of the 2008 presidential campaign so far, and despite Barack Obama’s remarkably successful efforts to rise above the normal constraints of political discourse, his opponents will continue to hammer their “message” as methodically as a mechanic smoothing out a fender.
Say you’re threatened, scared, or otherwise made uncomfortable by the prospect of a President Obama. You think that associating him with our nation’s historical distaste for angry black men will hurt his campaign. Here’s what you do: find a major media outlet. Set up your own artificial yes/no argument by asking whether Obama must “answer” for attending Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church. Then say yes, ignore Obama’s actual answers, and reference Wright’s angry black bogeyman statements. It’s like having your own Coors Light Six Pack of Questions, except that you’re undermining democratic discourse instead of breaking down a playoff game.
Like this:
George Will, country club conservative: “Wright's paranoias tell us something—exactly what remains to be explored—about his 20-year parishioner.” Ah ha! Something dark and mysterious is out there to be found, like Kurtz exploring the Congo.
Michael Gerson, moralizing former Bush speechwriter: “A smart, passionate pastor such as Wright naturally wants his views to influence his own congregation. He has every right to ask Obama, ‘Have you just now noticed my most basic beliefs? Have you really been asleep in the pew for 20 years?’" See, Obama can’t disagree with Wright, or at least he shouldn’t if he’s a good Christian.
Ed Koch, crotchety old Clinton supporter: “He has not explained why he sat in the church's pews for 20 years without complaint.” That’s not true: Obama delivered an entire speech explaining that.
The kamikaze campaign controversy piloted by Obama’s old pastor is the latest example of a multi-faceted issue of national importance getting distorted in the media for political advantage. Judging by the results in North Carolina and Indiana it obviously hasn’t derailed his campaign. But we haven’t seen the last of Rev. Wright, or other examples of “the politics of division and distraction” as Obama put it in his speech Tuesday night, because division and distraction are operationally fundamental to the modern news media. Division and distraction is its bread and butter, the key to a desperate bid for eyeballs and advertising dollars when so much information is now available for free. Traditionally campaigns, especially losing ones like Clinton’s and McCain’s, are happy to ply the media with disciplined message politics. Obama’s campaign isn’t perfect, but as a candidate he’s shown with issues like race and the gas tax that sometimes principle overrides easy answers.
ESPN’s genius works. For the past decade the sports network has been remarkably profitable, carrying once dominant sister companies ABC and Disney on their back. ESPN has made itself essential to the lives of practically every sports fan and professional athlete by building an empire where nuance is sacrificed for the sake of simplicity, entertainment outweighs accuracy, and the biggest sin is to leave your audience with an ambiguous conclusion.
But sports are diversions, something that can be endlessly and simply argued about becuase the results of a game don’t cost 4,000 American lives in Iraq. Games don’t have anything to do with the executive branch’s erosion of the rule of law, or economic policy favoring the rich at the expense of the poor, or the legacy of racism. Those issues are decided by politics, and in politics sometimes the truth doesn’t fit onscreen in a colorful banner graphic. It’d be a welcome change if our leading media outlets realized the difference.
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