THE END OF POLITICS?
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point. There are a lot of people who wonder whether the climate of
uncertainty - and it's almost a climate of fear that one perceives as a re–
sult of watching the national news with respect to the national economy
- is indeed appropriate to real economic circumstances. How bad things
actually are is open to debate. There are people in the Clinton camp,
for example, who right now will tell you that they see things moving
upward; that they see things getting better; that traditional economic in–
dices suggest that we are not so ravaged economically as most Americans
seem to believe. But these people admit that there is no particular reason
to acknowledge this reality in advance of Election Day. Do people
reflect on their own personal experience when they conclude that things
are going badly? Or does the media contribute to this sensibility? I think
it has to be that the media contributes. You know, we talk about, for
example, how television actually works and how news stories are shown.
One recent illustration is the discussion of the North American Free
Trade Agreement, which one of the candidates in particular was afraid
to acknowledge he had supported, for a long time, because - in his
perception - it spoke to the issue of job flight. It meant the closing of
plants here and the flight of American jobs abroad. And I think that this
response was a direct function of the fact that the only visual image that
national television can come up with to illustrate a subject as complex as
the North American Free Trade Agreement is a closed plant. That is an
actual image; that is what you will see on the nightly news. The result is
a media-driven interpretation of major national events. And I suspect
that media-driven interpretations inform the general climate.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr:
I would offer some qualifications. In the first
place, the media are not monolithic. (Here I resist the notion of regard–
ing "media" as a subject commanding a singular verb.) It may well be
that we do not have the intensely partisan press that we had in the nine–
teenth century, but the idea that the media operate in conspiratorial
unity is obviously quite wrong. You see plenty of press and television on
different sides of the questions. Nor do I think that so far as agenda-set–
ting is concerned, the media are more powerful than the president of the
United States.
For instance, during the whole period of the 1980s, the agenda was
set, and very foolishly set, in my view, by Reagan. We now recognize
some of the consequences of Reagan's agenda-setting. Probably the most
disastrous law that's been passed since World War II was the tax cut of
1981,
which, combined with the increase in the defense budget, resulted
in tripling the national debt and the succession of deficits. The whole as–
sumption behind this act was that tax cuts would pay for themselves,
which we know is not true. But Reagan set the agenda, and the media
