June 21, 2001

12:19 PM

Press sez "good", public sez "bad"I'm not posting this story to discuss Bush's EU tour (lord knows we've done that one to death), but rather to examine this line: "Mr. Bush's European tour, though it drew largely upbeat news coverage, did not appear to help him in the eyes of the public." I'm a pretty big believer that the media (oh, let's just go ahead and capitalize it: "The Media") plays a huge role is shaping public perceptions of politicians, and I too thought the coverage of Bush's EU trip was pretty positive -- certainly in comparison to the "he's gonna go over there and get suckerpunched" predictions they were running before his departure. And, still, his numbers go down. What do you think? How large an influence does The Media really have? Does the public just believe what Peter Jennings tells 'em, or is it possible that, *gasp*, they can think for themselves?
posted by Shadowkeeper (32 comments total)

So, if people like George Bush, they are simply mindless sheep who swallow whatever *The Media* puts out for consumption, but if people don't like George Bush, then they are possessed of a sharp, active intelligence with accompanying wisdom & judgment? Um...there is plenty of room in between those extremes...isn't there, Shadowkeeper?

Me? I believe the media does not shape public opinion as much as reflect it, but I have no illusions that what the various organizations choose to cover affects the "Q" rating in the collective public awareness. But beyond merely "awareness," I honestly believe that most people interpret the data according to their pre-existing frame/s of reference - I don't know anyone who would say "I like George Bush because Peter Jennings seems to approve of him."
posted by davidmsc at 12:26 PM on June 21, 2001

Gosh, that's a mighty big question.

Usually politics ends at the water's edge. Of course, it doesn't always, but you kind of have to hope the President at least looks well when he goes on a foriegn trip, no matter how bad the policies are.
posted by brucec at 12:27 PM on June 21, 2001

Putin warning twig about bin-laden. He got suckerpunched. Ever been suckerpunched? gets ya mad and you always want to get even.( i have a neat picture of Semar, art bell wants to see it but i told him he gives shadows a bad name-im not rippin ya here, just a little humor in my general agreement to your post)
posted by clavdivs at 12:29 PM on June 21, 2001

I would suggest taking a look at some of the reaction from the foreign press rather than mainly American press...
posted by Postroad at 12:34 PM on June 21, 2001

The latest poll shows that the "American people" (whoever they are) are losing their confidence and trust in Bush.

This is either a sign that Americans are wising up...or that they are even more idiotic than feared: you voted for the guy, and now you're finaly realizing just how dangerous he actually is? Um, a little late for that.

The Media (I will follow Shadowkeeper's lead) have been ever so soft on W from the start. Guess they are finally realizing they will look stupid if they don't start reporting the very real and very frightening actions of this president.
posted by mapalm at 12:38 PM on June 21, 2001

Oops, seems my (yahoo) link was the same as Shadow's (nyt)...apologies.
posted by mapalm at 12:47 PM on June 21, 2001

I think Bush thrives in the public's low expectations of him. During the campaign he said on Letterman, "People have so low expectation of me, all I have to do is show up and say: 'Hi, I'm George 'Dubbya' Bush,' and they'll all clap and cheer." The audience did go nuts and cheered him on that comment.

I personally think Bush is smarter than the media portrays him. I think he encourages the media to portray him like a buffoon. If you are President of Poland and all your information about Bush comes from reading the New York Times, and after you meet him, he comes across as being more "normal" than the news reports made him out to be, you'd be pleasantly surprised.

Bush is the ultimate bait-and-switch character. I think he likes it that way.

European media were pleasantly surprised at Bush's not screwing up. [So I read in the Times.] There used to be a time when people expected leaders to lead with specific plans. Now no one expects Bush to have a detailed plan. He just has to stand there and smile and say, "There is a plan," and not say anything more about what the plan is. People will be content with just that. He is playing all of us for fools with our lower expectation of him.
posted by tamim at 12:50 PM on June 21, 2001

So, if people like George Bush, they are simply mindless sheep who swallow whatever *The Media* puts out for consumption, but if people don't like George Bush, then they are possessed of a sharp, active intelligence with accompanying wisdom & judgment?

Hey, thanks for putting words in my mouth, davidmsc! That saves me the trouble of having to type them myself!

Actually, I think most voters are pretty sharp, regardless of who they vote for. And yet I also believe the media shapes a lot of people's opinions, including my own. How does one reconcile these two ideas? Are people "possessed of a sharp, active intelligence with accompanying wisdom & judgment" *and* extremely malleable. Seems that way to me. We have some of the brightest folks in thw world here in the U.S. of A., and yet we still go through periods where everyone and their sister is doing the Macarana or buying a "Shit Happens" bumper sticker. And I'm 100 pages into "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius", so it's not like I'm immune to these trends.

So this story is of interest to me, because here we have a case where the press is out of sync with the public: they're going "rah!" while the public goes "bah!". Regardless of whether you believe that the public follows the press' lead or (as you suggest, davidmsc, vice versa) that strikes me as an anomaly. It'll be interesting to see if they continue to diverge, of if one will sync up with the other. And if the latter, which will do the sync'ing.
posted by Shadowkeeper at 12:57 PM on June 21, 2001

European media were pleasantly surprised at Bush's not screwing up.

He did fine. He's an affable, charismatic figure (I've never doubted that) and as tanim suggested, the media wasn't really expecting another "Ich bin ein Berliner" kind of thing. This was all about meeting, greeting, and not scoring cheap political points. Hence the slightly offbeat choice of stops: Madrid, Gothenburg, Warsaw, Ljubljana, rather than London, Paris, Berlin, where the press conferences would have been much more awkward. The fun starts in Genoa next month, with the G8, and some hard politicking.
posted by holgate at 1:15 PM on June 21, 2001

He's pulling a Reagan.
posted by Ezrael at 1:19 PM on June 21, 2001

Perhaps: though Europe split along the Iron Curtain in its judgement of Reagan. I'm sure that Bush got lots of cheers in Poland for reprising Ronnie's talk of liberation; back west, we all thought he was nutso in 1982. (And still can't work out the compulsion in the US to name things after him.)

But I do find this addiction to "instant popular judgement" rather depressing. You get your chance to vote, and you deal with the results: if they didn't go the way you liked, you construct a positive opposition to press for compromise and force accountability. You keep your leaders honest. All these figures show is that a lot of polling organisations are making a lot of money out of graphing "ratings" that have precious little to do with the workings of both government and opposition.

And I'm sure that some of the vox pops at the end of that report have been stolen from the Onion.
posted by holgate at 1:22 PM on June 21, 2001

Ah. You know what, I just reread my original lead-in for this thread and I now realize how it could be (and apparently was) misinterpreted. My "Bush gets good press, poll numbers go down" beginning and my "does The Media influence our opinions or can people think for themselves?" ending were not intended to be correlated -- I didn't mean to imply that "people who think for themselves dislike Bush". I was merely trying to use the story in the first sentence as a springboard for a discussion about the last sentence. Sorry about that.
posted by Shadowkeeper at 1:41 PM on June 21, 2001

Holgate, I'm not sure we need another president telling the world that he's a jelly doughnut. If Bush mark II said that, it would definitely go on the Bushisms page.

Yes, I know that JFK's statement was well understood at the time.
posted by OneBallJay at 1:49 PM on June 21, 2001

If you don't think Bush is following polls (also see "The China Incident") as much as Clinton, you got another thing coming.
posted by owillis at 1:59 PM on June 21, 2001

aaron: Guess that explains Grenada after the Beirut disaster, eh? Guess that explains all the contant photo ops - Ronnie throwing a snowball, Ronnie bringing out Nancy with a birthday cake a press conference to make fun of Sam Donaldson, etc. Were you even alive during the 1980s? Good heavens, give me a freakin' break already. None of his PR staffers would ever make such ridiculous statements. No, they revel in talking about, say, how they made sure what colors of fireworks would go well on TV on the 4th of July, etc. Mercy.
posted by raysmj at 2:00 PM on June 21, 2001

Before Clinton, most presidents did what they thought was RIGHT, what was best for the country, what was in their hearts, rather than whatever they thought would best keep their numbers up

*rolls eyes*

Because Lord knows, we never had any presidents who liked being popular and wanted to stay president before. Nope, nope. Paragons of shining integrity, willing to sacrifice their power for principle, every one of them. Especially that Nixon guy. And Harding. And Grant. And Adams. And Reagan. And Kennedy. And . . .
posted by feckless at 2:05 PM on June 21, 2001

What depresse me most about the state of American politics (i.e., the dynamics of power in this country) is that the conversations are completely devoid of substance. We are a nation that is distracted from the real issues of who runs what. As long as we buy into politics as dictated by Cheney (and yes, Clinton) and pollsters and Fox and CNN and Exxon, then we ain't really talking about anything.
posted by mapalm at 2:16 PM on June 21, 2001

hey, so i guess bush thought we conquered britain or something. you guys owe us for our help in ww2 you know.
posted by moz at 2:59 PM on June 21, 2001

I seem to remember that Reagan was, um, an actor by profession.

Anyway, for a perspective on Pollster Democracy, how about Christopher Hitchens in the LRB from January 2000?

The situation at the populist end of the racket is equally dismal. A candidate needs money first, and name recognition if possible, and opinion poll 'findings' second, third, fourth and fifth.
posted by holgate at 3:10 PM on June 21, 2001

When we're able to have a conversation about politics without introducing Clinton into it, I'll be so relieved.
posted by rodii at 3:52 PM on June 21, 2001

Of course, there's also the question of whether polls were flying as fast and furious before The Clinton Era. Reagan/Bush only had CNN. Clinton had CNN, Fox, MSNBC and the web.
posted by owillis at 3:56 PM on June 21, 2001

And LBJ had only three networks with which to work. Consequently, he had three television sets in his office. (He owned TV station or two too, if I remember correctly, and thought TV was the Future and all. But he sucked at it, could never quite understand why, although most others around him could.)

Anyway, the modern polling era seems to have begun when the technology with which to poll was less expensive and more accessible. A lot of software now makes it a lot easier to handle. Reagan didn't have that technology. The use of such easier polling was essential to the GOP in crafting the Contract With America. (Why did CNBC hire Frank Luntz for its focus group crap? Because his charisma practically explodes through the screen?) That it's all too much is inarguable. To say that it started with one politician is quite another.
posted by raysmj at 4:11 PM on June 21, 2001

MSNBC, rather. Crap either way.
posted by raysmj at 4:19 PM on June 21, 2001

Shadowkeeper, I don't know what coverage you were watching, but what I've read on the Internet has been pretty negative (riots, etc.). I expected him to go to Europe and be hated for disagreeing with the EU on so many major issues and that's the gist of what happened, at least from the news reports I read.
posted by fleener at 4:29 PM on June 21, 2001

I didn't mean to say it started with one person, but the two eras coincided. The 24 hour news cycle began under Bush (Desert Storm), it exploded under Clinton, and will get more exhaustive with Shrub.
posted by owillis at 4:37 PM on June 21, 2001

Oh, wasn't meaning to say anything about you, owliss. Only the first graph was for you. I still think the showing of a diagram of Reagan's colon at a press conference - one shown repeatedly throughout the day -- marked the beginning of the modern (or postmodern?) news era.
posted by raysmj at 4:41 PM on June 21, 2001

I don't know what coverage you were watching, but what I've read on the Internet has been pretty negative

I've been following foreign (at least British) perspectives of Bush's European trip with the Telegraph and BBC online, and the coverage seemed mildly positive, and not negative at all.
posted by gyc at 5:51 PM on June 21, 2001

Reagan used to revel in bad polling, and would sometimes greet his staffers with tongue-in-cheek lines like, "So, who have you pissed off this week?" with the known implication that if you're only doing what's politically popular at the moment, you're highly likely to not be doing what's truly best for the country.

It's nice to know that a President who did so much good for this country took such joy in pissing everyone off.

Perhaps if he had bothered to not piss anyone off, we could have been spared some of his prayer-in-schools and pro-life idiocy. Not to mention the huge deficit he managed to rack up due to an insane program of tax cuts and his foreign policy of trying to bully regimes he didn't approve of out of office.

I suppose all of these things were good for the country?
posted by dogmatic at 8:24 PM on June 21, 2001

For those who don't understand Freepr logic:
Clinton = evil incarnate, can do no good
Reagan= purity and goodness, can do no wrong

Now back to the original question. There are many behind-the-scenes influences on our popular "Media" news outlets. As some here have pointed out, one particularly pernicious one is laziness. Accept force fed copy and repeat the talking points hand-outs. Read what's on the teleprompter and try to look nice for the camera. Follow the corporate mantra and receive a fat paycheck.

To find the dark underbelly of a story requires risk taking, real investigative WORK and may well cost your job. Following the directives of the monied interests assures your career path. There are several "Media" watchdog groups out there, many that have their own agendas to promote. My personal favorite is mediatransparency.org.
posted by nofundy at 6:42 AM on June 22, 2001