Djelloul Marbrook

The media’s discomfort with subjectivism diminishes our culture. It encourages us to weigh our affairs without the necessary intellectual rigor.

It’s a given, for example, that a politician who changes his mind about something is a flip-flopper when the argument ought to be made that anyone who never changes his mind is a dangerous sociopath or at very least an untrustworthy ideologue. If we really want leaders who never change their positions upon reconsideration of the facts, then we don’t want a democracy.

The media confuse steadfastness and fortitude with ideological arthritis, and the disservice to public discourse is considerable.

Similarly, we’re hearing the media chorus instilling the idea that Barack Obama talks pretty but lacks ideas and experience. What we don’t hear is that an unprecedented wave of young voters are excited by his attitude, his thoughtful approach to issues. The media are squeamish about approach; they prefer reproach. They know what to do with the negative, but the positive gives them hives.

The media are comfortable with gas tax holidays, numbers, wonkery, but they’re uncomfortable with a man determined to change the demeanor of public affairs, because that’s too subjective. And yet it’s precisely Obama’s attitude that brings enthusiasts to his cause. They’re sick of the details by which politicians manipulate voters’ expectations; they want a change of attitude. They understand that details change, but it is attitude that organizes them.

The press’s discomfort with the idea of attitude as a shaper of events is perhaps understandable given the press’s own smart-alecky, trivia-relishing attitude.

The press knows that George Bush’s belligerent attitude, perhaps
life in his father’s shadow, has lost us respect in the world, bankrupted
us, and sunk us in a tar pit of a war. They hope that Obama’s attitude,
his evenhandedness and desire to build a consensus will help us where other politician’s polarizing ways and outright lies have almost ruined us.

But the media don’t know how to express this. They distrust the very
idea of it. When they hear wonkery they call it content. They don’t think a change of attitude is as important as a new health care plan or a timetable for exiting Iraq. They have no faith that intelligence and a desire to bring opposing forces together is as good as another cheap plank in a platform.

It has been more than one hundred years since Sigmund Freud convinced us that our psychological health is as important as our physical health and is in fact bound up in it. But the media are still playing with blocks, stacking this idea on that one and paying scant attention to the psyche. They don’t understand Obama’s is a mind-body candidacy. His premise
is that we need to start listening to each other instead of swift-boating
each other. That is the precondition for getting things done. What’s hard about understanding that? All the ideas in the world won’t amount to a hill of beans if there is no intent to accomodate each other. This is why our young people are excited about the senator from Illinois. They understand attitude.

Ask any alcoholic who has been sober for X number of years what goes down when he or she mentions alcoholism to a prospective employer. And yet when President Bush’s alcoholism became public knowledge the press made nothing of the fact that he didn’t undertake psychotherapy in order to come to grips with the underlying causes of his alcoholism. The press reported, instead, that he had had a religious conversion and that made it unnecessary to subject himself to psychotherapy. The press wasn’t about to tangle with that show stopper.

The fact that this flies in the face of everything we know about alcoholism didn’t seem to bother the press. The fact that alcoholism can be dealt with but not cured got less attention from the press than Obama’s so-called elitism or his misguided remark about bitter rural voters. The intriguing if arguable idea that an alcoholic, once he stops drinking, must face the hard task of growing up because his maturing was arrested at the point when he became alcoholic was seemingly beneath the press’s contempt. And yet there is learned discussion in the psychiatric community about how mature and sober our president is, discussion the press treats as academic while it is willing to prattle about trivia.

This is hardly the first time the press has given alcohol—the industry is a major advertiser—a free pass. The press has always been perfectly content to allow the impression that Prohibition, the 1919 Volstead Act, was a complete failure, but the statistics say otherwise. Alcohol-related diseases
and deaths declined dramatically during and immediately following Prohibition

Why have the media glossed over the idea that we may have an emotional adolescent in the White House while obsessing about Obama’s perceived lack of experience or his failure to wear a flag pin? One reason, to my mind, is that alcoholism is a serious problem within the press corps and among legislators. Alcohol plays a major role in the way we conduct government. The stupendous irony that we have been spending billions of dollars in the war on drugs while conveniently ignoring the fact that alcohol is a legal drug seems not to bother the press a wit, not even when we know that alcohol kills more people than the drugs we’re so extravagantly obsessing about. Is this an accident? —DM