This week’s election of Barack Obama as President puts the larger issue of change under the microscope. But is change something that a President imposes, or must it come from below as well?
NPR’s Dick Meyer, in a column titled “You Wanted Change? It’s Time To Help,” argues that change that turns out to be more than just a buzzword or a marketing concept needs to come from below — via a soul-searching by many Americans.
Remember what John Kennedy said in his inaugural address in 1961: “My fellow Americans: Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”
I think this is a question Americans should be asking of themselves in the wake of Barack Obama’s victory. Let’s not wait until Obama puts the question in his own words when he’s sworn in on Jan. 20.
And, for the record, I would be writing the exact same column if John McCain had won.
If the political history of America for the past five years teaches anything, it is this: What voters give, voters taketh away. Often quickly. A mandate doesn’t come from an election; it is earned and built with governing and leadership in office. For all the glow of this moment, the path ahead is uncertain.
Expecting it change to blossom from Obama’s own political skills or intentions isn’t enough, Meyers says. And as part of the soul searching required, he points to some rethinking in the press:
I’ll volunteer my vocation as an example. Perhaps 95 percent of the American public thinks the news media are “part of the problem.” The other 5 percent work in news or don’t own televisions. Our craft is seen as tabloid, divisive, serially obsessive, gluttonous for the trivial, argumentative, biased in sneaky ways and distorted. And the market seems to be saying to us, “Go away, we won’t pay!”
Is there a meaningful way for practitioners and leaders in journalism to “ask what you can do for your country”? After all, most news outfits are struggling just to survive. Doesn’t that justify doing whatever it takes to grab an extra buck? Doesn’t that justify MSNBC going liberal, CNN going with attitude and Fox going conservative?
These are all complicated equations, and I am simplifying. But all I am suggesting is that there are tough and unselfish questions that need to be asked in my field. Should we fight the rise of argutainment? Will we cover government with the same resources we threw at electioneering and horse-race politics? Are we using new technologies with integrity, or just looking to exploit them? I don’t know any of the answers. I do know that not asking the questions is wrong. I said this was going to be earnest.
Meyer then poses some questions for the law profession and for parents, and ends with this:
Right now, despite the extraordinary economic conditions, the election of a new president should inspire us to ask small questions about big matters. Because it is the small stuff of people and families that do make and direct that big thing called society.
Sorry if that’s too corny for you.
To be sure, there is a thoughtful debate going on with change and what it means. READ THIS. But one aspect of change is at least giving it a chance to unfold.
That didn’t happen this week with conservative talk radio which was right on the attack (one host even played portions of the Reverend Wright tape) in fever pitched rant mode against Obama within minutes of the opening credits on many shows on Wednesday, the day after the election. The question now becomes: if Obama brings some change, and there is also change from below, will conservative talk radio benefit?
According to BlatherWatch’s Michael Hood, who covers talk radio, a top talk show expert predicted Obama’s victory will benefit conservative talk which came of age in 1992 when Bill Clinton and the Democrats were firmly in power. It became “us versus them.”
But Hood contends the conditions are different this time — and it may be conservative talk that has to change…because the United States has already changed:
It’s very different this year. Dems are in the reformer position — a position accelerated by a president with the lowest popularity since Hoobert Heever.
As in 1993, millions of Americans got politicized this year, too. But most are Americans who don’t know Laura Ingraham from Dr. Laura, Hannity from Colmes.
Boomer men, who are the biggest part of the talk radio audience, are graying out as a demographic, but the age group who showed up so hopefully and brilliantly in the election Tuesday, were the under 30’s of both genders, a bunch who have never listened to talk or any other kind of radio in any numbers.
And, indeed, if you talk to a lot of young Americans many of them roll their eyes at talk radio (of the left and right) and wonder how people can listen to three hours of a political rant. U.S. demographics aren’t the same and neither is U.S. culture — a culture in which newspapers are ill or dying off as more and more young Americans go online or spend their free time glued to ipods (or the latest versions of cell phones). And if they’re driving? Music is often the choice.
Talk radio has some young listeners but the genre seems infected with Baby Boomer-itus, the United States’ most resistant illness, which has as a prime symptom acute polarization and an us against them perspective. To many younger Americans now, it’s a matter of “all of us.”
And Hood makes another point as well: talk radio — which fits into the category Meyer calls “argutainment” — had a truly terrible track record this year in influencing the election:
Nothing Rush [Limbaugh] prescribed worked! Not his original opposition to McCain; not his voting-for-Hillary Operation Chaos which was to have fractured the Democrats; not repetitious, mocking smears of Obama as an appeaser, an anti-American and a terrorist.
He lists the names of some other talkers, then writes:
The talk radio campaign against the so-called Immigration reform bill last Spring, scared hell out of the flighty Congress, but polls show it did little to move the citizenry to care about the Armageddon they were predicting if the bill passed.
The next congress won’t be so intimidated be this paper tiger.
We doubt right-wing radio will die off completely– its demise has been predicted before — but we’ll venture this is the end of it’s role as king-maker.
They, like the Republican Party, must figure out what their new role must be.
The nut cutting has already begun: if talk radio doesn’t do something major and soon, it’ll become little more than a wailing wall for a clutch of snivelers dying off not with a bang, but with a furious whimper.
Why? Because over the past few years there already has been change from below…which on Tuesday directly led to change at the top.
And if there is more change from below as advocated by Meyer, change strengthened by those who move things forward in their own professions or areas of life, it’ll bolster any of Obama’s efforts to change from the top once he takes office in January. Will talk radio give Obama a breather (unlikely) or become a key force in fighting a (most likely losing) holding action (more likely)?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.