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.”1 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.
- Bill Moyers, Keynote Address to the National Conference on Media Reform, November 8, 2003, Madison, Wisconsin. Posted on www.commondreams.org. [↩]
