John L. Perry
Tuesday, May 11, 2004

With the inexorable force of the novelist’s o’erpowering whirlpool that funnels nearly every object in its clutches down, down, down into certain doom, the perfect storm of television is sucking American democracy into oblivion.

The way things are headed, television mass communications – with print media puppy-trotting alongside its ankles – are what will determine the outcome of the 2004 presidential election. Not the candidates. Not the issues. Not the ethics of anything or anybody.

Painful Admission

It hurts so deeply to have to write this, but television journalism has done more to disserve, dissemble and destroy the democratic process than any other single force.

One wag, critiquing the crippling onslaught of television, looked back upon the advent of radio as the culpable precursor and observed that “this is de Forest’s prime evil.” He was more right than he may have thought at the time.

When radio came along it spellbound listeners. In this country, Franklin D. Roosevelt became its foremost manipulator for political advantage. Without radio there’d have been no FDR fourth term. America might still be in a slough of depression, psychic as well as economic.

No Radio, No Third Reich

In Europe, Adolf Hitler would have remained unknown if not for radio, by which he cast his evil spell that spawned World War II.

Britons might never have survived the Nazi blitz if Winston Churchill had not rallied and sustained them via radio.

Americans would never have understood their plight and their heroism without the radio voice of Edward R. Murrow reporting as bombs fell, “This is London.”

Radio raised the creative potential of journalism from the tedious, stuffy precincts of newspaper yellow journalism. Small wonder that even greater good was anticipated from television news.

No Match for Greed

Indeed, it started out that way, but soon human frailties and avarices overtook technology. The great North Carolina novelist Thomas Wolfe warned that America’s enemy was “single selfishness and compulsive greed.”

There was no way the Founding Fathers could have foreseen this malady, no way they could have written into the Bill of Rights adequate protections – for both the purveyors and consumers of television news.

That had to be left to the practitioners of news gathering and reporting down the ages as technology leapt beyond each new generation’s wildest imaginings.

Throttling Democracy

Today, televised “journalism” – a word so corrupted it bears trifling resemblance to anything the Founders could have had in mind – has gripped the American presidential process to the strangle point.

The encroachment of television’s corrupting influence on the American body politic began tentatively some half a century ago. It welled up and surged on, exponentially, generating its own enormous reinvesting, self-reinventing industry of unprecedented proportions and wealth.

It feeds upon itself, and that suction draws further sustenance from every engine of productivity across the economic spectrum. It is not stoppable, and may well be immune to any external amelioration.

Understatement, Actually

Think that sounds like an exaggeration? Consider what is going on right now with the televised reporting of prisoner abuse in the war in Iraq.

That is the dominant story on television news. And newspapers from the New York Times to the Podunk Herald mimic this in their headlines, photos, “news” stories and local opinion columns.

Each sliver of development, no matter how trivial, routine or questionable, is flared up into a major new event. Members of Congress, ever starved for ego nourishment, insist on holding televised hearings where they preen, posture and speechify.

Pattern of Things to Come

The 24-hour cable-television news channels’ coverage of the latest celebrity rape, infanticide or child molestation case is a blueprint of what to expect between now and Nov. 2 in coverage of the prisoner abuse.

Assume there are a dozen, two dozen, maybe three dozen individual cases in the military. Each one – every single one – will be dragged through this news-media-determined scenario:

Families of the accused will be interviewed. So will their pastors. So will their neighbors. So will their attorneys. So will spokespersons for the International Red Cross and the American Civil Liberties Union. So will members of the Black Caucus (and members of the White Caucus if such could be found), members of the Senate, members of the House of Representatives, members of the Cabinet and no end of colonels and generals, no end of experts, no end of opinionizers.

TV News’ Ignorance and Effrontery

That’s just for openers. Each time an accused member of the military goes before an Article 32 hearing, a limited court martial or a full court martial, the television vultures will demand, anew, to be allowed to flock inside the courtroom. Anyone entering or leaving the proceeding will swarmed by television mike-and-camera thrusters.

If any of those alleged journalists has even the foggiest knowledge of the Uniform Code of Military Justice it will be a miracle. There will be an interminable parade of special-pleaders who will demand that guilt or innocence be proclaimed before the 6 o’clock news comes on. Accommodated by television news producers, protesters with signs will chant and scuffle with police trying to enforce picket lines.

Even though military justice proceeds at a somewhat swifter clip than civilian justice, there are enough cases, and potential cases, to string this circus out for the necessary six months that it takes to influence and determine the election outcome.

Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Elections

And why wait for the election when opinion polls – based on phone calls to 500 to 1,000 or so “typical” voters – are grinding out almost daily what America is supposed to think? Poll-influencing has become an art outranking voter-influencing.

Television news will seize upon a term apparently heretofore unknown to it – chain of command. With no understanding of what that really is, mass-comm manipulators will be demanding the scalp of every corporal, sergeant, lieutenant, captain, major, colonel and general “up the chain of command.”

Already the dour Democratic candidate for president wants on a pike the head of not only the secretary of defense but also the president of the United States. In his haste to preside at the chopping block, he seems to have overlooked the vice president. That will come.

Ample Ammunition Available

When stateside interviewees appear to be running out, there is always Europe, that overstocked fishing hole of anti-American envy and resentment.

At virtually no cost to themselves, Arab television networks will be rerunning all this over and over again for the benefit of folks who have sworn to kill Americans.

Where on television may one turn to find old-fashion straight news?

Forget the major networks – ABC, CBS and NBC. What news they’ve not just about given up on is now so politically slanted the anchors seem to have a hard time keeping straight faces.

Where Tax Dollars Go

Publicly funded television and radio are unabashed leftist propagandists, National Public Radio blatantly and the televised Public Broadcasting Service more insidiously.

CNN, which started out reporting news, has grown so politicized it has thoroughly discredited itself to the extent that Fox News Channel has overtaken its audience.

It looked as though FNC might be able to offer a counter-force in time. That hope is swiftly dying. The finest new hour on television anywhere remains Brit Hume’s program 6-7 p.m., ET, Monday through Friday, on FNC. But it’s an oasis of sanity that is being chipped away at, bit by bit.

Much of Fox elsewhere is content to have its “hosts,” like ungovernable adolescents, yelling and screeching at interviewees and at one another or bear-baiting guests to claw one another apart. Some Fox reporters have of late taken up the disgraced “60 Minutes” style of ambush journalism.

Six-Months Window

Is there any way of derailing this runaway train of mass-comm distortion before it hijacks the 2004 election? The most honest answer is probably not … unless.

That “unless” is this: The American people are not stupid – a little slow to catch on and push back at times, but not stupid.

They are also more than a little perceptive. They can, if they will, see through what’s going on, how they are being mesmerized and manipulated by the leftist mass-comm media.

Will Too Much Be Enough?

There is still a chance – a right good chance – that they will become sickened of what’s happening to them and on election day, in their revulsion, show the masters of the media who really is boss in this country.

In Poe’s story, the narrator tells how he managed to survive the maelstrom. He opened his eyes and used the sense God gave him. He saw that objects with angles got sucked most quickly into the depths and that cylindrical objects were more likely to avoid that fate. He grabbed a barrel, held on for dear life, rode out the storm and lived to tell the tale.

Americans’ native perceptive ability, common sense, decency and sense of outrage are the best hope – the only barrel left to clutch.

John L. Perry, a prize-winning newspaper editor and writer who served on White House staffs of two presidents, is a regular columnist for NewsMax.com.

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