Corporate media coverage of the 2008 presidential election has been rightly criticized for its inept analyses, frequent miss-readings of public sentiment, deep bias toward the status quo, and lazy habit of exploiting at-hand narratives that, in the end, are more like tales from another planet.
The progressive movement is all about the restoration of popular democracy, but the corporate media's acceptance of elite quasi-democracy remains a powerful obstacle. This is nowhere as apparent as in its discussion, or lack of a discussion, about racism, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
It is, maybe, the elite media's worst habit. They create or reinforce a public opinion environment and then step out of that environment and pretend they are covering something they themselves have not helped create. If politics is theatrical melodrama, it is as though they write the script, shape the action on stage, and then retreat to the audience and cover events as though they had no role in the production.
The West Virginia vote and the ongoing euphemism "white working class voters" is another telling episode from 2008, Act I.
Take Adam Nagourney's analysis of West Virginia in today's NYT. The Clinton victory is presented as something that happened "out there" as a consequence of a voter consciousness which the media has absolutely no responsibility for creating in the first place.
..some of the resistance that he [Obama] continues to face is almost certainly racial. In West Virginia, 20 percent of respondents said that race was a factor in their decision and those voters, by overwhelming number, backed Mrs. Clinton.
But accepting the obvious racist element in this vote -- and in measuring Obama's possibilities in the fall -- without acknowledging that racial attitudes are shaped and reinforced by the media environment in which citizens swim, is irresponsible. It's deluded, even.
The elite media's hand-washing and retreat to the balcony leaves unsaid certain obvious facts, like, "Clinton received many votes because she is not black."
But, more importantly, a phrase like Nagourney's "almost certainly racial," serves to legitimize a dramatic turn in the play that should be scrutinized as illegitimate in a democracy of equal citizens. While acknowledging media perceptiveness about race, such phrases back away and distance the media from any responsibility for racism's persistence in American political life.
The media dutifully and obediently showcased Jeremiah Wright for weeks, and then stepped away and pretended Wright somehow entered the consciousness of Americans with no help from the media at all.
It's time the elite media understood that their "in it but not of it" fantasy is not responsible neutrality but deluded destructiveness. They help set up West Virginia by reporting, "Hey, West Virginia voters, we don't want you to forget that Obama is black, Clinton is white, and Obama had a black preacher we're sure you'll be alarmed about."
Then, safely tucked in the audience once again, the media smugly publish their reviews. "See," they say to themselves. "We were right all along."
Of course they could accurately predict the script. They wrote it.
