We're Getting Smarter

I love semiotics, and Tristero gives one of the best close readings of a political comment I've ever seen, contrasting a pithy statement by Grover Norquist (who talks "TeeVee") with a long-winded one on the same topic by Dianne Feinstein.

I certainly didn't speak TeeVee in my media appearance last week. This is some definite food for thought. But the question is whether or not this matters anymore. Have the Republican'ts so screwed up with their actions that even their prowess with words is blunted? In another amazing piece, Stirling Newberry argues that this is the case, and it's as much of a testament to the rising power of the blogosphere as it is the recent damage done to the conservative movement:

...there is a growing body of evidence that the public has become more and more immune to the traditional media, and that, in fact, we have two streams of discourse. The media/public discourse, and the private discourse. Each, in its own way exists in a kind of bubble, ignorant of the realities of the other [...]

When asked about Congressional ethics in general, the public is remarkably consistent: congress is seen as being corrupt both in the present – with 66% responding that Congressional ethics were "Not so Good" or "Poor", while the January 1995 number was 72%. Half of this difference is "Unsure", so what we are really saying is that the present is almost the same – within the margin of error – as the past, in terms of the publics view of the institution and its members. However, when asked for a partisan breakdown a clear pattern emerges – namely, that while 71% of the public say there "isn’t much difference" between the two sides, the Republican support has bled downards, while the Democrats have remained largely the same.

Thus the constant media narrative of equal ccorruption is the overwhelming majority position, but while the coverage has not made clear differences between individually corrupt members among the Democrats, and the kind of systematic party corruption that is being investigated on the Republican side, the faith of those paying attention in the Republican Party has been shaken. Because that is who would respond that the Republicans are better at ethics in the first place. Lossing 25% of one's partisan base is significant on any issue, these are the people who are going to make the argument at the ground level. The picture is starker when asked about financial corruption, a recent CBS poll had the Republicans as more financially corrupt 40-15, with a trendline against the Republicans: a previous poll had it at 34-18. This means that the spread has gone from 16% to 25% - a ballooning deficit. In this poll, "unsure" was going down, and the "the same" stayed the same.

This is significant – because it means that the public does not believe the media coverage of a balance of corruption, despite the coverage. Within the public, there is a persistent erosion of support for Republican ethics, despite outlets like Fox covering almost nothing but a one sided view of who the guilty party is, and it isn't, on Fox, the Republicans.

And that disconnect between the public narrative and the private narrative needs to be attributed to the Internet, in my opinion, and in Newberry's:

Thus there is something larger and more complex here, where the public trend line indicates that there is a reappraisal of the parties and of George Bush, while the media continues to portray him as the once and future king – that this is a temporary dip in his approval, which he can battle back from with support from the good moral people of America.

This same effect is writ even larger on the war in Iraq – which has been "the invisible war" – with few pictures of the casualties, devastation or collateral damage of the war – merely wide panning shots with smoke rising over a city, whose details are indistinct. Iraq has become the "internet war" as the first invasion was the "cable war" simply because the television and print media have abandoned coverage. As a result, without prompting from above, the American public has turned against the war. To some extent this is a reflection of a long standing narrative, Americans like short interventions in other nations, even though we have fought numerous long wars in our history. However, again, it is not completely the result of this: public support for Afgahnistan is untouched, and there is still a broad willingness to use force around the globe. It is Iraq that is seen as a dry hole in the desert.

There's enough information available on the Internet (this Salaam Pak story is an example), and more important, enough ways to look at the media portrayal of the news, with its peculiar tiltings and biases, that the American public isn't engaging in a one-way information exchange anymore. We are all editors now, searching for a wider expanse of news that will give a fuller picture of events shaping our world. And this active engagement with the news, rather than the passive one which characterized the past couple centuries, virtually guarantees a more well-informed citizenry. By no means are we there yet. And the amount of misinformation on the Internet is staggering. But this is clearly where we're moving. We're getting smarter.