Why let the public in?

• Author: Douglas, Susan
• Position: Media ignores anti-Iraq invasion opinions in Feb '98 - Talking Back - Column - Brief Article

In the midst of those endless, artsy, black-and-white investment firm ads that advise us to get our IRAs in shape now or face a retirement of grubbing through garbage cans, in the midst of yet another debate about whether Kenneth Starr has gone too far, we got to see something nearly extinct on television: regular folks questioning, even yelling at, government officials about American foreign policy.

While some letters to the editor around the country -- and especially in the Columbus Dispatch -- expressed embarrassment and irritation over the questioning of authority at the now infamous Ohio State "town meeting," I think many viewers were exhilarated to see something that wasn't staged and managed by the White House. The tough questions and reasoned views of many "ordinary" people captured what is missing from TV news -- public discourse about public policy.

Miffed that CNN had an exclusive on the event, the other networks were happy to give the demonstrators a brief platform in the service of showing up their competitor. Nevertheless, these were still demonstrators. Rare was the story that did not use the terms "unruly," "raucous," and "disruptive." The New York Times trivialized the protesters as "over-caffeinated students." Few reported that Bernard Shaw -- who you may remember hiding under his hotel bed in terror while assigned to cover Desert Storm from Baghdad -- screamed at protesters that they were "not going to be allowed to disrupt" his ninety-minute program.

The news media did what they usually do unless there are 750,000 people out in the streets. They emphasized issues of spin over issues of substance and failed to follow up on this well-coordinated outburst of student activism in America. With their rolodexes filled with the numbers of former generals, their market research insisting that people would rather hear about liposuction than foreign policy, their assumption that young people don't care about current affairs, the mainstream media have become uninterested in, even hostile to, the sort of energy that burst forth at Ohio State.

While the Charleston Post and Courier wrote that "unruly democracy broke out" at the Ohio State "town meeting," CBS summed up the conventional line about the event: "a public relations disaster." Peter Jennings also cast the encounter between citizens and officials as a story primarily about public relations, with an Administration that "took it right between the eyes." Meredith Bagby, the...