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COMMENTARY
October 27, 2004
Letter to USA, IV
One week from today we may or may not know the result of the U.S. presidential election. Tens of thousands of lawyers employed by both parties stand waiting to contest results Florida-style in each swing state. The polls indicate it is exceedingly close both in popular vote and in the electoral college and different polls show different trendlines. The number of swing states appears to be increasing. Voter turnout is itself less predictable for this election than for any recent one in the U.S. -- the people are far from indifferent about the result. Advance polls show an extraordinary climb in voter participation. And the stakes keep rising. Several appalling terror strikes in Iraq -- given detailed saturation coverage by media which overwhelmingly oppose George W. Bush and believe a torrent of bad news could still defeat him -- have probably helped to tighten the race together with bad news from other fronts (oil price up stock market down) given similarly loving attention. Good news -- e.g. the successful conclusion of Afghanistan's first election and the reclaiming of towns that had fallen to the Jihadis in Iraq is being consciously spiked. Indeed the whole business of news-gathering is being transformed before our eyes. In one sense we are returning to the habits of another era when local dailies flourished their rival partisanships as much on front as on editorial pages. But as competition between railway companies gave way to competition instead between trains buses and then planes for the same passengers so is media competition developing. The medium has become the message though not quite in the way our Canadian sage Marshall McLuhan observed. If you want to know what John F. Kerry's campaign wants you to know and nothing more you read the big newspapers or watch the evening news on the established TV networks. But if you want to know something else you turn to the Internet or talk radio or cable. The "old media" are the trains in this analogy: no longer competing locally on both sides but now one big Democrat machine. The "new media" now offer the crazy quilt within which one must look for the Republican messaging services. Yet this is itself a spot reflection of a class or even tribal division within the larger society. The two U.S. parties no longer disagree about how to solve problems which both acknowledge. They have become by increments and largely unaware proxies for alternative worlds in which entirely different events are happening. I notice this whenever I tune in CNN or the New York Times. I feel as if I am getting the news from another planet it so little resembles what I know to be happening on this one. Take for example the extensive play given in the last two days to the story of 380 tons of high-grade munitions missing from a storage depot in Iraq. My own U.S. Army-sourced information -- stuff I've known since May of last year which is beginning to check out with other sources -- is that the material in question (HMX and RDX at Al Qaqaa) was almost certainly moved before U.S. troops even entered Iraq. Moreover I believe the New York Times which broke the story will prove to have had as its ultimate source U.N. (specifically IAEA) officials whose motives for shopping it should have been questioned. But it was presented unchecked as fact in big headlines which are now disappearing as the story falls apart. It gets better (or worse depending on your views). It now appears from media sources leaking all over the place that the New York Times "scooped" CBS on the story. Now CBS (which previously broadcast the fake memos on Mr. Bush's military service) was planning to roll it out on Sunday night so that it would play across the mainstream media on election eve and could not possibly be corrected until the voting was over. What makes these games the more startling is to see that the Democrats employ such "news" as talking points in live time. Within moments of this Times "scoop" Mr. Kerry had put the allegations to the front of his stump speeches. By doing so he showed himself to be more the creature of the media than vice versa: itself a very revealing quality in a presidential candidate. This is not symmetrical incidentally. The Bush campaign has not for instance used allegations from the "Swift Vets" against Mr. Kerry even though most of these stand unrefuted after many months. The Republicans have stretched their share of rhetorical points which is what happens in politics but have not entered so far as I can see into their own version of an alternative world. I fear they will if they lose the election. One wonders aloud: is this not the recipe for the "perfect storm" -- a Madrid-style terror strike on the eve of the election? David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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