THE END OF POLITICS?
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interest in foreign policy. International affairs gain their attention only
when catastrophes abroad are reported or by the reluctant realization
that a foreign crisis requires unavoidable American involvement.
Yet for the past fifty years, it has been accepted that the mass media
has a public responsibility to provide forums for foreign policy discussions
to take place during campaigns, whatever the level of public awareness
or popular concern. This year, the difference reflects, in part, a media
decision not to provide amplification or resonance for the discussion of
foreign policy issues. Instead, the recurrent effort to introduce these issues
into news forums were greeted by a media echo chamber, with the re–
verberating message that these issues were distractions raised to interfere
with the overwhelming concern of the American people about the sad
state of the economy.
However, the campaign discussion of economic policy also provides
support for the claim that the media does play a role in setting the
agenda.
It
rests upon the discrepancy between the realities of the eco–
nomic situation, from the point of view of an impartial spectator, and
the perception of that situation as projected in the major media. Simply
put, the picture of the economy that emerged from media coverage was
that the American economy was a "disaster area." Just as it may represent
bias to stress only the favorable figures, so it may be construed as bias to
place most of the focus on the negative numbers. The pervasiveness of
this negative domestic economic portrait has fixed the public agenda.
This "agenda-setting" claim has meant that any political campaign at–
tempt to shift the focus back to the good news side of the ledger has
opened the way for an image of the presidency as insulated from or not
caring about the victims of hard times.
This, in turn, raises the further question of how the Republican
presidency has become vulnerable to such charges. It goes beyond the
reasonably narrow question of media agenda-setting during a political
campaign to the broader issue of how the images and characterizations
of historical decades are set. If the media provide a species of instant his–
tory, then their influence on fixing or keeping the historical record is
considerable. Subject to future historical revisions, it is within their
power to decide whether, for example, the sixties are to be seen as a
decade of legitimate protest and effective compassion or of irresponsible
and counterproductive unrealism, or that the eighties were a decade of
greed rather than of sustainable growth.
Whatever the response to these questions, raising them reflects in
some degree Arthur Schlesinger's thesis of the changes in the power of
the media compared to the political party in recent American history.
An
interesting hypothesis on this change is that the critical turning point
was Watergate. The events of Watergate together can be seen as an ex-
