Right now I’m sitting in Rockville, Maryland one of the suburbs of Washington, DC, which as we all know is the nexus of American political power. Why I’m here is a long, long story best suited to another time, but being here has me thinking about one of the great truisms of politics — American or otherwise. And that is the saying, “Perception is Reality.”
It encompasses almost all aspects of politics and many other parts of life. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both used this truism to great advantage — especially in their first campaigns for President. For Reagan, it was the ability to cast his opponent, Jimmy Carter, as being ineffective and out of touch with the common man. And it worked. Reagan had that persona that made many feel like he was a regular guy they could have a beer with down at the corner bar. Carter’s image was, well, he was the guy who said we had a great malaise in the country. Not the best move, and not what you’d want to be known for. But then, Carter is widely considered one of the best and most effective ex-Presidents we’ve ever had.
For Clinton, it was his campaign’s focus on the economy in 1992 — or better put, people’s perception of the economy at the time — to capitalize on his opponent’s weakness. George Bush, the elder, kept arguing that technically the economy wasn’t in a recession. I’ll leave it to the economists to debate that point. But Clinton tapped into people’s feelings about where the economy was headed to great effect.
His unofficial campaign slogan was, “It’s the economy, stupid.” At least, that was the phrase among his campaign staff. They were right, and that is at least part of how Clinton won the election that year. The Republicans have done a pretty good job of working the perception is reality angle in the last 10 or 12 years — dating back to their recapturiing the House in the era of the “Contract With America.”
There’s any number of examples I could go on with, but you get the point, I hope. So we’re going to shift gears a bit, and move into the realm of the media, where “perception is reality” plays out in other ways. Like the tendency to perform the new/old trend of trial by media.
And the poster boy (unfortunately) for the toxicity of trial by media these days is none other than Floyd Landis. See, the information you hear or read is what forms your perceptions of an issue, or a person or a place or whatever the subject is. And what you hear first is what shapes your perception of a person, place or thing. For many people, it doesn’t matter what comes out later, their beliefs — their reality — is based on that initial information.
So when headlines scream that someone has done something wrong, people assume it to be true. Doesn’t matter what the facts ultimately turn out to be, if it was in the newspaper or on Fox News or CNN it must be true, right? Surely Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly would never lead us astray, would they?
I suppose if we lived in a perfect world, where the media was careful to check their facts and fully investigate stories before they publish them, that might be the case. But we have a competitive media that believes the public wants them to dish the dirt just as soon as they can. Never mind the facts. Or as that congressman said during the Nixon impeachment vote, “Don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind’s made up.”
The media often become the witting or unwiting accomplices of those who have an axe to grind, an agenda to forward or a person who they want to smear. The media are all too willing to publish sensational stories, especially if it will sell newspapers, magazines or in the case of television, the advertisers’ products.
Trial by media flies in the face of our basic beliefs about justice. When someone is accused in or by the media, many people assume that the person is guilty of whatever “crime” the media (or the people leaking information to the media) are trying to pin on him or her. It’s an affront to one of the foundations of this country. The idea that a person is innocent until proven guilty.
But as the media helps form those perceptions of guilt, they also bear a responsibility to get the story right. And there’s any number of instances where they didn’t and later it came out that not only were the media wrong, but the people who put the story out there in the first place were wrong, too. And the originators of the story perhaps may even have been criminal in how they smeared a private individual. Think Wen Ho Lee, for example.
What got me to thinking of the this truism was watching the video of the CBS interview of Floyd Landis last night. It was good to see him getting in front of a camera and presenting his case. If he had been that composed in the early days, it would have gone a long way towards maintaining his image. Perhaps even changing the perception of him from what was being portrayed in the media at the time. Better late than never, but Landis is fighting an uphill battle now. And as we’ve seen in the past, he has the capability to come from behind, break away from the pack and thoroughly trounce the competition.
Me, I’m hoping he can do it again.
Me too. It was so nice to see him smile during the interview.
Makes you wonder why people like Kate Moss, who had the police investigating her for drugs (along with the photos and the trip to rehab), were a momentary blip on the lose-your-sponsors/contracts screen, and other people like Floyd suffer much longer. But I didn’t follow her case as closely as this one, so maybe I’m missing something.