Page 137 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

126 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

their own fashion, Bush and his handlers—some of them fresh from
Reagan’s team—followed. Their masterwork was a Bush commercial
which opened with a still photo taken on the White House lawn: Reagan
to the right, at the side of the frame; Gorbachev at the center, shaking
hands with the stern-faced Bush. The camera moved in on the Vice-
President and Gorbachev; Reagan was left behind—having presided, he
yielded gracefully to his successor, the new man of the hour. As the
camera moved closer, the stern face and the handshake took over, while
the voice-over spoke the incantation: ‘strong …continue the arms
control process…a president ready to go to work on day one.’ The
entire saga was present in a single image: Bush the heir, the reliable
man of strength who was also savvy enough to tame the adversary by
dealing with him.

ON THE PREHISTORY OF BITES AND
SPECTACLES

How new is the reduction of political discourse to the horse-race, the
handicapping, the tailoring of campaigns to the concoction of imagery?
What is particular to television? How good were the good old days?
Tempting as it is to assume that television has corrupted a previously
virginal politics, the beginning of wisdom is history. As the campaigns
invite us to read their blips, alarm is amply justified—but not because
American politics has fallen from a pastoral of lucid debate and hushed,
enlightened discourse to a hellish era of mud-slinging and degraded
sloganeering. Television is very far from having invented the
superficiality, triviality and treachery of American politics. American
politics has been raucous, deceptive, giddy, shallow, sloganeering and
demagogic for most of its history. ‘Infotainment’ is in the American
grain. So is reduction and spectacle—and high-minded revulsion
against both.
Is negative campaigning new? In 1828, supporters of Andrew
Jackson charged that John Quincy Adams had slept with his wife before
marrying her, and that, while minister to Russia, he had supplied the
Czar with a young American mistress. In turn, pro-Adams newspapers
accused Jackson of adultery, gambling, cock-fighting, bigamy, slave-
trading, drunkenness, theft, lying and murder. Jackson was said to be
the offspring of a prostitute’s marriage to a mulatto. Papers accused
Jackson’s previously divorced wife of having moved in with him while
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still married to her first husband. Not that all mud sticks. Some mud
boomerangs. In 1884 a Protestant minister called the Democrats the