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PARTISAN REVIEW
that time is now upon us. Thank you.
William Phillips:
Thank you both. We will turn the discussion over
to the audience, and may I remind you that before the panelists began,
we agreed to confine our discussion to the basic issues and not to address
the particular merits or demerits of each candidate. Edith Kurzweil will
now moderate. Is there a comment from the audience to begin our dis–
cussion?
David Sidorsky:
I should like to connect Mr. Schelsinger's theme of
the changes in the role of the media in the political process with Mr.
Breindel's reference to the inclusions and exclusions of the political dis–
cussion during the electoral campaign. To a significant degree, the media
have asserted their ability to "set the agenda" of American political de–
bate. Any body that functions as the instrument of the perception of re–
ality has power in shaping or focusing the objects that will enter into
the field of perception. This seems to me to be ubiquitously evident in
news reporting. Our culture's major media of perception and interpreta–
tion of the news - that is,
The New York Times, The Washington Post,
the
three television networks, and
Time
and
Newsweek
as the recognized
group of nonconspiring and noncolluding prestige media - share in the
power to select, among the myriad happenings throughout the world,
those which are to receive the status of events, while others are relegated
below the threshold of perception. In terms of two competing philo–
sophical approaches, it marks a recognition of the power of the subjec–
tive thesis of Bishop Berkeley, that "to be is to be perceived," against
the realism of Bishop Butler that "each thing is what it is and not an–
other thing."
One of the crucial tests of this thesis would be found in explaining
the virtual exclusion of foreign policy issues from this year's presidential
campaigns. Despite the demise of the Soviet Union, there is no doubt
that the American role in world affairs is still important, with decisive
consequences for domestic policy. Certainly there are issues that distin–
guish the two parties in the conduct of foreign policy. Yet at no time
during the presidential campaigns has the issue of foreign policy emerged
on the agenda of political debate or national concern. There are alter–
native ways of explaining this extraordinary exclusion which do not re–
quire that we conclude the media has set the agenda. For example, the
Democratic Party pursued its appropriate strategy of minimizing discus–
sion of foreign policy questions, while the Republican Party campaign
showed itself inept in generating public discussion of these questions.
Further, the American people, characteristically, have never had a great
