Perusing my copy of E.B. White's The Points of My Compass this morning on the subway--it's a terrific collection of the author's New Yorker "letters"; highly recommended--I stumbled on a passage that resonated nicely with the nation's attitude toward what it now calls the "mainstream media," especially in light of the report by Dana Milbank on Sarah Palin's recent rally in Clearwater, Fla. in today's Washington Post. According to Milbank, "in Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the
crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her 'less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.' At that, Palin
supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and
shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter
shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told
him, 'Sit down, boy.'"
Back to White. It was 1956. The author had just read an interview with Harry Truman in the New York Times in which the former president, reflecting on the 1948 election, claimed that the press--in White's paraphrasing--"was ninety percent hostile to his candidacy, distorted facts, caused his low popularity rating at that period, and tried to prevent him from reaching the people with his message in the campaign." Sound familiar?
The author had no trouble acknowledging Truman's complaint. "Democrats do a lot of bellyaching about the press being preponderantly Republican, which it is," he wrote. But as "a second-string member" of the media himself, White offered his readers a morsel of advice disguised as observation:
The beauty of the American free press is that the slants and the twists and the distortions come from so many directions, and the special interests are so numerous, the reader must sift and sort and check and countercheck in order to find out what the score is. This he does. It is only when a press gets its twist from a single source, as in the case of government-controlled press systems, that the reader is licked.
Fifty-two years later, "the slants and twists and distortions" have only become more numerous and multidirectional (even if readers no longer assume the press is "Republican"). But that's created a problem. Rather than encouraging the electorate to engage in an even more vigorous process of sifting and sorting and checking and counterchecking, the recent eruption of information has simply allowed a lot of people to ignore published material that doesn't confirm their own preconceptions. Thanks to cable news and the Internet, it's easy to dismiss a discordant dispatch as "biased" and seek out a show or site that echoes what you already believe.
This is too bad. It's not that the press is perfect. Far from it. It's that (political expediency aside) bashing the media is even more pointless now than it was then, when the news was far more monolithic. Today, voters have more power to sift and sort and check and countercheck, not less. It's up to them to use it. As White wrote, in 1948 "millions of studious, worried Americans heard and read what [Truman] said; then they checked it against the editorials; then they walked silently into the voting booths returned him to office." Here's hoping the press plays just as modest a role in this election as it did in that one--despite all the sound and fury. And the thunder sticks.
