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"Show-me" midwest media maelstrom

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Dateline - St LOUIS: Where better for a multi-media guy, especially one with a distinctly visual bias like me, to spend some countdown days toward November's elections than here in the "Show-me" State?

And sure enough, the frenzy of television advertising alone in Missouri's US Senatorial battle has been enough to justify this video-hound’s trip here. Missouri is one of three states (along with Virginia and Tennessee) which could bring the Democrats up from the four states (Ohio, Pennsylvania, Montana and Rhode Island) in which they can be confident of winning, to the magic number of six that they have to win to achieve a Senate majority.

So out of their current war chest of $67.3 million, national Democrats are investing nearly $13 million in just these three states, Virginia, Tennessee and Missouri.

And get this. Nearly $2m of that was spent on television advertising right here in this city of St Louis - on one single night. It was Monday night of this week, and of course it was Game One of the World Series that pits St Louis’ Cardinals against the Detroit Tigers.

It’s hard to overstate the local resonance - and hence the media power - of this sporting event, in a city baseball-mad enough in ordinary times, but currently inaugurating a brand-new beer-financed stadium, the home team in sight of national glory, and municipal fountains spouting Cardinal-red water. (I do not jest – for a moment I though some bloody Psycho-style slashing had taken place in downtown’s Keiner Plaza)

The Dems’ intensive TV advertising is in support of a strong candidate, Clare McCaskill, who as well as campaigning against the Iraq war is also building a strong platform in defense of embryonic stem cell research.

It’s a big issue here. As well as their congressional choices, Missourians will be voting on a pro-research state proposition, known as Amendment 2. It was this aspect of McCaskill’s campaign that brought actor Michael J. Fox (pictured above) to the "Show-me" State’s airwaves on that highly-watched night, to say as a very visible Parkinson’s disease sufferer: "What you do in Missouri matters to millions of Americans, Americans like me".

Rush Limbaugh, talk radio's pharmaceutical expert, wins one of my Media Medals for Gall this week by instantly accusing Fox of putting on "purely an act", perhaps by manipulating his medication, and thus exaggerating his disease’s symptoms on air. Limbaugh’s Gall Medal has an added cluster of nightshade-leaves, for nauseating crassness beyond the call of duty.

There have been other contenders this week. National Public Radio’s under-used but hard-digging Senior Correspondent Juan Williams somehow tempted Dick Cheney onto NPR, out from his normal media comfort zone - which stretches, if that’s the word, from Fox News to NBC’s Tim Russert. And so it came in answer to Williams' quoting back at Cheney his own previous words (addressed to the comfort zone's Larry King, as it happens) claiming that Iraq’s carnage represented "the last throes" of the insurgency - and to Williams’ asking specifically "do you think they’re in the last throes now?" - that The Veep finally voiced his curiously flat (even for him) admission: "I can’t say that".

Well, he did once. He earns the other Medal for Gall this week, unadorned and bald-faced.


CHENEY, I’M SURE, CHALKED UP A TRIUMPH with the presidential signing last week of the Military Commissions Act, which authorizes military tribunals to try "high-value" terrorism suspects and simultaneously takes away the right of non-citizens in US custody (and here that means Guantanamo prisoners) to petition for habeas corpus.

Now, I am one of the still relatively few journalists to have written about Guantanamo prisoners. It’s important to acknowledge it was far from first-hand reporting.

The entire field of journalism, in fact, is almost entirely dependent for information about what goes on in that prison camp upon intermediaries – specifically lawyers who have had access to the prisoners under the long-hallowed habeas corpus principle. (It does mean, after all, "Show the body" – let us see who you have in custody.)

Under the new law, those lawyers simply won’t have access. And reporters for whom Guantanamo has ended up a specialty, notably Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald, can now expect an already difficult beat to become nigh impossible.

According to Rosenberg, "The process of lawyers going down there has informed the reporting immensely … If the habeas attorneys can no longer speak to those people, how will I be able to report about them?"

Now, she speculates, virtually the only way for news to get out, about prisoner treatment for instance, will be via prisoners themselves getting letters to their families (in Afghanistan? - in Pakistan?) and via those families contacting the press at their end of the process. Not exactly a reliable chain of communication.

Accountability - which our supposedly democratic institutions, including the press, are meant to exert upon those in authority - is dealt another stupifying blow with this Act.