Her fashion-forward sweater set. His saucy love affair with a campaign staffer. These should be the top stories on an Entertainment news show, not a political news show. But flip through any of the major 24-hour news networks today and inevitably you will find the details of the governor’s sex scandal, the first lady’s fashion faux pas, or the ex-Vice Presidential Candidate’s daughter’s pregnancy. Which should leave most Americans wondering, what about the actual politics? Our cultural obsession with the lives of celebrities has grown to include political leaders, whose daily lives often wind up making the news more often than the work they’ve been elected to do. The media’s disproportionate emphasis on politicians and their often salacious lives overshadows coverage of the political issues, which in turn has begun to discredit the American political process as a whole.
America’s love affair with personality-driven politics dates back to the 1960s, when John F. Kennedy realized how powerful the television medium could be to the political process. “The Kennedy-Nixon debates allowed voters to see how Kennedy and the camera adored each other, and television permanently transformed American politics”
(Caryn James, New York Times). The presidential first-family was broadcast into living rooms all across the country, and for the first time, the constituents were seeing their politicians up-close and personal. Glamorous and powerful, the Kennedy family became iconic to the American public, attracting the attention of paparazzi more like a member of The Beatles than a political leader. Now almost 50 years later, we are every bit as enticed by the celebrity of the new first-family, as we were when presidential politics made its television debut.
President Barack Obama has become one of the biggest celebrities of our generation, attracting the attention of many people who might otherwise have not been as interested in the political process. What makes this potentially disconcerting is that on any given day the President’s dog garners more press than the cap-and-trade bill he spent the morning re-drafting. While the media seems like the easiest scapegoat to pin responsibility on for the degeneration of fact-based political reporting, it is not the root of the problem. Media coverage of any issue is simply an answer to the public’s demand for information about a particular subject. We, the American people are the overly curious beasts that drive the non-stop coverage of celebrity-politics. This curiosity is then perpetuated by the increased availability of new media forms that make access to the lives of politicians no more difficult than a click of a button.
If the invention of television gave Americans the chance to pull back the curtain of mystery and have a peek at the lives of politicians, then today’s digital revolution has enabled the average citizen to tear down the curtain and gawk as long as they’d like. The digital revolution has created a plethora of new mediums through which information can be transmitted. The expansion of cable networks has allowed niche market channels to flourish, and news to branch out into a diverse array of around-the-clock coverage options. The limitlessness of the virtual world, whether television or online, has opened up the floodgates for anything and everything to be revealed. When there can be a whole blog, website, talk show, or even television network dedicated to nothing but following the lives of politicians, why wouldn’t it exist? The problem is not that it does, but rather that it is sufficiently more engaging and intriguing to the masses than any kind of 24-hour coverage of political issues. These new opportunities created by the digital world have given us a choice, or rather, a lot of choices. The trouble is, very few would choose C-SPAN coverage of a congressional hearing over Comedy Central’s the Colbert Report, and perhaps still fewer would choose sitting down to watch the Colbert Report in its entirety on television, when they could go to the website and pick and choose whichever stories interest them.
Now that the individual has been empowered with the ability to create his or her own media diet rather than being spoon-fed what someone perceives are the top stories, the media must cater to their audience’s preferences in order to remain relevant. If the majority of their audience would prefer to watch a story about a political sex-affair more than a story about a bill going through the senate appropriations committee, then the media will cover the sex-affair more aggressively to stay competitive with the millions of other choices anybody has for accessing political information. So then the real issue seems to be why it is that we as Americans have shaped our political interests around politicians and not the political work they do. The most obvious answer seems to be the one that is also the most disappointing: In a day and age where we require constant stimulation and excitement, government’s slow, tedious procedures just don’t make the cut. Where politics themselves may be very difficult to for the average person to follow, politicians on the other hand, are just people whose lives not only make sense, but are often more fascinating than public policy and debate.
It is without question that people are more fascinating than politics, but is there something more to our fixation with the lives of political leaders? American culture thrives on icons; faces, names, people whom we all think we know better than our own mother, and well we probably do. "There's a celebrity stalker in all of us," says James Houran, an academic clinical psychologist who has researched celebrity worship. "We need celebrities as much as we need food, water and shelter. We need them to feel connected"
(Bruce Horovitz, USA Today). Perhaps it is this desire for connection to our political leaders, some of the most powerful men and women in the country, that drives us to seek out every detail of their personal lives. As the line between politician and celebrity blur, our interest in lawmakers extends beyond their work lives and into their personal lives. This cultural obsession with celebrities’ lives has been around for a long time, and still even some of the biggest celebrities don’t understand why. Playboy Entrepreneur, Hugh Hefner, was quoted in a USA Today article saying, “There's an intrinsic voyeurism within society that technology has helped to spiral out of control. People not only want to see celebrities without their clothes — but to learn the naked truth about them.” Whereas celebrities once seemed so inaccessible, technology has brought these larger-than-life personalities right to our living rooms and home offices, even to our cell phones. While learning “the naked truth” about musicians, actors, or athletes seems to have no real consequence on their professional work, the same cannot be said for celeb-politicians.
Theoretically, politicians should be of the highest caliber of class, dignity, and moral righteousness. In reality though, these elected lawmakers are really just regular human beings chosen to do an important job. They are no less likely to sin or misstep than the ordinary citizen, but inevitably a select few of them always do. When this happens, the media exploits the issue in every way possible, while the American public stands by waiting to absorb every minute detail. When something happens in a politician’s personal life, it is as if the political world comes to a screeching halt, or at least that’s what one would perceive by the way the media covers scandals and conflicts. For at least a week after a politician admits to having an affair, is accused of extortion, or even just makes a public scene, nothing else seems to make the news. More people can tell you about Congressman Joe Wilson’s outburst during the President’s address to Congress, than what the content of the actual address was. These kinds of episodes and the amount of attention they receive, exacerbate feelings of distrust in politicians.
The notion that politicians are “slimy” people is perpetuated by extensive coverage of political scandals, which in-turn repels a lot of people from participating in politics. Whether or not politicians as a whole are “slimy” is debatable, but the disproportionate amount of coverage of the select few who are in fact dishonorable or morally reprehensible, ruins the reputation for the thousands who are not. And even still for those politicians who do make mistakes in their personal lives, these discrepancies should not overshadow the real political issues. If a businessman cheats on his wife, it may ruin his personal life, but most likely would not affect his professional life. The standard is different for politicians. A political leader isn’t any less fit to carry out his or her elected responsibilities because of a personal transgression. That’s not to say that their actions shouldn’t be condemned, they just shouldn’t be publicly condemned for weeks to months on end. The more negative publicity politicians incur, the weaker their respective parties and the American political system as a whole will become.
Negative publicity is not exclusive in its weakening of the political system. Controversial publicity of topics that are not directly relevant to the political process are also disadvantageous to its reputation. A common phrase in the journalism world is, “if it bleeds, it leads”. In the case of political news it seems fair to say, “if it’s a juicy read, it leads”. Our fascination with the lives of extravagant political characters has made it easier for politicians to get press coverage for things unrelated to politics. This publicity allows them to make a name for themselves and helps them to break into the political arena, though they may be severely under-qualified. For example, Sarah Palin is still a media icon, though her recent participation in the political process after the 2008 election, has been of relatively no significance whatsoever to the country. The American news media continues to give her a political platform to be heard because the general public is still very fascinated by her personal life and intrigued by her celebrity. In fact, we hear more sound bites on the news from Palin as an ex-Vice Presidential candidate than we do from our actual Vice President, Joe Biden. As outrageous characters and scandalous behavior become increasingly synonymous with American politics, the public becomes ever more jaded in their perception of politicians and the credibility of the work they do.
Even seemingly harmless and occasionally positive publicity of politicians can prove to be a detriment to the American political image. This is especially pertinent when addressing the press coverage of females in the political realm. It is difficult enough for a woman to break into the political world, and when she does, the media seldom gives her any legitimate coverage for her policy work. The constant scrutiny or praise of female politicians’ appearances and fashion sense, belittles them to mere fashion icons, a challenge their male counterparts never face. In a field where authority comes from perceived power, women cannot afford to be denigrated to little more than a gender stereotype. News stories about Michelle Obama’s fashion sense or Hilary Clinton’s figure reduces our nation’s political system to a beauty pageant. Katie Heimer of the National Organization for Women said that female politicians are media magnets, often covered in a sexist way that undermines their credibility and trivializes their ability to provide strong, effective leadership
(Katie Heimer, reclaimthemedia). If there were less focus on the gender and appearance of the person behind the politics, his or her efforts as a political leader would be taken more seriously on the national and international stage.
As we acknowledge the problem, its cause, and serious consequences, the current state of political reporting seems almost irreversible. Perhaps though, the long-term reality is not quite as bleak as it may seem. Could it be possible that the over-coverage of politicians and under-coverage of politics will prove to strengthen the American political system in the long run, not through a better understanding of the issues but through a closer sense of relation to the politicians? The continually evolving nature of the digital world will only continue to close the gap between people who otherwise would have no connection to one another. The advent of television, the internet, and now social networking sites have revolutionized the interaction between constituent and elected representative. One can only hope that as politicians become increasingly accessible to the public, the glamour and awe of their apparent celebrity status will diminish, allowing the political issues to take center stage.
Bibliography:
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/02/arts/critic-s-notebook-when-tv-changed-american-politics.html
http://www.usatoday.com/money/advertising/2003-12-19-celeb_x.html
http://www.livescience.com/culture/090608-media-message.html
http://www.reclaimthemedia.org/media_literacy_bias/hillary_clinton_and_the_media_%3D5069
