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Perceptions of the people

Thursday, September 25, 2008

THEY ARE A DAMNABLY difficult thing, the perceptions of media consumers. You know, all those people who watch, hear, read, download and - to some extent at least - take in what they are offered by media practitioners.

What could the ultimate reaction possibly be among the great American audience to all the brouhaha over tomorrow's scheduled Presidential debate, a messy game of one-up-manship played out against the background of Washington's Battle of the Bailout?

 

It's a battle of course that the sitting, if lame, President tried to control by grabbing megaphone time last night from all the TV networks, though when it came to early soundings among viewers he was judged neither important nor unimportant to the issue. As was his grandstanding invitation to the candidates to join in the White House / Capitol Hill discussions. 

 

Just how uninfluenced George W Bush's "fellow citizens" can remain even in the face of truly big communications blasts should be very humbling to us all.

 

Here's a microcosmic case in point, about the public's frequent intractability. A friend of mine – let’s call him Mike – was regaling a bunch of us at dinner with his fears about a possible Barack Obama administration. You might think he’d worry more about any continuation of the Republican principles of government (or are they principles of non-government?) that have been affecting him deeply.

 

After all, he’s been unemployed for months now, a direct victim – because he dealt in commercial and residential real estate – of the sub-prime lending meltdown that led to our current wider meltdown. But for Mike, national security seems to trump economic matters, even his own business prospects, and for him Obama is just too weak and non-belligerent to contemplate as our national leader.

 

Mike said: “Imagine we’re attacked by some terrorist in Pakistan” (and a little spookily he was talking just before this week's truck bomb that killed more than sixty people at Islamabad’s Marriott Hotel, a symbol to many Pakistanis and others of American-led globalization). “I wouldn’t want anybody in the White House who would just invite Pakistan’s leader to come in, sit down, have a cup of tea and we’ll talk about it.”

 

Amid a surge of others trying to correct Mike and offer him nuanced explications, like what “preconditions” might mean for Obama if he opened talks with unpopular foreign leaders, I tried a simple declaration of fact. I pointed out that Obama was the candidate who said, just this summer: "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf [then Pakistan’s leader] won't act, we will”.

 

You may recall that this effort at tough-talking by Obama prompted John McCain to label him “naïve” (Hillary Clinton did so too - but that’s another, older story for another time).

 

Mike, however, didn’t recall those facts at all; he simply refused flat-out to believe me, or the published record. McCain is his “shoot-from-the-hip” man, and that’s way he prefers it.  Prefers McCain, too, of course.

 

  

 

A WISE COUNSELOR OF MINE IN THE TRADE of journalism once warned me, a bit sadly and  world-wearily, to temper my idealism about how many hearts and minds any of us might influence with our laboriously researched facts and explanations.

 

I was already well-primed to listen to him from my days as a TV news anchor. Our antiquated prefiguring of “user generated content”, or the “Comments” section of a webpage, was a bank of phones in our newsroom, whose volunteer operators I was often happy to join the moment I came off-air from the nightly broadcast. But I’m afraid I almost never heard anything to surprise me. People called into the show in their hordes, but only to complain about something that contradicted what they felt they knew, or to affirm whatever supported anything they already believed.

 

Is it worse nowadays, this echo-chamber effect, with the internet vastly amplifying all the rampant misinformation put out by political workers and their freelance allies?

 

I don’t know. But it’s all too predictable that the Pew Research Center can now report that only 50% of the American public know Obama’s religion (Christian, of course) while a depressing array of lies and manipulative rumors fill the minds of others. Thirteen percent actually believe he’s a Muslim - oh, that includes my friend “Mike”, by the way – while 16% report they are unsure because they’ve heard “different things”. Almost as many “Don’t Knows” feel unsure because they “haven’t heard enough”. I wonder how much more information they need … or is that phrase just a euphemistic excuse for not wanting to answer?

 

Also, is it misinformation, or “not enough” information, that led to a Washington Post – ABC News poll showing that 51% of Americans believe their taxes would go up under Obama’s taxation plan, even though the plan is – clear as day – aimed at the top five percent of the taxpaying population?

  

 

WE’RE CONSTANTLY TOLD THAT SUCH NATIONAL NUMBERS don’t matter so much anyway, since the presidential election will hinge upon a handful of swing battleground States. So examining how voters in – let’s say - the persistently resonant (since the Great Recount Struggle of 2000) Sunshine State of Florida, are processing the information they receive about the candidates might be more illuminating.

 

A state-wide poll underwritten by the Miami Herald, the St Petersburg Times and the TV channel Bay News 9 this week gives a narrow lead (2%) to McCain in overall voting intentions, even though Obama is said to be better trusted to "improve the economy" by 49% of Floridians, compared with the 40% who conclude they should pin their economic hopes on McCain.

 

And before you ask, yes this poll was conducted well after Wall Street's turmoil had come to dominate the headlines.

 

So what can this evident contradiction mean? Maybe it’s summed up – as so often in the polling business – by the qualitative questioning more than the quantitative. Follow-up interviews revealed thinking like this answer from Nick Bohn, an attorney of Pinecrest in Miami-Dade County, who - although he's worried about the economy - said: “I'm just one of those guys who wants to be left alone. I don't like big changes”.

 

One of the polling team's chiefs, Kellyanne Conway interprets that, along with hundreds of others’ answers, to mean that Obama faces the problem of an electorate which may now “have a love affair with the concept of change, and yet is scared to death to effectuate it. People don't like to take risks when times are tough."

 

And we all face an electorate (let's face it, we are part of an electorate) which can base its decisions more on prejudiced perceptions than any number of demonstrable facts.

 

Three well-attested notions collide for me here. Democracy is the least worst form of government (as suggested by Winston Churchill back in 1947). An informed electorate is essential to democracy. And – sad to say – the third and overpowering truth … a country tends to get exactly the form of government it deserves.

 

 

**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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