Trumping Up a Culture War

I recently took a trip to England and France for a number of reasons: to broaden my horizons, to see some shows, and to come up with stuff to blog about that's a little outside the norm.  I didn't really think I would find blog fodder watching TV or reading newspapers, but turns out that's the sort of thing you do during all the downtime you have traveling.  At first, I didn't notice anything unusual on the BBC or on international versions of American cable news shows like CNN.  Government scandals, the elections in India, the effects of global warming (okay, this last one was covered at a length unusual in the U.S.)--mostly the same kind of news, right?  Probably indistinguishable from what's considered news on similar channels at home, right?  After all, MTV in Europe still offers "Pimp My Ride," so really, there's more in common than not. 

Generally speaking, that's true, but when I returned to the States, one significant difference in what is considered news in the U.S. as opposed to in Europe stuck out dramatically: the "story" about the non-controversy of Obama delivering the commencement address at Notre Dame.  

After taking a two-week break and coming back, what was shockingly obvious is that the American media has no qualms about turning non-stories into huge controversies, if they can stoke religious and cultural tensions in doing so.  It's not just the Obama- goes-to-Notre-Dame story, though I think it's hard to imagine that would even be a story if the American media hadn't concocted it almost out of whole cloth.  It's the Americans calling themselves "pro-life".  The real story--that Americans still largely resist banning abortion (even, if you'll recall, in super-conservative states like South Dakota)--was ignored in favor of stoking resentments and anxieties, and empowering people who live to sniff their neighbors' panty drawers.  When it comes to culture war stories, our mainstream media has moved from reporting the story to creating the story. 

Fox News led the pack on the Obama protest story, repeatedly featuring spokespeople from the small anti-Obama student minority, as well as Alan Keyes.  But MSNBC, CNN, and the AP used their coverage to elevate marginal figures without noting how marginal they are, imply the protests were much bigger than they were, neglect to mention that Notre Dame is closer to a secular university than right wing religious schools like Liberty University, and either conceal or bury the fact that the students and faculty at Notre Dame put their support behind the President.  Of all the extensive coverage I saw of what should have been a non-story, only CBS accurately contrasted the small, wacky minority of anti-choicers with the feelings of the majority.  They also made a point that other outlets skipped over, which is that most of the protesters weren't students, but the same group of people who spend their free time picketing clinics.     

Going back over what I missed on American cable news shows while in Europe, I was shocked to see this story growing to the point where it exploded all over cable news, with Alan Keyes in particular wearing out his microphone denouncing Obama's pro-choice position.  Interestingly, in all the coverage I saw of this, never once did I hear it mentioned that Alan Keyes was humiliatingly defeated in the race for Illinois Senator in 2004, an election in which Obama won with 70% of the vote.  Nor did I hear it mentioned that Keyes, along with being an anti-choice nut, is also a conspiracy theorist who believes Obama faked his birth certificate.  Not a whiff of information indicated that Keyes might be riding these Notre Dame protests because he has a personal vendetta against the President, rather than a pure love of embryonic life.  

The problem with this story was terminal silliness.  Notre Dame had never before had an anti-feminist litmus test for commencement speakers, and Notre Dame students and faculty largely supported the President coming.  Based on sheer numbers, this story shouldn't have been a story--you can find a tiny minority of people to rile up about any foolish thing, and that a well-funded anti-choice movement was able to do that in this case was no more news than the fact that a percentage of people continue to believe the moon landing was faked.  But even if we don't take numbers into account, this story was stupid.  Notre Dame may be a Catholic university, but like most of them, its primary goal is to compete with secular universities and provide a real education, not turn its students into dogma-spouting automatons.  As someone who went to a Catholic school, I can assure you that the small fringe of hard right conservatives find themselves as marginalized by other students as on any other campus, and all their actions reflect their bitterness about this more than a commitment to whatever cause they're rallying around that day.   

And if the sheer smallness of the problem wasn't enough, then you get to the terminal silliness of the protesters themselves, who showed up pushing plastic dolls in strollers they've covered with blood.  When you do something like that, you're begging the mainstream media to treat you like a circus sideshow, instead of serious people with an actual point to make.  But despite the way pro-lifers acted, they were accepted like moral warriors speaking for Catholicism, instead of the shrill and silly minority they are. 

Despite obvious reasons not to treat this as a real story, the mainstream media in the United States forged ahead, concocting a fake controversy, and going out of its way to stir antagonisms between culture warriors who already feel huge amounts of resentment towards halls of learning at Notre Dame and elsewhere.  Watching much of the coverage, you would have thought there was an actual chance the Notre Dame would just give up on being a real university, and instead commit itself to pushing the most outrageous strikes against academic freedom requested by the religious right.  They'd probably give up their football team sooner.   

While our cable news networks create culture war stories out of scraps, the entire journalism industry is suffering a major financial crisis.  Newspapers are being shut down, massive layoffs attempt to stave off the crisis, and investigative journalism is disappearing as an art, because no one wants to pay for it.  Real news is just way too expensive, it turns out.  Much cheaper to find minor culture war stories, and turn them into major stories.  If every twist and turn of the story is actually caused by the media, they don't have to pay anyone to go out and get the real story.  If the airwaves are filled with these non-stories, media execs don't have to worry about filling time, and resorting to the expensive method of actually seeking out and writing the news. 

You can do less, but get more with culture war stories, too.  After all, people get confused by all the jargon and complications you get with stories about the economy, the war, and government corruption, which causes them to flip the channel to simpler fare, like "Friends" reruns.  But sex and religion?  Well, everyone understands that.  Or they think they do.  Truth is, people are just as ignorant on these issues as they are on all others, and the situation is only made worse by sensationalist coverage.  If you actually watched and believed the news reports on Obama's appearance at Notre Dame, you walk away even more ignorant than before.  You may have erroneous notions about what kind of institution Notre Dame is, thinking that it's less a university than it actually is, and more a hodge-podge of superstition.  And you definitely won't get as full a picture of how nutty the anti-choice protesters are, nor how few in number.  

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