• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Media Madness

Senator Lindsey Graham leaned back in his chair in his Senate office, trying to imagine for us what would have happened if America’s current media had been around to cover the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. We’d probably still be living as separate colonies, he said.

“Let’s go back in time,” mused Graham. It is 1787 “and we’re in Philadelphia, we’re trying to hammer out the Constitution. Tell me how the twenty-four-hour news cycle would have affected writing the Constitution. Cable networks are outside Independence Hall. Ben Franklin walks out. He gets ambushed by Fox News. ‘Is it true you’re caving on a small [state] representation? What power do you give small states?’ I’ve always thought Saturday Night Live should do this. Think of a skit in which Ben Franklin is walking down the streets and people are just eating him alive. And you have Glenn Beck right outside saying, ‘They’re selling us out.’ You’ve got Rachel Maddow throwing herself in front of the door. Okay, so now, fast-forward. The twenty-four-hour news cycle makes compromise difficult because things get leaked and the momentum to find consensus is deterred. It’s hard to maintain momentum for controversial topics in the twenty-four-hour news cycle. You saw it on the energy bill—when somebody from the White House told Fox News that Lindsey Graham is pushing the carbon tax, remember that?” That report generated so much conservative opposition in South Carolina before Graham got a chance to put it in context that he was unable to continue his support for the bill.

All of the forces of polarization that have weakened our political system’s ability to address our biggest problems are reinforced by a hyperfragmented, hyper-energized media environment, which has turned the war between the parties into a much more intense form of entertainment and blood sport than ever before.

“The twenty-four-hour news cycle is about defining things,” Graham continued. “You’re always in a constant cycle to make sure that your proposal is not defined in a way that would destroy your ability to get the necessary votes … What does this mean? It means that Social Security reform, Medicare reform, tax-code reform, are going to be incredibly difficult—because all it takes is one or two liberal or conservative special interest groups to be able to get traction [by the way they define the issue in the media and] then you start losing people.”

Technology makes these problems more acute. Where once working politicians had to follow, and contend with, only newspapers and the three major television networks, now talk radio, cable television news, the Internet, and the blogosphere are inescapable aspects of their working lives. From our interviews, it appears that the time politicians spend obsessing on what is written about them in the blogosphere rivals the time they spend dialing for dollars.

The new media have turned news into something that is distributed through many channels, that is updated constantly, and that is available everywhere. Because of blogs and Twitter, anyone can be a reporter or a columnist. Because of websites, the news is reported twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week—in the back of a taxi to the airport, in the waiting room at the airport, and on the plane itself. Because of satellites, digital cameras, and cell phones, anything that happens anywhere that is of interest to anyone can and will be broadcast, instantaneously, around the world. These developments have broadened the range of news sources and opinions, which we believe is healthy for our democracy. But they have also created an appetite, and platforms, for more opinions from more people all the time, which can have unanticipated and unwelcome consequences.

“In the twenty-four-hour news cycle, the political moment seems to trump any sense of history,” added Graham. “I guess what we’re losing in the Senate is a sense of history and perspective. The intense pressures of the