The Looking Glass of Conventional Media

Norman Solomon
Sat, 06 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700
Opinion

A convention is in the eye of the beholder.

Twenty years ago, at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, the media buzz was all about Michael Dukakis and his closest rival, Jesse Jackson.

Dukakis had accumulated a dominant quantity of delegates. And the talking heads on the TV networks were dispensing conventional wisdom with the media story line — urging him to be a "moderate," unbeholden to "special interests."
Updated: Fri Sep 05, 2008

A convention is in the eye of the beholder.

Twenty years ago, at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, the media buzz was all about Michael Dukakis and his closest rival, Jesse Jackson.

Dukakis had accumulated a dominant quantity of delegates. And the talking heads on the TV networks were dispensing conventional wisdom with the media story line — urging him to be a "moderate," unbeholden to "special interests."

Who were those "special interests"? According to corporate media, they were advocates for women's rights, organized labor, low-income people, the environment and so forth.

At a park not far from the amphitheater, the day before the '88 convention opened, I took notes while Jesse Jackson spoke to several thousand people across a meadow: "We the people must keep hope alive. ... The pain of a hungry baby; whether white, black or brown — hunger hurts. ... We want a democracy of the many and not the aristocracy of the few. ... All blood is royal blood. ... It's so basic. We want to share. ... Hold on. Don't surrender your dreams."

I was there as a journalist. For the next few days I walked around, inside and outside the convention hall, with press credentials around my neck.

Countless big-name journalists praised the nominee for sticking to "the center" and keeping Jesse Jackson — symbol of those "special interests" — at arm's length. Dukakis left Atlanta with a 17-point lead over the incumbent president, George H. W. Bush. And, in the fall, Dukakis dutifully ran a "moderate" campaign while his lead collapsed.

Since then, I've gone to four other Democratic National Conventions, each time as a journalist — except for the one that just ended in Denver, where I was an Obama delegate. On the surface, a lot has changed in the party. But just how much has really changed is unclear.

In Atlanta, 20 years ago, the Jackson delegates — many of them African American — were on the outside of the party's power, looking in. And, overall, the major media were edgy about the insurgency of so-called "special interests." Most of the media narratives favored the predictably stolid Dukakis and the "national interest" (Wall Street, military contractors, etc.) that he represented.

In Denver, a week ago, it was less clear who has a grip on the party. Barack Obama is no Jesse Jackson — the 2008 nominee is much more corporately reliable than Jackson — but a wheel of politics is turning, and possibilities exist for significant social change via the Democratic Party.

Still, the obstacles are huge. Key progressive concerns — for instance, about a shortage of economic justice and a profusion of spending for the warfare state — are no more part of the mass-media focus now than they were two decades ago. The priorities of the nominee are still in some kind of synergistic dance with the preoccupations of the nation's corporate media establishment.

Many pivotal questions remain off the media table. For instance: Should the government keep spending $2 billion per day on the Pentagon? Is it really a good idea to escalate the war in Afghanistan by increasing the U.S. troop levels there? Why not implement a "Medicare for all" (a.k.a. "single payer") healthcare system in the United States instead of letting the profit-driven insurance industry block healthcare for people who need it?

At a political party's national convention, the job descriptions of journalists and delegates are supposed to be quite different. In theory, the journalist tries to uncover and illuminate truth, while the delegate sticks to the presidential campaign's talking points.

I like the sound of that journalistic job description. Too bad, instead, journalists routinely run in a herd and rut themselves into narrow grooves.

As for delegates — well, I think the virtues of top-down talking points are vastly overrated.

"The system presents itself as eternal," writer Eduardo Galeano has commented. "The power system tells us that tomorrow is another word for today."

But tomorrow can be different. As Galeano observed: "There is no greater truth than the search for truth."

Norman Solomon's latest book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," has been adapted into a documentary film of the same name. For details, go to: www.normansolomon.com.