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Anna Marie Smith,
"Sex Scandals, 'Responsible Fatherhood' and the 2008 Election Campaign:
When 'Sex Talk' Trumps Race and Class"
(page 2 of 7)
Part of the response to the sex scandals has to revolve around media
reform: stopping the mega-mergers between content providers,
distributors, advertisers, and corporate giants; breaking up the
corporate conglomerates through vigorous anti-trust regulation;
dissolving the cozy relationship between corporate lobbyists and the
governmental agencies charged with regulating the media; and empowering
the non-commercial alternative media.
Every government, to a greater or lesser extent, loathes aggressive
journalism and tries to encroach upon a citizen's right to know. Even if
governing parties and officials suffer from the immediate impact of a
sexual scandal, we should consider the ways in which sexual scandal
serves authoritarian interests over the long run, insofar as
sensationalism displaces real news and creates the simulacrum of an
informed public. Bill Moyers contrasts today's journalism with the
muckraking reporting of the progressive era that targeted "the shame of
the cities, the crimes of the trusts, the treason of the Senate and the
villainies of those who sold tainted meat and poisonous
medicines."[5]
Now the precious little muckraking energies that actually thrive in the
corporate media are devoted almost exclusively to sexual scandal. This
is the symbiotic relationship between the corporate media and the
imperial State to which Moyers refers.
The United States is at war in two different countries: Iraq and
Afghanistan. The economy is in a crisis, and inequality continues to
escalate far beyond the already intolerable levels reached in the 1990s.
It is only with a vibrant and fiercely oppositional press that we can
hold our elected officials accountable and mobilize against the abuse of
governmental and corporate power. We need investigative journalism on
social justice issues, high-quality independent commentary, and the use
of the latest technology to present economic, political, and military
news in a lively manner. (If they can zip up baseball statistics and
weather forecasting without sacrificing substance, then surely they
could make quality reporting on Wall Street and the Pentagon more
accessible.)
This is not to say that the U.S. audience is utterly naïve when it
comes to media consumption. On the contrary, the often biting political
satire of programs like The Jon Stewart Show, The Colbert
Report, and Saturday Night Live, and the endless loops of
political parody videos posted on YouTube, were a constant feature of
the 2008 primaries and election season. The first problem with American
satire, however, is that it tends to track the sensationalist agenda of
the mainstream corporate media. With few exceptions, such as Michael
Moore's films, the satirists do not uncover and critique the ways in
which sexual scandals and sensationalism divert our attention from
serious economic problems and social injustice.
Second, American satire sometimes ends up contributing to the very
representational problems that it targets for critique. Satirizing a
complicated figure such as Sarah Palin, the Republican Governor of
Alaska who brought her religious right credentials to John McCain's
presidential ticket when she was tapped as his vice president nominee,
is never a simple matter. While Palin richly deserved to be placed under
a harsh spotlight for many of her extreme views, the satirical
portrayals of her candidacy borrowed a little too much from the
misogynist playbook. It was not always clear whether the critics were
making fun of her because her opinions could not be squared with
mainstream American principles of corporate responsibility, transparent
government, and tolerance for diverse viewpoints. It may be objectively
true that she was grossly unqualified for the V.P. office, but the fact
that the Republicans were cynical enough to think that her
qualifications were unimportant is revealing. When they rail against
affirmative action, Republicans conjure up an image of higher education
institutions that have been hijacked by liberal administrators who
ignore merit and jeopardize standards in their bid to diversify
campuses. In this case, it was the Republicans themselves who were guilty
of promoting a woman into the top echelons of a man's game who simply
could not hold her own ground, let alone win votes for the party's
ticket. If Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) scored a first for women in 2008
by narrowly losing the Democratic primaries to Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL),
Palin's V.P. candidacy nevertheless connected women's leadership to
farcical and disastrous imagery.
The fact that Palin was dubbed the representative of the Republican
Party's future (after the decisive Obama-Biden victory) only added to
the female gendering of political failure. This presents a possibility
of serious polarization. The political center and the left are becoming
more comfortable with women's leadership, and the religious right
grassroots men and women certainly turned out in large enthusiastic
crowds for Palin. It is not clear, however, that the Republican Party's
male elite will easily disregard the memories of feminized incompetence
and failure when it comes time to select a new crop of congressional and
presidential hopefuls.
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