Jesse-Justin Cuevas, Columnist
Ideology: Liberal Independent | Writing from: Brooklyn, NY
We vote for our elected officials, but after Election Day how involved are we in the shaping policy? Maybe more than we tend to complain.
Journalism cultivates public opinion, and arguably, it always has. Reporting current events and worthy public occurrences has been a profession and hobby of many dating back to the 1400s, and the 1600s in the English-speaking world. The Northeast spearheaded the newspaper industry in the 1700s, and with the industrial revolution came the nationally widespread emergence of the newspaper, proper. In the early 20th century, the “media” entered the scholarly arena as an academic and intellectual issue, with writers and thinkers such as Walter Lippmann and John Dewey positing the potentially problematic relationships between the newsmakers, the news writers and the newsreaders. The written word has shaped our knowledge and consciousness of world happenings for centuries.
That journalism affects public opinion never has been a question up for debate, but how it directly affects politics and public policy is a little more complicated with the on-going contemporary evolution of the media.
In the early 20th century, Walter Lippmann wrote Public Opinion, a bleak proposal that the press could not be trusted to formulate an opinion about current events. After its publication, Lippmann became the editorial director of the The World, a contemporary leading liberal journal, where for nearly a decade he wrote a daily editorial for the “man on the street.” Lippmann, instead of retreating to “an academic tower to write obscure treatises, or become a government official beyond the reach of the voters,” he sought “to anticipate and to supplement the insight of his fellow men into the problems of their adjustment to reality.” He threw himself into the public sphere and aimed to clarify political psychology.
Clearly not everyone has the opportunity to write an editorial to be read by thousands or even millions of Americans, but the politicians and their teams probably—and certainly ought to—follow the debate in the comments sections on (internet) publications. And opinion polls and approval ratings supposedly play pretty strongly into the actions of some party members. And now, with constantly updated online news and the birth of the blogosphere comes a gathering of thinkers, a creation of a (potentially short-lived) political community around local, national and international events.
In a recent New York Magazine article, Kurt Anderson concedes the legitimacy of the popular concern over democracy’s peril in a country as large as ours. “The framers [of the Constitution] worried about democratic government working in a country as large as this one, and it’s possible that we’ve finally reached the unmanageable tipping point they feared: Maybe our republic’s constitutional operating system simply can’t scale up to deal satisfactorily with a heterogeneous population of 310 million,” he writes.
I heard that argument a thousand times when working abroad in Venezuela. So many locals who spoke to me about the political climates of our very different nations would assure me that participatory democracy “just can’t happen” in a place as geographically and demographically vast as the United States. At the time, I shrugged my shoulders sadly and hoped to disagree.
In our world of sorely unrepresentative government, where local and community politics see the active participation of few, has the editorial (and the ensuing public opinion) filled the gap where national, state or citywide referenda are lacking? And is this a suitable substitution?
“In the old days, the elite media really did control the national political discourse,” Anderson writes. The olden days he refers to are the days before bloggers, podcasts, nonstop talk radio and free online news. “Until fifteen years ago, presidents and congressional leaders could pretty well manage the policy conversations, keep them on reasonable simmer. But the new technologies have, maybe permanently, turned up the political heat to boil.” Anderson continues.
His argument is an interesting one. I for one am used to hearing (and complaining, admittedly) that our government is undemocratic, unrepresentative, and inaccessible. Anderson does not put up with such noise. Rather, he posits, that’s how it was supposed to be. Now, however, democracy is killing democracy. James Madison & Co. created a democracy with very undemocratic aims to keep those masses “too easily stimulated by some irregular passion…or misled by the artful misrepresentations” at bay, but our current situation, thanks to the “new means of 24/7 cable and the hyperdemocratic web,” is a Republic busting at the seams with such irregular passions and artful misrepresentations.
That is the potential power of the editorial. To some extent, politicians no longer regulate our opinions; we regulate theirs.
Take for instance the hooplah over New York’s current governor, David Paterson.
Certainly the editorials surrounding Paterson’s controversy have shaped my knowledge, understanding and, therefore, opinion about Paterson’s success as governor—that is to be expected. But the fact that the written back-and-forth between editors and readers has propelled political action says something about the state of civilian political participation.
Paterson has been caught in a crisis of confidence since last fall, when his approval rating dropped from 75 percent to a mere 17 percent. Amidst rumors of a sex scandal, it is also clear that Paterson tolerated accusations of domestic abuse against one of his closest confidantes, David Johnson, and may have contributed to a campaign of witness tampering to interfere in Johnson’s prosecution.
When the governor’s dwindling approval ratings ceased to improve, President Obama urged Paterson to remove himself from the governor’s race last September. When Paterson refused to follow suit and the controversy’s plot thickened, New York City’s leading daily news sources called for his resignation in front-page editorials this past Friday morning. “Time to go, Dave,” read New York Post’s headline. The New York Daily News reported that Paterson had “demeaned his high office” and was not trustworthy.
On Friday, Paterson abandoned his campaign for election this November, citing the scandal as “too great a distraction from his mission to pull the state’s finances out of crisis,” the Associated Press reports. As of yet, Paterson is determined to govern the remaining 300-odd days of his term.
It’s hard to believe that Governor Paterson would refuse to step down at the “suggestion” of the President but would pull out of the race after some mighty grave press. And maybe the goings-on off the record aren’t direct cause and effect. Then again, editorials are like the bully pit; they may not have legislative power, but their political pressure is potent.
Does my opinion affect policy? No. I am not a revered or well-known writer for a mainstream publication. Although I won’t allow my personal readership or my Politicizer audience and the subsequent conversation to dupe me into a feeling of direct inclusion and participation in politics, the things I read and write are important in crafting an alternative state of political participation in America. Politics isn’t what it used to be, neither is leadership, nor is democracy, and it seems as though the media in its many veins is in many ways ahead of the game. As a wise man once sang, “the times they are a’changin” – so it’s only right that our opinions and outlets for venting do as well.