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Paying attention, fully

Thursday, September 18, 2008

IT’S NOT ONLY charity that begins at home. So does headline-writing. It’s hardly a surprise that America’s media fixation, and indeed that of the entire industrialized world, on Wall Street’s current tumult has pushed just about everything else of importance completely aside.

 Among the sidelined events is of course one internationally significant development that reporters and analysts, with a unanimity that was led by the Associated Press, are calling “historic”.

 

Regular readers of THE MEDIA BEAT won’t be surprised that I mean the once-inconceivable happening of Zimbabwe’s dictator Robert Mugabe signing an agreement with the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, (who was the real winner in the recent traduced elections) to share power in that benighted country. To echo the otherwise not very quotable British ex-Premier John Major who once saw power transferred, with deep resistance, from Margaret Thatcher to his own slight shoulders: “Who’d have thunk it?"

 

Those loyal readers will know that, while I won’t deny the seriousness of the US economy’s distress right now, I am inescapably preoccupied with Zimbabwe. [ And I have been for a long time. Only this week, by happenstance, some family papers surfaced to show that my first communications with this former colony known as “Rhodesia” date back to when I was seven years old.] The South African-brokered agreement’s quite evidently breaks a long-intractable log-jam and, where it has been covered, this has been greeted with much relief (oh, and I share some of that optimism) ... but there are disturbing signs that we still need to pay close attention to realities on the Zimbabwean ground.

 

We should not be distracted - however big the news is at home -  from the fact that Robert Mugabe is (to put it mildly) a slippery customer, and is again adhering to form.

 

Only yesterday his media mouthpiece, The Herald newspaper, was used - as it often is - to begin hacking out his probable path ahead. It gave a typically unquestioning platform to the former “justice” minister, Patrick Chinamasa (above left) who lost his parliamentary seat in the elections, but was still to the fore in the cross-party negotiations and, for what it’s worth, was appointed to the Senate by Mugabe.

 

Chinamasa was quoted as warning that key aspects of the new power-sharing deal will not go in effect until at least next month. The delay stems from the need to amend the Constitution, in order to create the position intended for Tsvangirai, a Prime Minister post with executive powers which can function as some kind of counterforce to Mugabe as President. (For instance, the new Prime Ministerial office will in theory have as its priority the revoking of Mugabe’s draconian security and media laws.)

 

But guess what?  Only Parliament can thus amend the Constitution, and the President – according to Chinamasa - won’t convene Parliament until October 14, not earlier as was originally envisaged in the agreement. This is just the kind of foot-dragging for which Mugabe is all too notorious, and with which he held critics and opponents at bay for 28 years.

 

This is no time for the world’s media to look away.

   

 

**A RADIO DISCUSSION OF THIS COLUMN AIRS EVERY WEEK ON CONNECTICUT'S NPR STATION, WHDD (ROBIN HOOD RADIO) - Fridays at 7.35 am, and Saturdays at 4.45 pm.**

 

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REPUBLICAN-SUPPORTING MEDIA OUTLETS HAVE had a hard time with John McCain. It’s troublesome when the candidate and his media handlers flip-flop within hours about whether the fundamentals of the US economy are “strong” or in “crisis”. I suppose in an ideal, economic model of a world they could be both.

 

But it turns out that isn’t what McCain meant, either – or so it was decided by his flailing, and I imagine hair-tearing speech-writers, notably those ex-Bush White House spinners Nicole Wallace and Matthew Scully, who SO effectively briefed Sarah Palin for her set-pieces with ABC’s Charlie Gibson. In a speech that I guess was carefully crafted and which was certainly leaked in advance for the express purpose, acording to an anonymous aide, of putting the Senator’s earlier remarks “in context” (that common euphemism for “Let me try Take Two on that recording”). They decided that, of all things, it was the term “fundamentals” that had to be re-defined. The economy’s fundamentals are now “the American worker”, proclaimed the candidate.

 

To this somewhat unsubtle ear, that sounds dangerously Marxist. Isn’t that what Joe Hill and the "Wobblies" (the very different W’s, the International Workers of the World) used to say? It’s not what I’d expect from a top Republican, even one with an alleged “maverick” mode.

 

One red-bloodedly Republican outlet had even greater trouble with one of the current implosion’s hastily-contrived remedial measures. I’m thinking of those high priests of de-regulated market-forces at the New York Sun (its historic clock, pictured above center) – and especially of its founding editor Seth Lipsky, the ex-Wall Street Journal man for whom no greater bugbear exists than Socialism. The Sun greeted the Federal Reserve’s rescue of insurance giant AIG with a big banner headline claiming: AMERICA NATIONALIZES AIG GROUP.

 

Pretty hard-line, I’d say, and not very loyally supportive of the current Administration or of the candidate’s support for the Fed's move.

 

I naturally wondered how The Sun would react to the top of the GOP ticket in his re-defining of our economy’s fundamentals ... that "workers-of-America" stuff. It said sniffily that McCain “struck a populist tone”. Well he certainly tried.

  

   

 

WE MEDIA FREAKS ARE ALWAYS LOOKING for alternative metrics to gauge the state of the Presidential race – I personally am hungry for sheer novelty, and also leery about the general rash of crudely-applied political opinion polls.

 

Cyberspace - with its ever-increasing penchant for UGC, user-generated content - has come up with a stimulating new guide  ...  the number and variety of “home-made” political paraphernalia supporting and attacking the two sides.

 

It’s the online marketplace www.cafepress.com, at whose Election ‘08 section you can buy all kinds of candidate-themed “swag” from buttons to tee-shirts to bumper-stickers and beyond. Nothing is official party merchandise – their 6.5 million visitors (though these I suppose could include campaign workers) come up with their own designs and post them for sale in this competitive market. (An inevitable lipstick-on-a-pig tee-shirt logo, pictured right.)

 

The data is far from scientific, of course, but the site’s vice-president Amy Maniatis says their sales-meter functions as “a leading indicator of interest” in the candidates. Before the Republican National Convention, Obama completely dominated the field, but now it’s divided between him and (tellingly, both) McCain and Palin. The three split the market 30%-30%-30%, with poor old Joe Biden scarcely to be seen.

 

Numbers aside, the goods themselves are fun to browse through. I liked the sticker “Hockey Moms for Obama. But then I saw “Pit-Bulls for Obama” … and I liked that even more. 

 

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