Vol. 2 No. 6 (October 2003)

Uncommon Denominator

The Newsletter of the Commonweal Institute
www.commonwealinstitute.org

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin

Talking Points: George W. Bush, hunter
Wit and Wisdom: The trials of Rush Limbaugh
Eye on the Right: Unfair and imbalanced, and now there's proof
Featured Article: Brent Cunningham on journalistic objectivity
Quoted! Mel Gibson on Manichaean ontology
Happenings: New CI report on "tort reform", and more
Endorsements: CTA Executive Director Carolyn Doggett
Get Involved: Spread the word; become a contributor

TALKING POINTS

Within days of 9/11, President George W. Bush began using the language of the hunt. "We will hunt down" the terrorists. Osama Bin Laden "can run but he can't hide." More recently, "we are on the hunt" for violent elements in Iraq.

This rhetoric might seem reasonable enough; certainly, it captures the basic reality of an anti-terror policy that gives priority to military rather than diplomatic strategies. But the language of the hunt carries a unique cultural force that helps to explain how we got to where we are today.

The administration generally tries to take the high road by formulating its policies in intellectual and moral terms, but there is no denying that fear, hatred, rage, and vengeance have all figured centrally in the country's response to 9/11. Were it solely a question of rational judgment, without the visceral sense of collective violation, Americans might have insisted, over the last two years, on a more balanced, thoughtful approach to terrorism - one that would seek to build alliances and strengthen cultural bridges, to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, to help young Arabs achieve their aspirations, to call upon the most privileged of us to sacrifice a bit more for the general good.

And were it solely a question of rational judgment, Americans might remember that 3,000 dead in the twin towers pales next to the number of Americans shot and killed each year by their own countrymen (upwards of 10,000, not including accidental gun deaths). All that means, of course, is that the 9/11 death toll, horrific as it may be, is not really the issue. The sudden intensity of the violence has something to do with it, as does the endless repetition of graphic images in the media. Fundamentally, however, the issue is the foreignness of the attackers, the fact that they hailed, and still hail, from outside the cultural fence. We can kill ourselves in vast numbers, but God help anybody else who kills us. We will hunt them down.

Thus the administration, despite the shakiness of their arguments, and despite the fact that Americans had not even given it much thought, could rally public support around an invasion of Iraq. At some level, Afghanistan was just not satisfying enough. We wanted to take down somebody else, and were eager to accept the intellectual and moral arguments that would create the opportunity to do so. And we wanted a strong leader in this effort, a father figure, a hero. This desire expresses an elemental human need for security, but it also ties into deeply rooted American cultural myths that go all the way back to the Puritans.

The scholar Richard Slotkin has described one of these myths as "regeneration through violence." The argument gets complicated, but his basic idea is that the country's representative figures have extended the domain of American civilization by temporarily crossing into the wilderness, into its vitality and savagery, in order to clear the way for the people and values they represent. One of these figures is the hunter, who reappears throughout American history in the form of various literary and cultural icons: Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, Natty Bumppo and Captain Ahab, Rambo and Dirty Harry. One hesitates to add George W. Bush to this formidable roster, but Slotkin's description of the hunter's defining quest certainly sheds some light on the last two years:

His adventure is an initiation and a conversion in which he achieves communion with the powers that rule the universe beyond the frontiers and acquires a new moral character, a new set of powers or gifts, a new identity. . . . The consummation of his hunting quest in the killing of the quarry confirms him in his new and higher character and gives him full possession of the powers of the wilderness. Through the ordeal and discipline of the hunt and its culmination in violence, the hero has achieved a regeneration of the spirit . . . What nominally prevents [the hunter's] code from becoming merely a glorification of egotistical opportunism is the ethic of self-restraint that accompanies it. The hunter possesses a natural humility, a reverence for something greater than himself (God, nature) that checks the full expression of his will.

From this perspective, the President looks less like an unusually privileged and lucky scion of the American aristocracy, and more like our hunter-in-chief. Seeing him in these terms helps to explain not just the overwhelmingly military focus of the "war on terror," but also its rhetorical and political features: the markedly personal quality to it, pitting the hero against the villains; the President's sense of religious mission; the narrative of his "coming of age" as commander-in-chief; the swaggering machismo. One might object that "natural humility" has been sorely lacking in the administration's policy, but what underlies the myth is the performance of humility, the insistence that we are using our power responsibly, for moral ends, rather than in some orgy of violent retribution.

So when critics of the administration, particularly Europeans, deride Bush as a "cowboy," the criticism doesn't go very far with American audiences. For the cowboy, as one version of the heroic hunter, occupies a sacred place in the American imagination - not because he herds cattle, but because he symbolizes the vanguard of civilization as it extends itself into the dark places of the world (Western Nevada, the Mekong Delta, the Sunni Triangle). Yet the hunter, to avoid repudiation, cannot fail. He must produce results; he must make the kill. George Bush the Elder failed to make the kill in 1991, and lost at the polls, so his son seems all the more determined to make it now.

Yet Americans, who seem so intractably caught between self-delusion and clear-eyed pragmatism, should not forget that the myth of the heroic hunter comes with profound costs. Slotkin offers this warning: "Believing in the myth of regeneration through the violence of the hunt, the American hunters [during westward expansion] eventually destroyed the natural conditions that had made possible their economic and social freedom, their democracy of social mobility. Yet the mythology and the value system it supported remained even after the objective conditions that had justified it had vanished." And that is where we find ourselves today.

Other warnings come to mind as well. We must remain vigilant against the time when the hunter becomes a demagogue or a bandit, when the hunt becomes an end in itself, when we discover, too late, that after all we ourselves have become the prey.

WIT AND WISDOM

"There is an investigation now, and they say Rush Limbaugh could go to prison. You thought he was against gay marriages before!" -- Jay Leno

EYE ON THE RIGHT

Call it the American Al Jazeera. Call it the Bush News Agency. Call it whatever you want, but don't call it fair and balanced.

Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, as any half-sensible, half-informed American knows, leans hard to the right in its politics, despite its patently Orwellian slogan "fair and balanced." Now there's clear evidence that Fox News has contributed - more than its fair share - to the misperceptions that Americans have about the conflict in Iraq.

On Oct. 2, the Program on International Policy and Attitudes (PIPA), an ultra-respectable, non-partisan research institute, released a study titled "Misperceptions, The Media, and the Iraq War." The report concluded that "a substantial portion of the [American] public had a number of misperceptions that were demonstrably false, or were at odds with the dominant view in the intelligence community." The three biggest misperceptions were the beliefs that:

1) Iraq either was directly involved in 9/11 or provided substantial support to Al Qaeda;
2) weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq or even used during the war itself; and
3) world public opinion supported the war.

The study also found that the extent of these misperceptions varied significantly according to where the respondents were getting most of their news.

None of the main news sources the study included came away with entirely clean hands, but PIPA found that "Fox News watchers were most likely to hold misperceptions - and were three times more likely than the next nearest network to hold all three misperceptions." CBS came next, followed by ABC (ditto), NBC, CNN, and the print media. People who got most of their news from PBS or NPR held the fewest misperceptions. Crucially, the study controlled for demographic variables across the audiences, so the results cannot be explained away as the effect of demographic variation. Republicans who watch Fox, for instance, are more likely to experience the three key misperceptions than Republicans who listen to PBS-NPR (54% to 32%). (Click here to read more about the study's methodology).

Unfortunately, watching more news is not the solution - it is the problem. PIPA found that "[a]mong those who primarily watch Fox, those who pay more attention are more likely to have misperceptions." (Again, the other networks are not excluded from this finding; only those respondents who follow the print media, the study reported, gain more accurate perceptions by paying more attention to the news. But nonetheless, Fox was the worst of the lot).

While all journalists should be sobered by this study, one suspects that the cadre of ideologues in charge of content at Fox News just won't care, or will dismiss the study as they dismiss so much else that runs against their interests or their worldview. But the findings represent empirical confirmation of what many people knew about Fox already. They give the lie to Fox's pretense of providing balance to a political dialogue that Rupert Murdoch and his ilk accuse of "liberal bias."

No serious journalist pretends to be able to achieve perfect objectivity, but the fundamental ethic of the profession holds that a search for the truth, and an accurate presentation of what that search turns up, must be undertaken in good faith, and with great respect for the effect this news has on the audience. What Fox News has done is to let its ideology corrupt its journalism, and unless they are called on it, this threatens to corrupt our democracy. When a major network that sells itself as the voice of reason and neutrality actively hinders the public from accurately understanding a conflict that will cost so much blood and treasure, Americans should shudder. And they should switch the channel.

FEATURED ARTICLE

The following is an excerpt from "Rethinking Objective Journalism," by Brent Cunningham, managing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review:

"The press operates under a number of conflicting diktats: be neutral yet investigative; be disengaged but have an impact; be fair-minded but have an edge. Therein lies the nut of our tortured relationship with objectivity. Few would argue that complete objectivity is possible, yet we bristle when someone suggests we aren't being objective - or fair, or balanced - as if everyone agrees on what these words all mean. Over the last dozen years a cottage industry of bias police has sprung up to exploit this fissure in the journalistic psyche...."

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Uncommon Denominator

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