Page 139 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

128 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

turned out the vote; the act of voting was the consolidation of a
collective ritual, not a private act through which the isolated citizen
expressed his piety. 18
In the age of professionalization, reformers recoiled. What developed
in the 1870s and 1880s, with a push from so-called ‘educated men’, was
a didactic politics, what McGerr calls an ‘elitist’ politics. High-minded
reformers insisted on a secret ballot; they approved of social science;
they wanted enlightened leaders to guide the unwashed. They worked
toward a new-style campaign: a campaign of education. Independent
journalism helped—newspapers no longer under party management.
Alongside the waning partisan press, there emerged a bifurcated press:
the high-minded independent papers with their educated tone,
cultivating political discernment; and the low-minded sensational
19
papers with their lurid tone, cultivating apolitical passion. The way is
already open to our contemporary bifurcation: the New York Times and
the New York Post; public television’s daily MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,
with its protracted, detailed round-table discussions of issues current in
Washington, and the syndicated Geraldo Rivera with his televised
exposes of Satanism and teenage prostitution. This split corresponds to
the highbrow/lowbrow cultural split that developed during the latter
decades of the nineteenth century, as traced by Lawrence W.Levine in his
20
recent book. Serious politics became, like high culture, ‘sacralized’,
while the political discourse of the working-class press degraded into
yellow journalism.
Such sharply bifurcated media reinforce political division: to
oversimplify, a progressive middle class takes politics seriously while a
diverted working class is for the most part (except for the Great
Depression) disabused. Although it takes decades for this process to
develop, and there are exceptional periods of working-class
mobilization along the way, the lineaments of the modern campaign are
already in place at the turn of the century: emphasis on the personality of
the candidate, not the party; emphasis on the national campaign, not
local events; a campaign of packaging, posed pictures and slogans.
Politics as a discretionary, episodic, defensive activity for the majority
alongside moral politics for the few. The politics of the consumer
society, in short.
The radio hookups of the 1920s made presidential campaigns still more
national. Candidates and presidents could reach over the heads of the
party apparatus directly to the electorate. Party structures grew steadily
more redundant. Some of these changes were welcomed by reformers,
and properly so: gradually, candidates found it more difficult to utter