Anderson Cooper The Journalist

Thomas Friedman

A column by Thomas Friedman in yesterday’s New York Times provided the focal point of an AC360 discussion Wednesday night that focused on the rawness of American politics at present.  Those discussing the issue with Anderson Cooper were Democrat strategist James Carville and Republican former Cabinet member William Bennett, and the conversation ran along predictable ground, with Bennett nay saying the concern over possible conservative violence and Carville expressing some limited unease with how the trend is going.

Unfortunately, attention was given to Friedman’s opening comparison of present American circumstances in Israel shortly before the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.  By focusing their attention on that portion of Friedman’s statements, the discussion participants failed to recognize the legitimacy of other comments Friedman made.  These included:

The American political system was, as the saying goes, “designed by geniuses so it could be run by idiots.” But a cocktail of political and technological trends have converged in the last decade that are making it possible for the idiots of all political stripes to overwhelm and paralyze the genius of our system.

Those factors are: the wild excess of money in politics; the gerrymandering of political districts, making them permanently Republican or Democratic and erasing the political middle; a 24/7 cable news cycle that makes all politics a daily battle of tactics that overwhelm strategic thinking; and a blogosphere that at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world. Finally, on top of it all, we now have a permanent presidential campaign that encourages all partisanship, all the time among our leading politicians.

I would argue that together these changes add up to a difference of degree that is a difference in kind — a different kind of American political scene that makes me wonder whether we can seriously discuss serious issues any longer and make decisions on the basis of the national interest.

The last two items listed by Friedman are the ones most contributory to the current declining state of American politics.  Fanning the flames of 24/7 news channels are bloggers who appear at their virtual will with no training in areas of journalistic responsibility.  Journalism once ranked as a high profession in which substantial training was involved.  This included a restraint from getting people unnecessarily and irresponsibly aroused and observing a proper decorum.

That is no longer the case for neither a large portion of what is presented on cable news or what is written in the blogosphere.  There is more prominence being given to arousal of emotional fear, leading Friedman to note:

And Mr. Obama is now having his legitimacy attacked by a concerted campaign from the right fringe. They are using everything from smears that he is a closet “socialist” to calling him a “liar” in the middle of a joint session of Congress to fabricating doubts about his birth in America and whether he is even a citizen. And these attacks are not just coming from the fringe. Now they come from Lou Dobbs on CNN and from members of the House of Representatives.

The irony is that we are succumbing to the technology that we pretend to control but which, in reality, controls us.  We do not know how to use it responsibly, feeling some sort of need to use it whenever possible.  In American politics, as elsewhere in our lives, we are allowing it to erode rather than the buttress the good aspects. – George Curcio