Obama and the State of the Media

It’s remarkable how shallow the media coverage of our Presidential elections has become.

Yesterday I attended a campaign event for the first time, taking my spot at the press table as Democratic candidate Barack Obama addressed a crowd estimated at 7,000 at the Resch Center in Green Bay.

His speech was complete with the slogans, rhetoric, and stabs at his opponent one would expect, all delivered with the quintessential oratory that has captivated a his party. But also in the context of his address were a number of interesting, specific policy points that went beyond the cliché, those things we all say we want, what the media yearns for.

Yet when I turned on the local news later in the evening to get their take on the event, the cliché carried the day.

NBC began its newscast with the oh-so-original line “Barack Obama brought his message of change to Green Bay today.” Well, there’s a waste of nine words. How much of the day was spent on that savvy piece of political insight? And that was about as deep as their coverage went.

Newscasts are measured in seconds, so you would assume reporters and anchors would try to get the most out of each second of airtime. Instead, they sink to the easy, the cliché, the echoes of lines rehearsed a million times over.

In the last week both presidential candidates, one of whom will end up as the most powerful man in the world, came to Green Bay Wisconsin, and the local affiliates aired all of about 12 seconds of their addresses, broken into three separate snippets, during their nightly newscasts.

So what was really news in Obama’s speech?

In the midst of the campaign mantras we’ve all heard ad nausea,

he countered the often-repeated claim voiced by the campaign that Obama will raise taxes on most Americans. Obama said, (and factcheck.org verifies) that his plan will actually lower taxes on 95 percent of Americans and only raise them on those who make more than $250,000 annually. It’s important that Americans choosing their next president know that, but NBC didn’t see fit to include it.

One of the early priorities of the Bush Administration was the privatization of Social Security, which McCain supported and many speculate will be put back on the table if McCain is elected. Obama pointed out that the benefits of many new retirees would be suffering at the hands of the market today. NBC didn’t share or investigate this claim.

NBC also didn’t see fit to report on Obama’s claim that McCain has supported in the past much of the deregulation that contributed to our present economic crisis.

“We did not arrive at this moment by some accident of history,” Obama said. “We are in this mess because of a bankrupt philosophy that says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to the rest of us.”

It’s an important point at a time when politicians across both isles and Mr. Bush will stand before national television cameras with stunned looks and try to sell Americans on the idea that this mess came out of nowhere and their actions (or inactions) had nothing to do with it.

And in an era when the whole of the national voting public is no match for the power of Washington lobbyists, Obama’s ideas for watering down their power deserved some time and debate, but received none. Obama pledged to limit the ability of lobbyists to move in and out of his administration and use that access to enrich the firms they work for.

“I’ll make it absolutely clear that working in an Obama Administration is not about serving your former employer, your future employer, or your bank account – it’s about serving your country,” he said.

He said members of his administration will be barred from working on regulations or contracts related to their former employer for two years, and when they leave they would be barred from lobbying his administration forever.

He also proposes putting all bills awaiting his signature online for five days for citizens to view before he signs, and placing meetings between lobbyists and government agencies on the Web as well.

“When there is a tax bill being debated in Congress, you will know the names of the corporations that would benefit and how much money they would get,” Obama said. “And we will put every corporate tax break and every pork-barrel project online for every American to see. You will know who asked for them and you can cast your vote accordingly.”

Will many citizens take him up on the offer? Will these proposals have an effect? Maybe, maybe not, but either way it’s worth knowing about.

Obama culminated his speech with a nod to Wisconsin’s progressive past, a torch carried from Fighting Bob La Follette to William Proxmire and on to Russ Feingold.

“Change has always come from places like Wisconsin,” he said, where the progressive movement was born. “A movement rooted in a principle that was known as the Wisconsin idea.”

Well, change may indeed yet come from Wisconsin. But our local media has let it be known it won’t start with them – they’re content to take their cue from the same soundbite journalism trickling down from the networks.