Page 141 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

130 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

parties’ nominating conventions are the obvious example—more people
turn off. Thus television inspired political withdrawal along with
pseudo-sophistication. As campaign coverage proliferates, and the
pundits and correspondents pontificate in their savvy way, they take
part in what is increasingly a circular conversation—while an attuned
audience, wishing to be taken behind the scenes, is invited to inspect the
strategies of the insiders. Savviness is the tribute a spectacular culture
pays to the pleasures of democracy—middle-class outsiders want to be
in the know, while the poor withdraw and fail to vote (partly because
legal obstacles are thrown up in the way of their registration, and
neither party finds it in its interest to change the law). Politics, by these
lights, remains a business for insiders and professionals. While the
political class jockeys, the rest of us become voyeurs of our political fate
—or enragés. Can it be simple coincidence that as voting and newspaper
reading plummeted in the 1980s, Morton Downey, Jr arrived with his
syndicated right-wing television yellfest, resembling nothing so much
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as an electronic bar-room brawl? And that at the same time radio talk
shows were able to mobilize the indignant against congressional salary
raises? Probably not. The vacuum of public discourse is filled on the
cheap. Moral panics thrive, disconnected from radical or even liberal
politics. The only issue on which radio talk show hosts nationwide
could agree was a symbolic crusade in behalf of Congressional ethics;
they do not mobilize their listeners against a tax ‘reform’that lines the
pockets of the corporate rich, or against military-industrial profligacy.

INTIMATIONS OF THE HOLLOWING PUBLIC
SPHERE
And what of the future? As the artist Folon says, ‘I work at forgetting
I’m a pessimist.’ Ronald Lembo’s research, which I’ve alluded to above,
suggests that younger viewers are more likely, when they watch
television, to pay attention to disconnected images; to switch channels,
‘watching’ more than one program at once; and to spin off into fantasies
about images. Of all age-groups, the young are also the least likely to
read newspapers and to vote. Do we detect a chain of causation? Does a
fascination with speed, quick cuts, ten-second bites, one-second
‘scenes’ and out-of-context images suggest less tolerance for the rigors
of serious argument and the tedium of organized political life? Has the
attention span been shrinking; and if so, is television the cause; and what
would this prophesy for our politics? Is there, in a word, a music video
generation? Future apparatchiks of the media-politics nexus are