May 31, 2007
Kennedy at 90 Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:15 PM EST Two days ago, on May 29, a few news sources, including the Boston Globe and the New York Sun, noted the ninetieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s birth. It’s a meaningless occasion, in some respects. Kennedy’s birthday comes every year, and it isn’t especially significant this time around just because it includes a round number. Just months after Gerald Ford’s death, however, Kennedy’s birthday inspires an unsettling reflection: If the thirty-fifth President were alive today, he would be younger than Ford was when he died last December. And he would have been 87 years old in 2004, when Ronald Reagan died at the age of 93. It reminds one of just how young Kennedy was in 1960 to consider that he was six years younger than Reagan, who would not even hold public office until six years later, and who would not win the presidency for another two decades. Kennedy’s birthday is also a sobering reminder of the role that contingency plays in history. Since his death, more than a few have considered how America might be different, had he not been assassinated. In 2003, for the anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination, the historian Nigel Hamilton responded to this question with an alternative timeline for the last 40 years, published in The New York Times. Hamilton’s piece was pretty far-fetched, including such events as the 1969 appointment of Martin Luther King, Jr., as Vice President, the conviction of O. J. Simpson, and a triumphant visit to Hawaii for the fiftieth anniversary of World War II’s end—by President Colin Powell. Despite its sillier qualities, Hamilton’s alternative history usefully emphasizes the historical influence of chance events like the assassination. And, with a more measured approach, it’s not so hard to imagine a meaningfully different twentieth century, absent the Kennedy assassination. If Kennedy had lived, perhaps he, instead of Jimmy Carter, might have been the globetrotting President to win the Nobel Prize some 20 years after leaving office. It might have been he, rather than Lyndon Johnson, who rammed through the most important civil rights legislation of the century. At the same time, however, Kennedy might be more vigorously indicted for his slow approach to civil rights during his Senate service and first presidential term. It might also have been Kennedy, rather than his successor, who ended up stuck with the responsibility for war in Southeast Asia. It’s hard to pin down exactly how we might think of Kennedy if a bullet hadn’t found him so young. It’s almost certain, though, that a good part of his golden memory comes from his early death. In 1996, Professor Michael Nelson of Rhodes College published an article comparing Kennedy with the classical hero Achilles. “Achilles’ appeal,” Nelson wrote, “may be traced to his beauty, valor, might, striving, and individuality, all overlaid by the early, violent nature of his death.” Bringing his point home, Nelson continued: “The inconvenient presence of a 70-year-old Achilles almost certainly would have dimmed the lustre of his majestic youth.” As Nelson suggests, perhaps the same is true of Kennedy. Still, there’s something unavoidably sad about a President who, as his youngest brother said in 1999, “had every gift but length of years.”
May 31, 2007
How Important Is Television News? VI Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 08:00 PM EST Mr. Gordon is absolutely correct that the study I cited, conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, includes only the leading cable news stations (Fox, MSNBC, and CNN), and not the network news; and while it differentiates between morning, afternoon, and evening coverage, it does not, I think, single out each outlet’s signature new program for analysis. Still, it is a useful study and does not make Fox look like a particularly serious outfit. On a nitpicky point, Mr. Gordon quotes me as saying that “Fox also stood out for its lack of coverage on the firings of the U.S. attorneys, compared with the other channels . . .” Actually, this is not my contention; I was quoting the PEJ study and made that clear in my post. On a more substantive note, Mr. Gordon cites this very fact as evidence of liberal bias in the mainstream press. “Despite the very best efforts of Democratic politicians and their water bearers in the media,” he writes, “no one has been able to come up with a scintilla of evidence that anything illegal took place, a hopelessly dysfunctional public relations operation at the Department of Justice not being against the law. . . . Had George Bush been a Democrat, does anyone think that The New York Times et al. would have given a damn about this story?” Where Mr. Gordon sees liberal bias, I see only an unhealthy media fixation on scandal. (For the record, I do think the U.S. Attorneys affair is important. If not illegal, what the Bush administration did—by putting party loyalty ahead of performance standards—had a chilling effect on morale in U.S. Attorneys’ offices. Consequently, the policy sorely undermined both the war on terror, in which U.S. attorneys play an important role, and the general cause of law enforcement. The media and Congress have a legitimate responsibility to bring such partisanship and incompetence to the public’s attention.) I’m reminded of the media’s extensive coverage in 2001 of the vandalism that outgoing Clinton administration officials allegedly committed in the White House and Old Executive Office Building; it later turned out that no such vandalism had ever occurred. Or the ridiculous attention directed at John Edwards’s and Bill Clinton’s mega-expensive haircuts. Or “Travelgate,” which, despite Kenneth Starr’s best efforts, revealed no misdoings on the part of either Bill or Hilary Clinton, or their top aides. So much of this obsession with scandal must in some way date back to Watergate and Vietnam. Since the Washington Post helped to crack the Nixon administration’s misdoings, and since The New York Times revealed the thick web of lies and intrigue behind successive administrations’ policies in Southeast Asia, every reporter has wanted to be the next Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, or Seymour Hersh. There is surely an important place for this kind of journalism in a vibrant democracy, but when it runs amok, it really runs amok.
May 31, 2007
FDR’s Electoral Margins III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:30 PM EST In pointing to Franklin Roosevelt’s dwindling reelection margins after 1936, John Steele Gordon "guess[es] that his drop in 1940 was largely due to people who disapproved of a third term and came out to vote for Wendell Willkie," and that the "1944 vote was surely affected by millions being overseas." Building on this observation, Alexander Burns writes that it "was a unique accomplishment for the President to move the country as far as he did without incurring a greater backlash from his base of urban ethnics and racial minorities, white Southerners, and union members." Though it’s surely bad form to use this space to plug one’s own work, I’m going to do so anyway. In my new book, White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics and the Shaping of Post-War Politics, I chart FDR’s declining popularity among New York City’s Irish and Italian Catholic citizens, who gave the President 73 percent and 78 percent of their votes, respectively, in 1936, 56 percent and 42 percent in 1940, and only 50 percent and 41 percent, respectively, in 1944. Given the central role that urban Catholic voters played in building the New Deal coalition, these figures are startling. Some of the drop-off surely owed to specific ethnic concerns. Roosevelt’s staunch opposition to the Italian government lost him a good measure of support in the city’s Italian neighborhoods, where he was actually warned not to campaign in 1940. By the same token, the open sympathy that leading New Dealers showed to anti-fascist Loyalists in Spain and to the anti-clerical, secular government in Mexico sat poorly with many staunchly anti-Communist Catholic voters, be they Irish, Italian or German in descent. In the late 1940s a leading city Democrat observed that in the early New Deal era "the Irish and the Jewish people stayed together politically.... That’s all gone. I think it’s largely ascribable to the Fascist growth in Europe. So there is a dangerous, disheartening, and rather tragic cleavage now between our Irish friends and our Jewish friends—and I am afraid that is going to deepen as time goes on." More fundamentally, many Catholic Democrats grew increasingly uneasy with what they viewed as a strong parallel between Communism and New Deal statism. Mr. Gordon’s observation that the "1944 vote was surely affected by millions being overseas" scratches the surface but could go a good deal further. The massive growth of the state during World War II saw an expansion of the federal income tax to cover most wage earners and the introduction of withholding taxes; the use of unpopular wage and price controls to keep inflation in check; and the imposition of rationing, which affected household use of such staples as sugar, coffee, meat, and fuel. On the home front, ordinary people accepted these privations with an unusual amount of stoicism, but popular grassroots resistance did exist, and toward the end of the war, civilians grew restive. FDR’s declining popularity surely owed in no small measure to the tensions created by the new, bureaucratic regulatory state, whose tentacles reached deep into people’s homes and workplaces during the war.
May 31, 2007
Don’t Bogart That Point Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 04:00 PM EST The Motion Picture Association of America recently decided to be more aggressive about giving R ratings to films that include smoking. In the June 11 issue of National Review, Rob Long comments on this policy. (The article is available online only to subscribers.) Long scoffs at the idea that characters who smoke on-screen cause viewers to do the same: “Smoking isn’t cool because people do it in movies. People do it in movies because it’s cool.” The reason so many characters light up in films, he says, is that smoking injects some movement—”business,” in actors' lingo—into what otherwise would be a static scene of talking heads: “It draws attention inexorably to the smoker and away from whatever mediocre dialogue he or she is forced to say . . .” This is a good point—so good, in fact, that Fred Andersen made it in an article called “Smoking and ‘Business’” in the pages of American Heritage nine years ago, back when American Heritage actually had pages. Unsurprisingly, both articles invoke Humphrey Bogart, who lit up so often on screen that his characteristic smoking style has become a verb.
With this new ratings policy, as usually happens, social reformers have chosen a heavy-handed command-and-control scheme to attack a problem that was well on the way to solving itself. The main use of smoking in film is to break up long, dialogue-heavy scenes, and when’s the last time you saw one of those in a movie aimed at teenagers? Moreover, when’s the last time you saw a movie that wasn’t aimed at teenagers? These days you’re lucky (or unlucky, considering the quality of most movie dialogue) if a character speaks two consecutive sentences without something blowing up or somebody demonstrating a bodily function. Still, the decision has been made, and filmmakers will just have to cope. What can replace smoking? Andersen suggests drinking, even if it’s fruit juice, but that would quickly become conspicuous, and it doesn’t always fit the action. Cat’s-cradle would work nicely, and tying a bow tie would be my first choice, but I have to admit that these things work in an even narrower range of circumstances. How about rock/paper/scissors? It’s getting more popular every day, with championship tournaments and frequent pop-culture references. The trouble with r/p/s is that it takes two people, so it wouldn’t work for the type of scene where an anguished character pours out his or her soul. A bold conceptual filmmaker might have his characters use 1960s-Motown-style hand motions, like the Supremes backing up Diana Ross on “Love Child.” For most films, though, this would be a distraction; rhythmically imitating a football referee only works if you have music to do it along with. My nominee for Hollywood’s “business” activity of the future is knitting. It’s trendy, especially in the film industry, so the characters wouldn’t have to worry about looking like dorks. As with smoking, it can be done anywhere at any time for no particular reason. And it’s innocuous enough that no self-appointed censor of right or left can possibly object to it. In fact, knitting has already been used in many films, as these fans can attest. So knitting is the perfect choice as the favorite shortcut for future filmmakers who need to get around a boring screenplay—unless some future researcher discovers that it causes carpal tunnel syndrome.
May 31, 2007
FDR's Electoral Margins II Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:55 AM EST I’m struck by the election returns that John Steele Gordon provides in his latest post. I was aware of the general arc of Roosevelt’s presidential campaigns, but I had never actually looked at the popular vote totals. One interesting characteristic of these numbers, as Mr. Gordon points out, is how they reflect the decline in America’s voting population as a result of the war. Another is the relative stability of Roosevelt’s vote totals over time. His lowest total was 22.8 million in 1932; his highest 27.8 in 1936. These results, along with the other two, are grouped tightly around his average electoral pull of approximately 25.9 million votes. In other words, over four presidential elections, his returns showed remarkably little variation compared with those of Presidents since. (Consider, in contrast, the difference of 10 million votes between Reagan’s returns in 1980 and 1984, and the almost identical drop-off between George H. W. Bush’s performances in 1988 and 1992.) Judging from these returns, if Franklin Roosevelt had not persuaded a single additional person to vote for him after 1932 but had managed to keep his existing voter base intact, he still would have triumphed over his opponents in three subsequent elections. This isn’t a tremendously clever observation; you could say something similar about any candidate winning in a massive electoral landslide. Yet, there’s something significant about the fact that FDR at his worst outperformed all of his Republican opponents at their best. In light of this, I think Fred Smoler’s point, which Mr. Gordon echoes, holds: Newspapers could not bring down Roosevelt, no matter how bilious their headlines. I suppose I’d agree with Mr. Gordon that this is partly due to the fact that in ’36, ’40, and ’44, most “everyone ‘knew’ Roosevelt and knew what they thought about him.” The facts about Roosevelt, however, changed during that time period. He took controversial stances (court-packing, expanding involvement in Europe, etc.) that could have dislodged many more voters and might have caused more Americans to seriously reconsider just how well they “knew” the man in the White House. It was a unique accomplishment for the President to move the country as far as he did without incurring a greater backlash from his base of urban ethnics and racial minorities, white Southerners, and union members. It would take many more words than a blog post contains to fully analyze and explain Roosevelt’s electoral successes. A good bit of it has to be attributed to his inborn political talent. His ability to phrase controversial policy proposals in accessible, folksy language (analogizing the lend-lease program to lending a neighbor a garden hose when his house is on fire, for example) is perhaps the best example of this. Roosevelt also mastered the skill of pacing himself, of not pushing for too much change, too quickly. As Doris Kearns Goodwin has related in No Ordinary Time, her husband’s deliberately slow speed frustrated Eleanor Roosevelt when it came to issues like desegregating the armed forces. On issues like involvement in World War II, though, this gradual pacing helped preserve the President’s political coalition. 1932 was an unmitigated disaster for Republicans, but it’s not necessarily the case that the three remaining elections had to be similarly crushing. Thus, a second cause I’d suggest for Roosevelt’s consistent success would be the repeated failure of the Republicans to present a compelling and well defined alternative to the Democrats, and to engage Roosevelt in his areas of greatest vulnerability. In 1940, for example, Republicans nominated Wendell Willkie, who refused to drum up the nation’s spirit of anti-interventionism until the last weeks of his campaign. Charles Peters, in his snappy little volume Five Days in Philadelphia, has suggested that Willkie’s restrained campaign saved Roosevelt’s agenda but doomed his party’s fortunes at the ballot box. This seems a reasonable assessment. There are many lessons to learn from the example of Franklin Roosevelt, and the mechanics of maintaining a national coalition is not the least of them. Except, debatably, for Ronald Reagan, no other leader has built a similarly stable and durable political alliance since Roosevelt’s death. In this case, the numbers do not lie.
May 30, 2007
FDR’s Electoral Margins Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:30 PM EST In his recent post on television news, Fredric Smoler wrote, “The newspapers were steadily more anti-FDR between 1932 and 1944. He won his elections by steadily larger margins.” Actually, FDR had his best election in 1936. In 1932 he won 59 percent of the vote; in 1936, 62.6 percent; in 1940, 55 percent; and in 1944, 53.6 percent. (I’m ignoring minor parties.) But I suspect the newspapers were of marginal influence, at least after 1932, as everyone “knew” Roosevelt and knew what they thought about him. I would guess that his drop in 1940 was largely due to people who disapproved of a third term and came out to vote for Wendell Willkie, whose popular vote total was much larger than Alf Landon’s had been (22.3 million to 16.7 million), while Roosevelt’s popular vote was down slightly from 1936 (27.8 in 1936, 27.3 in 1940). FDR’s vote was down again in 1944 (25.6 million), while Dewey’s was slightly down from Willkie’s (22.1 million). The 1944 vote was surely affected by millions being overseas.
May 30, 2007
How Important Is Television News? V Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:50 PM EST An interesting exchange between Josh Zeitz and John Steele Gordon—“How Important Is Television News?”—prompts these mild thoughts: Josh Zeitz points out that despite Euro-phobias about Fox news running America, the facts are that Fox news has a much wider audience than its cable rivals, a much smaller audience than its network rivals, and a staggeringly smaller audience than NPR’s main news shows. So what is commonly perceived as the electronic right dwarfs the electronic center and is in turn dwarfed by the electronic liberals, and we thus have some grounds for assuming that broadcast news does not much affect our politics, since our electoral politics are often more Foxist than NPR-ist. In any case, Josh Zeitz then looks back at the 1960s, when the alleged effects of broadcast news are said to have turned the American people against segregation and the Vietnam War, and finds that a lot more people were reading newspapers than consuming broadcast news, which suggests that broadcast news cannot have been a significant source of social upheaval. My guess is that who listens matters as much as, maybe more than, how many listen; what looks a lot like upheaval requires a few hundred thousand in the streets of a few cities, repeated over a few years. If demonstrators were over-represented among watchers of broadcast news, that could have mattered. My guess, as it happens, is that it didn’t. I was pretty demonstration prone, and I did not watch or listen to broadcast news. I also read comic books, Zap Comix, to be precise. And I talked to people. 1960s colleges concentrated millions of people in the presence of books, comics, and one another, at a time of life when they had a certain amount of free time, while a steadily expanding economy boomed in a climate of broad idealism and general disinhibition. This may have mattered more than the then novelty of some electronic media. Figuring out the link between what people watch, listen to, or look at and their politics can be tricky. A generation ago, a famous historian discovered that the pre-Revolutionary French spent a lot more time looking at anti-Royalist pornography than reading Rousseau, and some people concluded that porn killed the Old Regime, leaving Rousseau in the clear, and that the French Revolution was more about anti-aristocratic misogyny than more lofty conceptions of politics. I have the impression that we have since returned to a more balanced view: Misogyny mattered more than we once thought, but the French had some conventionally political ideas in addition to the ones spattered through the porn. Do the media matter? Sometimes. I cannot imagine the impeachment of President Clinton without the eager assistance of the media, subsequently disavowed. But sometimes much less than you’d think. The newspapers were steadily more anti-FDR between 1932 and 1944. He won his elections by steadily larger margins. And during the impeachment, New York magazine polled to see how many Americans had heard of any of the much-revered shrieking scolds monopolizing the TV political talk shows. Fewer than 2 percent, if I remember correctly. A fair chunk of the other 98 percent came out to vote in 1998, and the Republicans regretted it, along with some of the media commentators, who opined that the electorate had forfeited the confidence of the press and could win it back only by redoubled efforts. In 2000 there was indeed some penitence on the part of the electorate, although not quite among a majority of it. Some of the same media that had two years before chastised the electorate for too-easily forgiving Clinton now rebuked it for punishing Gore. Go figure. As to the effect of the electronic (and print) media in their current form, one last note. I came of age in a period of relative media civility, at least at the high end of the business. For most of the history of this republic, the press has been sharply politicized and remarkably venomous. One thing I have noticed about the last few years is that political groupings nowadays tend to read their own media. They have a common news source less often than they did in my youth. This does not seem like a healthy development, but we survived it for something like two centuries, and my guess is that we’ll survive it again.
May 30, 2007
How Important Is Television News? IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:15 AM EST I thank Mr. Zeitz for the information he provided, but it does not quite answer my question. What I was hoping for was “a comparison of the various news and broadcast channels’ signature evening news programs regarding Iraq coverage and fluff coverage.” (Italics added.) By signature evening news programs I meant such programs as NBC Nightly News and The Fox Report. I’m sure CNN and MSNBC have equivalent programs. In other words, straight news. Most of the evening on Fox is devoted to The O’Reilly Factor, Hannity and Colmes, and On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, which are basically opinion shows. And the last in particular seems devoted to whatever the Fox News Channel’s fluff obsession of the week happens to be rather than what Mr. Zeitz and I would consider news. Of course, Fox News Channel is in the TV business first, and their ratings via-à-vis the other news channels would seem to justify their programming, even if I have zero interest in watching it and therefore don’t. I would count Special Report with Britt Hume as a “signature evening news program,” as Hume is the Washington managing editor at Fox and the program is entirely devoted to news, albeit from a Washington perspective. In other words, if the story does not have national political implications, it will get fairly short shrift. The last 20 minutes of the program is a discussion, led by Hume, by the “Fox All Stars,” on the biggest news items of the day, news items of the Zeitz-Gordon variety. These all stars are people like Fred Barnes (The Weekly Standard), Mort Kondracke (Roll Call) and Mara Liasson (NPR), to name the most frequent ones. In other words, fair and balanced. Again, I guess that if these particular types of shows are compared, each of the various network and cable news channels will be seen to have devoted roughly equal percentages of time to Iraq and roughly equal percentages to Anna Nicole Smith. Mr. Zeitz writes, “Fox also stood out for its lack of coverage on the firings of the U.S. attorneys, compared with the other channels. The story, which gained real momentum in mid March, consumed a mere 2% of Fox’s total airtime. CNN devoted twice that percent (4%) and MSNBC four times (8%).” This would seem to prove my case of unconscious liberal bias at CNN and MSNBC, and I thank Mr. Zeitz for it. First, the story was fully covered on Special Report because it obsessed Washington and, I’m sure, The Fox Report. Perhaps the reason Fox did not cover it much outside of its straight news programs is that this is the Oakland, California, of political stories: There’s no there there. Despite the very best efforts of Democratic politicians and their water bearers in the media, no one has been able to come up with a scintilla of evidence that anything illegal took place, a hopelessly dysfunctional public relations operation at the Department of Justice not being against the law. The New York Times was even forced to posit a totally bogus distinction between firing every United States attorney for political reasons at the beginning of a Presidency, which Bill Clinton did, and firing 10 attorneys for political reasons in the middle of a Presidency, which George Bush did. Had George Bush been a Democrat, does anyone think that The New York Times et al. would have given a damn about this story?
Mr. Zeitz writes, “One last note. Mr. Gordon suggests that ‘maybe the reason CNN and MSNBC have so much Iraq news is that they are only too delighted to report the bad news,’ presumably because of their, as he put it, ‘unconscious liberal bias.’ There is a pernicious logic to this statement that I hope Mr. Gordon did not intend—to wit, that liberals delight in America’s military troubles in Iraq.” I think they delight in George Bush’s troubles in Iraq and often don’t think through the situation enough to comprehend the implications for the country.
May 30, 2007
American Jews and the Middle East Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:35 AM EST Josh Zeitz wrote, on the fortieth anniversary of the Six-Day War, that it is “established lore that the Six-Day War encouraged American Jews to reconsider their liberalism on domestic and foreign policy”. He goes on to express skepticism that anything of the kind occurred, especially at the level of foreign policy, since “the standard narrative on American Jews and the Six-Day War is wrong. . . . On a grassroots level Jews continued to identify as liberal Democrats. Exit polls in 1968 indicated that 87 percent of New York City’s Jews voted for the Democrat Hubert Humphrey, down only slightly from 1964 totals, when 92 percent supported Lyndon Johnson. Four years later . . . Jews continued to vote Democratic but in somewhat diminished numbers. Exit polls suggested that McGovern won 66 percent of the Jewish vote nationally but a whopping 85 percent among New York City Jews.” Struck by the durability and breadth of the notion that American Jews control American foreign policy and push it to the right (Josh Zeitz teaches at Cambridge, where this view seems more common than one would have hoped, given the weight of evidence on the other side of the question), he concludes that “the Six-Day War . . . laid the foundation of an inaccurate but still resonant charge that blames American Jews for so many of the world’s woes, even as it fundamentally misreads American Jewish political culture.” I more or less agree with this account of the situation, for given the standard correlates of electoral behavior (wealth is one of them), American Jews continue to vote for the Democrats and support a liberal foreign policy in remarkable numbers. I am not sure that events in the Middle East will always be irrelevant to the electoral behavior of American Jews, but I do think the pattern Josh Zeitz describes will continue for quite a while, although the likely reason for this is not a very cheering one. Here’s why: For most of the period 1967–2007, both major U.S. political parties have followed similar policies on Israel and the Palestinians. While various lunatics contend that this agreement between the major American political parties has occurred because the omni-competent Jews control both of them, a more plausible explanation is that both Democrats and Republicans have seen the long-term future as a two-state solution, which means there will eventually be an Israeli state and a Palestinians state living alongside one another, with at most minor changes in the 1967 borders, and mutual recognition. Israeli politics has sometimes been dominated by a coalition that rejected a two state solution, and most large Israeli political parties have supported the construction of Jewish settlements in areas occupied in 1967, settlements that have often exasperated American Presidents. However, as long as the Palestinian political leadership (the PLO for most of the period since 1967) has conspicuously failed to consent to a two-state solution, instead insisting on what is described as a bi-national and secular state in Palestine, there has been no reason for the Americans to fall out with the Israelis, because no obvious opportunity for a stable peace was being lost on account of Israeli intransigence. From the White House’s perspective, the Israelis can occasionally be very annoying, but they are rarely truly infuriating for any significant length of time. There thus has been no reason for any large number of American Jews to decide that any American President was treating Israel badly. There was a very small exception to this pattern in 1992, but otherwise it has held strong for 40 years. In 1994, when the Palestinian leadership endorsed a two-state solution, the Israeli leadership followed suit, so there was still no obvious reason for the United States to fall out with the Israelis. Since 2000, two dramatic things have happened that have only reinforced this pattern. First, the PLO seems to have been unwilling to accept a two-state solution when one was on offer that year. Although this version of events remains contested, its accuracy is now, alas, irrelevant, because in January of 2006 Hamas won control of the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas explicitly rejects a two-state solution. Until Palestinians accept a two-state solution which the Israelis then reject, the chance of a protracted and truly serious rift between the United States and Israel seems slight, which means that American Jews, even if they care passionately about Israel—and there is some evidence that fewer do than was once the case—have no reason to prefer one U.S. party to the other on the grounds of U.S. policy toward Israel. The perennial demand for the United States to be “more even-handed between Israel and the Palestinians” wanes as soon as the Palestinian leadership visibly declines to accept the permanent existence of an Israeli state in part of Palestine. So for the foreseeable future, my guess is that support for Israel will not much distinguish Democrats and Republicans. Palestinians can probably change that. So far they haven’t.
May 29, 2007
How Important Is Television News? III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:45 PM EST Mr. Gordon wrote that he “would be interested to see a comparison of the various news and broadcast channels’ signature evening news programs regarding Iraq coverage and fluff coverage. I bet Fox does nicely (more Iraq, less fluff) compared with the others, but that’s only a guess.” Would that it were so. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the cable news channels’ evening coverage from December 31, 2006 to March 31, 2007 broke down as follows:
PEJ’s report reads: “If Fox was less focused on the Iraq War, what took its place? Mostly—according to the numbers—Anna Nicole Smith. Coverage of her death trailed just barely the airtime spent on the Iraq policy debate, accounting for 9.6% of all the Fox content studied (versus 10.1% for the Iraq policy debate). Fox also stood out for its lack of coverage on the firings of the U.S. attorneys, compared with the other channels. The story, which gained real momentum in mid March, consumed a mere 2% of Fox’s total airtime. CNN devoted twice that percent (4%) and MSNBC four times (8%).”
What’s particularly incredible is that Anna Nicole Smith died on February 8, almost halfway through the sample period. I shudder to think how even more absurd these figures might look had she died toward the beginning of the quarter.
One last note. Mr. Gordon suggests that “maybe the reason CNN and MSNBC have so much Iraq news is that they are only too delighted to report the bad news,” presumably because of their, as he put it, “unconscious liberal bias.” There is a pernicious logic to this statement that I hope Mr. Gordon did not intend—to wit, that liberals delight in America’s military troubles in Iraq. Even if we accept his argument that CNN and MSNBC betray liberal bias—and that is a highly debatable charge; Lou Dobbs is about as anti-immigrant as they come on cable news—that’s a problematic statement. It’s worth remembering that CNN built much of its reputation during the 1991 Gulf War, when its coverage was both unrelenting and triumphant. Given the depth and consequences of our involvement in Iraq, 15 percent seems an inadequate level of coverage. It’s probably MSNBC and CNN that have it right.
May 29, 2007
How Important Is Television News? II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:50 AM EST I abandoned the news programs of the three major networks several years ago, having usually watched NBC Nightly News since the old Huntley-Brinkley days. I am not alone, as their ratings have been in steady and serious decline for more than 20 years. My objection was the ever-increasing emphasis on “soft news,” especially features aimed at the AARP demographic that is the heart and soul of the aging audience for network news. Being a member in good standing of that demographic doesn’t make me want to listen to reports on kidney dialysis and old people moving back from Florida to be with their children in their final years, thank you very much. I want to listen to the news. Now I watch Special Report with Britt Hume on Fox News Channel, which runs from six to seven, at least in the Eastern time zone. Its virtues are many besides its anchor, who, I think, is the best in the business. For one thing, it’s all hard news of the day, no soft, feel-good features of the locating-the-blind-boy’s-stolen-puppy variety. For another, it really seems to me to be, to coin a phrase, fair and balanced. Network news—along with CNN and MSNBC—remains permeated with an unconscious liberal bias. By that I don’t mean a tough-on-Republicans-soft-on-Democrats bias (although that happens, of course) but rather the unquestioning acceptance of the idea that the liberal world view is the only one decent people have, that the American political universe is divided into two classes: moderates and right-wing nuts. Hume, who does not share that notion, seems to me consciously to try hard to be fair and balanced, whereas his competitors unconsciously assume that, being “moderates,” they are, ipso facto, fair and balanced. So I would recommend Special Report. I don’t recommend Bill O’Reilly any more than Joshua Zeitz would. I find him obnoxious to put it mildly. But then, proving myself fair and balanced, I can’t stand CNN’s Lou Dobbs either. I have a limited tolerance for blowhards, even blowhards who earn several million dollars a year blowing hard. Mr. Zeitz notes a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism finding that Fox spent more daytime air on Anna Nicole Smith than on Iraq and less on Iraq than CNN and MSNBC did. Having sometimes tuned into The Big Story with John Gibson, which precedes Britt Hume, I can certainly verify that she got more than her fair share of attention (personally I would put her fair share at about 10 seconds; I also have a limited tolerance for bimbos). Having run that story into the ground, Gibson’s show is now obsessing about Rosie O’Donnell. Why a Fox News Channel show would give ABC’s The View a free 10-minute infomercial every afternoon is a mystery to me. But I wonder why just daytime news was measured. None of the “news channels” are pure news, especially in the daytime. They are all a mix of opinion, fluff, financial ticker, etc. I wonder what measuring the evening, or even the whole 24-hour day, would reveal. Mr. Zeitz mentions that he can understand why Fox shies away from reports on Iraq (Special Report certainly doesn’t), but then, maybe the reason CNN and MSNBC have so much Iraq news is that they are only too delighted to report the bad news. This tendency is nicely spoofed in the Day by Day cartoon series for Memorial Day. I would be interested to see a comparison of the various news and broadcast channels’ signature evening news programs regarding Iraq coverage and fluff coverage. I bet Fox does nicely (more Iraq, less fluff) compared with the others, but that’s only a guess. As for the question, how important is television news, about the only thing for sure is that the news business, like every other aspect of publishing and communications, is in a profound state of flux, thanks to the Internet. The news business that I grew up with (I can remember when New York City had at least seven daily newspapers) is long gone. The news business of the 1980s and 1990s (let’s call it the CNN era) is rapidly disappearing. What will replace it is anybody’s guess. But one thing is certain. The news business in, say, 2032 will be utterly different from what it is today, just as the overland transportation business in 1860 was utterly different from what it had been in 1835, thanks to the railroad.
May 28, 2007
How Important Is Television News? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:45 PM EST Having lived in England for the better part of the last four years, I’m consistently struck by Europeans’ widespread but erroneous assumption that the Fox News Channel (a) dominates the American news market; (b) attracts more viewers than any other outlet; and (c) reflects the opinions of most Americans. In fact, as of six months ago Fox News averaged 840,000 viewers each evening. The channel’s most popular on-air talent, Bill O’Reilly, attracted roughly two million nightly viewers. These are impressive numbers when measured against Fox’s cable competitors, CNN (448,000 viewers) and MSNBC (270,000 viewers). But when stacked up against network news, Rupert Murdoch’s behemoth looks considerably smaller. Recent figures peg ABC’s World News With Charlie Gibson at 8 million viewers, NBC’s Nightly News with Brian Williams at 7.3 million viewers, and The CBS News With Katie Couric at 6.1 million viewers. More striking, National Public Radio, often accused of liberal bias (though that charge is disputable), reaches 20 million listeners. Its signature news shows, All Things Considered and Morning Edition, enjoy larger audiences than any radio program except Rush Limbaugh’s. Liberal or not, NPR is arguably one of the most thorough broadcast news outlets in the world, and its audience dwarfs that of Fox News. More fundamentally, I wonder just how influential television news really is. In American history courses, including those that I teach, it is axiomatic that the advent of television played an unusually large role in shaping recent politics and culture. Without taped coverage of Birmingham and Selma, the civil rights movement would have had a tougher time selling its legislative agenda to sympathetic Northerners; without news feeds from Vietnam, antiwar sentiment would have been slower to emerge. But is this really the case? Until 1963 the three networks offered only 15 minutes of national news each evening. CBS and NBC switched to the 30-minute formula that year, and ABC followed suit in 1967. Yet in October 1969, at the high-water mark of 1960s social upheaval (this was just weeks before the Moratorium Day protests against the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon’s famous “Silent Majority” speech), a survey reported that more than half of the adult population had not watched a newscast in the preceding two weeks. In 1976 the Roper Organization found that more than two thirds of poll respondents claimed to get most of their news from television, but the ratings told a different story. Newspaper readership still eclipsed TV news viewership. A 1974 survey of 5,600 Americans over the age of 18 found that “on any single, average day, the television news audience includes only about half of the adult population while only one adult in five sees the showcase of the medium, the evening network news.” This meant that what little news Americans were watching by the 1970s tended to be local news, which became sillier and more frivolous as the decade wore on. Once reported by sober-looking, nondescript, middle-aged white men, local news in the ’70s became the preserve of attractive on-air talent with little or no background in journalism. Local stations eagerly adopted the advice of broadcast consultants who argued, as did one typical 1970s-era concern, for “simplifying and limiting treatment of complex news, and elimination of ‘upper-class English.’” Increasingly, the focus of local news moved from current events to sensational and salacious doings (“Masked vigilante arrested wearing no pants! Film at 11.”), and the sales pitch for news teams was their affability rather than their knowledge or journalistic talent. Hence an advertisement that promised viewers “good news or bad, laugh a little with your News-4 favorites. You’ll feel better.” Back to my original point, just how relevant is Fox News? A recent study conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that of the three cable networks, Fox devoted the least attention between December 2006 and April 2007 to the Iraq War. During its daytime programming, the channel devoted just 6 percent of its coverage to Iraq and 17 percent to the death of Anna Nicole Smith. By comparison, CNN allocated 20 percent of its coverage to Iraq and 5 percent to Anna Nicole Smith; MSNBC, 18 percent Iraq, 10 percent Smith. Overall, Fox spent 15 percent of its time on Iraq, compared with 25 percent and 31 percent for CNN and MSNBC respectively. If I were Fox News chief Roger Ailes, I wouldn’t want to talk about Iraq either. The war that his channel so ardently supported has lost its popular support, and so much of the news that comes out of Iraq each day is bad news. But again, Fox News draws a modest audience, probably no larger than the local news audience in many medium-size cities. Maybe it’s best to leave the hard news to NPR, so that Fox can concentrate on lighter fare. Like, “The emperor has no clothes! Film at 11.”
May 28, 2007
The Six-Day War, 40 Years Later Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:20 PM EST Next month will mark the fortieth anniversary of the Six-Day War between Israel and several of its Arab neighbors. That brief but decisive conflict, which saw the Jewish state capture east Jerusalem from Jordan, the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria, redrew the borders of the Middle East and established the framework for much of the region’s chronic instability over the four ensuing decades. Though subsequent arrangements resulted in the return of the Sinai Peninsula and a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from (and Palestinian autonomy in) Gaza, the war’s legacy continues to form the backdrop against which Arab and Israeli politics operate. It’s long been established lore that the Six-Day War encouraged American Jews to reconsider their liberalism on domestic and foreign policy. According to the standard narrative, American Jews were stunned to see many erstwhile allies in the black civil rights movement support the Arab cause in 1967; feeling resurgent ethnic pride in Israel, they not only repudiated the agenda favored by their onetime friends in the civil rights struggle—namely, an expanded welfare state and increased opportunities for African-Americans—but also rejected the liberal universalism that had been ingrained in modern Jewish culture in favor of a more “particularist” strain of Jewish pride and power. It didn’t help that many prominent Jews claimed that the war changed their fundamental outlook. “Has the Six-Day War changed my Weltanschauung,” Elie Wiesel asked rhetorically in 1968. “I would go even further and say that the change was total, for it involved my very being both as a person and as a Jew.” But the standard narrative on American Jews and the Six-Day War is wrong. Far from repudiating the politics of Great Society liberalism, the main Jewish “defense” agencies—the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council—as well as local Jewish federations and synagogues continued throughout the 1970s to apply standard liberal logic to the problems facing their communities. Despite breaking with their civil rights allies over the issue of affirmative action in high education, something that did not drive a wedge between some Jewish and black organizations until the late 1970s, most Jewish organizations remained steadfast in their support of more compensatory spending on antipoverty, educational, and infrastructural spending. Prominent Jewish neoconservatives may have been in the process of questioning the efficacy of state intervention in social and economic affairs, but most Jewish community leaders were not. Moreover, on a grassroots level Jews continued to identify as liberal Democrats. Exit polls in 1968 indicated that 87 percent of New York City’s Jews voted for the Democrat Hubert Humphrey, down only slightly from 1964 totals, when 92 percent supported Lyndon Johnson. Four years later, when Richard Nixon ran for a second term, The New York Times reported that the President “overwhelmed [George] McGovern in areas of predominantly Roman Catholic voters,” while Jews continued to vote Democratic but in somewhat diminished numbers. Exit polls suggested that McGovern won 66 percent of the Jewish vote nationally but a whopping 85 percent among New York City Jews. By the early 1970s half of all Jews still considered themselves “liberals” and another 27 percent “moderates,” compared with just 13 percent of Catholics who identified as “liberals.” The flawed 1967 narrative has present-day implications. Those on the extreme left and extreme right continue to blame neoconservative Jews for America’s problems in the Middle East, with the former tending to claim that America’s support for Israel has cost it its moral capital in the region, and the latter insisting that the Iraq War was initiated for, by, and at the behest of Jewish necons. What both sides share is a dangerous tendency to see a powerful neoconservative Jewish lobby pulling the strings and calling the tune. But this has never been the case. Neoconservative Jews are few in number and do not enjoy the backing of the larger American Jewish community, which continues to support liberal and even dovish Democrats in greater proportion than does any other ethno-religion or racial group except African-Americans. If Karl Rove can do anything right, it is surely counting votes. In this sense, the Six-Day War did more than redraw geopolitical boundaries in the Middle East. It laid the foundation of an inaccurate but still resonant charge that blames American Jews for so many of the world’s woes, even as it fundamentally misreads American Jewish political culture.
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