From The Editor’s Desk

Setting the national agenda is a constant battle between issues that need to be heard and those that they want us to hear.

Andrew Garib, Turn Left | If there’s one truism in politics in the 21st Century, it is that the media’s power is unparalleled. Governments small and large must vie for attention in order to hock their policy wares (no matter how vaudevillian or Orwellian). But simply dominating the news is not enough, for (although it may not seem this way) the viewing and reading audience is fickle. Attention must be kept, guided, and directed by the egos of Albany or Sacramento or Washington D.C. itself.

And there has never been an administration as adept at media manipulation as that of George W. Bush. While unlike many strong liberals I think there’s a conservative media bias as much as I think there’s a liberal one, Bush media manipulation is undeniable. Nevertheless it’s not simply qualified lies and highly-choreographed media events that lull America into tunnel vision. It’s a subtle and effective form of distraction that has less to do with the media and more to do with scale and position.

By position, I mean the administration with enough clout (despite November 2000) to demand quite explicitly that criticism of the government be hushed voluntarily, out of respect of those fighting our perpetual wars. I mean a government trusted enough in a time of national fear and second-guessing that the most hideous actions and pieces of legislation – like the PATRIOT Act, or the justification for the war on Iraq – against all reason are passed, given bipartisan support and the blessings of the masses. I mean the ability to lie enough times that eventually, one day, those lies become given truth.

By scale, I mean the magnitude of a global, indefinite war against terrorism with its tentacles tenuously reaching – with enough massaging – the most desired of geopolitical points of control. I mean the fabricated immediate threat of foreign dictators, the magnitude of American military power, the strength of American diplomatic resolve. These are issues all grander – although not always greater – than the concerns we would often like to have addressed at home, such as the state of the environment, healthcare, education and the economy, and thus dominate discussion and the media as if only those in Washington set agendas worthy of national discourse.

In March 2003, there was no avoiding the agenda set by Washington. Today it is equally but perhaps more legitimately a focus of discussion, since there are so many American servicemen attacked daily by terror threats – at the very time when Bush administration spin doctors wish to remind Americans of the good (and not the bad) aspects of the ongoing occupation of Iraq. Bush cannot just set the agenda, but set it on his terms. ‘We’re making good progress in Iraq,’ Bush said. ‘Sometimes it’s hard to tell it, when you listen to the filter’ – the filter, presumably, which represents immediate American interests rather than those of the administration. Bush’s spin is clearly taken from the pages of Anne Coulter and the like.

Now Bush and White House communications director Dan Bartlett intend to circumvent the ‘filter’ completely – and provide the most intimate access to the president and analysis of his policy not to seasoned national journalists working for the largest news companies in America, but local television and radio stations. Due to the importance of both the President’s message and office (scale and position), he can still reach the masses without the pesky musings of the New York Times or CBS News. Bush and his cabinet are free from the tough questioning of the veteran national journalists and can thus set the agenda as they please, Nixon-style.

(The trouble with Nixon, of course, was that his true character caught up with his government’s projected image of détente and strength and cool diplomacy. The power of agenda-setting returned to public hands, ending in the humiliation of the resigning of the President who the press couldn’t kick around anymore. Perhaps this is a page out of history worth going over again.)

We on the Left can only hope that the power of agenda-setting is swinging back in the direction of the general public. When the Bush administration’s tax, education, healthcare, environmental and homeland defence initiatives are exposed once and for all as the frauds they are – when democracy is restored, and the public once again sets the agenda for the nation – we may just end up with a domestic regime change of the electoral kind in 2004. Until then, it is up to us in the press and you in the real world to truly set the agenda.

This issue of Turn Left has as its theme ‘the Lost Issues’ – those ideas and problems that, especially in the atmosphere of Near East distraction, hardly get the attention they deserve. Take, for example, Alex Berke’s reflection on the Turkish genocide of Armenians during World War I. To highlight this, we have included a new feature, The Back Burner, which foregrounds the issues and events of national and international importance which don’t seem to be part of the agenda when we need them there the most. We certainly hope you enjoy and are engaged by The Back Burner.

It’s easy to get caught up in the hype of the imposed agenda, so blatantly flaunted, hung high for all to see, its weight secured tightly by the scale and position of the governments who impose it. Nonetheless, we can’t be so easily distracted from our goals of a more progressive society, polity and policy. We must be relentless in our resolve to set agendas and place the stories and issues we believe to be of highest priority at the forefront. A government who feels the need to impose ideology and direction more than harness one from the electorate is an administration who stands more for its self-interest than its nation. With the elections exactly a year away, it’s time we remind Mr. Bush, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Rove just who needs to be setting the agenda.

Sources: http://abcnews.go.com/sections/Nightline/Politics/media_bypass031025-4.html End.