[Sosfbay-discuss] Al Gore on the effect of TV on politics, elections (book excerpt in Time)

[JamBoi]

Fowarded by Scott McLarty, media spokesperson of the
GP-US:

(I don't usually forward articles by Al Gore, but
this has some interesting information about the
effect of TV on politics and how dissent is
blocked from broadcast, which can be converted
into some good Green arguments for public funding
of campaigns and candidates free time on the
public airwaves. -- Scott) 


Al Gore on the effect of TV on politics, elections
(book excerpt in Time)
Date:	Fri, 18 May 2007 10:30:06 -0700 (PDT)

Book Excerpt: The Assault on Reason

By Al Gore
Time, May 16, 2007
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1622015,00.html

Not long before our nation launched the invasion
of Iraq, our longest-serving Senator, Robert Byrd
of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor and
said: "This chamber is, for the most part,
silent—ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no
debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for
the nation the pros and cons of this particular
war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in
the United States Senate." 

Why was the Senate silent? 

In describing the empty chamber the way he did,
Byrd invited a specific version of the same
general question millions of us have been asking:
"Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a
sharply diminished role in the way America now
makes important decisions?" The persistent and
sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of
policy, even in the face of massive and
well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems
to many Americans to have reached levels that
were previously unimaginable. 

A large and growing number of Americans are
asking out loud: "What has happened to our
country?" People are trying to figure out what
has gone wrong in our democracy, and how we can
fix it. 

To take another example, for the first time in
American history, the Executive Branch of our
government has not only condoned but actively
promoted the treatment of captives in wartime
that clearly involves torture, thus overturning a
prohibition established by General George
Washington during the Revolutionary War. 

It is too easy—and too partisan—to simply place
the blame on the policies of President George W.
Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions
our country makes. We have a Congress. We have an
independent judiciary. We have checks and
balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free
speech. We have a free press. Have they all
failed us? Why has America's public discourse
become less focused and clear, less reasoned?
Faith in the power of reason—the belief that free
citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly
by resorting to logical debate on the basis of
the best evidence available, instead of raw
power—remains the central premise of American
democracy. This premise is now under assault. 

American democracy is now in danger—not from any
one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes
in the environment within which ideas either live
and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the
physical environment; I mean what is called the
public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas. 

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the
strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am
not alone in feeling that something has gone
fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was
an aberration when polls showed that
three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam
Hussein was responsible for attacking us on Sept.
11. More than five years later, however, nearly
half of the American public still believes Saddam
was connected to the attack. 

At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop
coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial was just an
unfortunate excess—an unwelcome departure from
the normal good sense and judgment of our
television news media. Now we know that it was
merely an early example of a new pattern of
serial obsessions that periodically take over the
airwaves for weeks at a time: the Michael Jackson
trial and the Robert Blake trial, the Laci
Peterson tragedy and the Chandra Levy tragedy,
Britney and KFed, Lindsay and Paris and Nicole. 

While American television watchers were
collectively devoting 100 million hours of their
lives each week to these and other similar
stories, our nation was in the process of more
quietly making what future historians will
certainly describe as a series of
catastrophically mistaken decisions on issues of
war and peace, the global climate and human
survival, freedom and barbarity, justice and
fairness. For example, hardly anyone now
disagrees that the choice to invade Iraq was a
grievous mistake. Yet, incredibly, all of the
evidence and arguments necessary to have made the
right decision were available at the time and in
hindsight are glaringly obvious. 

Those of us who have served in the U.S. Senate
and watched it change over time could volunteer a
response to Senator Byrd's incisive description
of the Senate prior to the invasion: The chamber
was empty because the Senators were somewhere
else. Many of them were at fund-raising events
they now feel compelled to attend almost
constantly in order to collect money—much of it
from special interests—to buy 30-second TV
commercials for their next re-election campaign.
The Senate was silent because Senators don't feel
that what they say on the floor of the Senate
really matters that much anymore—not to the other
Senators, who are almost never present when their
colleagues speak, and certainly not to the
voters, because the news media seldom report on
Senate speeches anymore. 

Our Founders' faith in the viability of
representative democracy rested on their trust in
the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry, their
ingenious design for checks and balances, and
their belief that the rule of reason is the
natural sovereign of a free people. The Founders
took great care to protect the openness of the
marketplace of ideas so that knowledge could flow
freely. Thus they not only protected freedom of
assembly, they made a special point—in the First
Amendment—of protecting the freedom of the
printing press. And yet today, almost 45 years
have passed since the majority of Americans
received their news and information from the
printed word. Newspapers are hemorrhaging
readers. Reading itself is in decline. The
Republic of Letters has been invaded and occupied
by the empire of television. 

Radio, the Internet, movies, cell phones, iPods,
computers, instant messaging, video games and
personal digital assistants all now vie for our
attention—but it is television that still
dominates the flow of information. According to
an authoritative global study, Americans now
watch television an average of 4 hours and 35
minutes every day—90 minutes more than the world
average. When you assume eight hours of work a
day, six to eight hours of sleep and a couple of
hours to bathe, dress, eat and commute, that is
almost three-quarters of all the discretionary
time the average American has. 

In the world of television, the massive flows of
information are largely in only one direction,
which makes it virtually impossible for
individuals to take part in what passes for a
national conversation. Individuals receive, but
they cannot send. They hear, but they do not
speak. The "well-informed citizenry" is in danger
of becoming the "well-amused audience." Moreover,
the high capital investment required for the
ownership and operation of a television station
and the centralized nature of broadcast, cable
and satellite networks have led to the increasing
concentration of ownership by an ever smaller
number of larger corporations that now
effectively control the majority of television
programming in America. 

In practice, what television's dominance has come
to mean is that the inherent value of political
propositions put forward by candidates is now
largely irrelevant compared with the image-based
ad campaigns they use to shape the perceptions of
voters. The high cost of these commercials has
radically increased the role of money in
politics—and the influence of those who
contribute it. That is why campaign finance
reform, however well drafted, often misses the
main point: so long as the dominant means of
engaging in political dialogue is through
purchasing expensive television advertising,
money will continue in one way or another to
dominate American politics. And as a result,
ideas will continue to play a diminished role.
That is also why the House and Senate campaign
committees in both parties now search for
candidates who are multimillionaires and can buy
the ads with their own personal resources. 

When I first ran for Congress in 1976, I never
took a poll during the entire campaign. Eight
years later, however, when I ran statewide for
the U.S. Senate, I did take polls and like most
statewide candidates relied more heavily on
electronic advertising to deliver my message. I
vividly remember a turning point in that Senate
campaign when my opponent, a fine public servant
named Victor Ashe who has since become a close
friend, was narrowing the lead I had in the
polls. After a detailed review of all the polling
information and careful testing of potential TV
commercials, the anticipated response from my
opponent's campaign and the planned response to
the response, my advisers made a recommendation
and prediction that surprised me with its
specificity: "If you run this ad at this many
'points' [a measure of the size of the
advertising buy], and if Ashe responds as we
anticipate, and then we purchase this many points
to air our response to his response, the net
result after three weeks will be an increase of
8.5% in your lead in the polls." 

I authorized the plan and was astonished when
three weeks later my lead had increased by
exactly 8.5%. Though pleased, of course, for my
own campaign, I had a sense of foreboding for
what this revealed about our democracy. Clearly,
at least to some degree, the "consent of the
governed" was becoming a commodity to be
purchased by the highest bidder. To the extent
that money and the clever use of electronic mass
media could be used to manipulate the outcome of
elections, the role of reason began to diminish. 

As a college student, I wrote my senior thesis on
the impact of television on the balance of power
among the three branches of government. In the
study, I pointed out the growing importance of
visual rhetoric and body language over logic and
reason. There are countless examples of this, but
perhaps understandably, the first one that comes
to mind is from the 2000 campaign, long before
the Supreme Court decision and the hanging chads,
when the controversy over my sighs in the first
debate with George W. Bush created an impression
on television that for many viewers outweighed
whatever positive benefits I might have otherwise
gained in the verbal combat of ideas and
substance. A lot of good that senior thesis did
me. 

The potential for manipulating mass opinions and
feelings initially discovered by commercial
advertisers is now being even more aggressively
exploited by a new generation of media
Machiavellis. The combination of ever more
sophisticated public opinion sampling techniques
and the increasing use of powerful computers to
parse and subdivide the American people according
to "psychographic" categories that identify their
susceptibility to individually tailored appeals
has further magnified the power of propagandistic
electronic messaging that has created a harsh new
reality for the functioning of our democracy. 

As a result, our democracy is in danger of being
hollowed out. In order to reclaim our birthright,
we Americans must resolve to repair the systemic
decay of the public forum. We must create new
ways to engage in a genuine and not manipulative
conversation about our future. We must stop
tolerating the rejection and distortion of
science. We must insist on an end to the cynical
use of pseudo-studies known to be false for the
purpose of intentionally clouding the public's
ability to discern the truth. Americans in both
parties should insist on the re-establishment of
respect for the rule of reason. 

And what if an individual citizen or group of
citizens wants to enter the public debate by
expressing their views on television? Since they
cannot simply join the conversation, some of them
have resorted to raising money in order to buy 30
seconds in which to express their opinion. But
too often they are not allowed to do even that.
MoveOn.org tried to buy an ad for the 2004 Super
Bowl broadcast to express opposition to Bush's
economic policy, which was then being debated by
Congress. CBS told MoveOn that "issue advocacy"
was not permissible. Then, CBS, having refused
the MoveOn ad, began running advertisements by
the White House in favor of the president's
controversial proposal. So MoveOn complained, and
the White House ad was temporarily removed. By
temporarily, I mean it was removed until the
White House complained, and CBS immediately put
the ad back on, yet still refused to present the
MoveOn ad. 

To understand the final reason why the news
marketplace of ideas dominated by television is
so different from the one that emerged in the
world dominated by the printing press, it is
important to distinguish the quality of vividness
experienced by television viewers from the
"vividness" experienced by readers. Marshall
McLuhan's description of television as a "cool"
medium—as opposed to the "hot" medium of
print—was hard for me to understand when I read
it 40 years ago, because the source of "heat" in
his metaphor is the mental work required in the
alchemy of reading. But McLuhan was almost alone
in recognizing that the passivity associated with
watching television is at the expense of activity
in parts of the brain associated with abstract
thought, logic, and the reasoning process. Any
new dominant communications medium leads to a new
information ecology in society that inevitably
changes the way ideas, feelings, wealth, power
and influence are distributed and the way
collective decisions are made. 

As a young lawyer giving his first significant
public speech at the age of 28, Abraham Lincoln
warned that a persistent period of dysfunction
and unresponsiveness by government could alienate
the American people and that "the strongest
bulwark of any government, and particularly of
those constituted like ours, may effectively be
broken down and destroyed—I mean the attachment
of the people." Many Americans now feel that our
government is unresponsive and that no one in
power listens to or cares what they think. They
feel disconnected from democracy. They feel that
one vote makes no difference, and that they, as
individuals, have no practical means of
participating in America's self-government.
Unfortunately, they are not entirely wrong.
Voters are often viewed mainly as targets for
easy manipulation by those seeking their
"consent" to exercise power. By using focus
groups and elaborate polling techniques, those
who design these messages are able to derive the
only information they're interested in receiving
from citizens—feedback useful in fine-tuning
their efforts at manipulation. Over time, the
lack of authenticity becomes obvious and takes
its toll in the form of cynicism and alienation.
And the more Americans disconnect from the
democratic process, the less legitimate it
becomes. 

Many young Americans now seem to feel that the
jury is out on whether American democracy
actually works or not. We have created a wealthy
society with tens of millions of talented,
resourceful individuals who play virtually no
role whatsoever as citizens. Bringing these
people in—with their networks of influence, their
knowledge, and their resources—is the key to
creating the capacity for shared intelligence
that we need to solve our problems. 

Unfortunately, the legacy of the 20th century's
ideologically driven bloodbaths has included a
new cynicism about reason itself—because reason
was so easily used by propagandists to disguise
their impulse to power by cloaking it in clever
and seductive intellectual formulations. When
people don't have an opportunity to interact on
equal terms and test the validity of what they're
being "taught" in the light of their own
experience and robust, shared dialogue, they
naturally begin to resist the assumption that the
experts know best. 

So the remedy for what ails our democracy is not
simply better education (as important as that is)
or civic education (as important as that can be),
but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic
discourse in which individuals can participate in
a meaningful way—a conversation of democracy in
which meritorious ideas and opinions from
individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful
response. 

Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to
revitalize the role played by the people in our
constitutional framework. It has extremely low
entry barriers for individuals. It is the most
interactive medium in history and the one with
the greatest potential for connecting individuals
to one another and to a universe of knowledge.
It's a platform for pursuing the truth, and the
decentralized creation and distribution of ideas,
in the same way that markets are a decentralized
mechanism for the creation and distribution of
goods and services. It's a platform, in other
words, for reason. But the Internet must be
developed and protected, in the same way we
develop and protect markets—through the
establishment of fair rules of engagement and the
exercise of the rule of law. The same ferocity
that our Founders devoted to protect the freedom
and independence of the press is now appropriate
for our defense of the freedom of the Internet.
The stakes are the same: the survival of our
Republic. We must ensure that the Internet
remains open and accessible to all citizens
without any limitation on the ability of
individuals to choose the content they wish
regardless of the Internet service provider they
use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this
future for granted. We must be prepared to fight
for it, because of the threat of corporate
consolidation and control over the Internet
marketplace of ideas. 

The danger arises because there is, in most
markets, a very small number of broadband network
operators. These operators have the structural
capacity to determine the way in which
information is transmitted over the Internet and
the speed with which it is delivered. And the
present Internet network operators—principally
large telephone and cable companies—have an
economic incentive to extend their control over
the physical infrastructure of the network to
leverage control of Internet content. If they
went about it in the wrong way, these companies
could institute changes that have the effect of
limiting the free flow of information over the
Internet in a number of troubling ways. 

The democratization of knowledge by the print
medium brought the Enlightenment. Now, broadband
interconnection is supporting decentralized
processes that reinvigorate democracy. We can see
it happening before our eyes: As a society, we
are getting smarter. Networked democracy is
taking hold. You can feel it. We the people—as
Lincoln put it, "even we here"—are collectively
still the key to the survival of America's
democracy. 

___________________

JamBoi: Jammy, The Sacred Cow Slayer
The Green Parties' #1 Blogger
http://dailyJam.blogspot.com

"To the brave belong all things"
Celt's invading Etrusca reply to nervous Romans around 400BC

"Live humbly, laugh often and love unconditionally" (anon)


       
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