Word count: 1048 | Reading time: 5 min read
Pretzel Logic
Watch the watchdogs, but don’t bring out the muzzles.
A couple of very interesting and somewhat disturbing perspectives on the media have been played out in the last several days.
And I am not even talking about reaction to coverage of the president’s proclivities.
To the denizens of greater Philadelphia, none of that has the same significance as a couple of issues in the news right here.
The first is the potentially explosive question of just what role race will play in the 1999 mayoral election. The second is what role the local press should play in Philadelphia’s attempt to establish itself as a premier tourist destination, the proof of which, at least to Mayor Rendell, would be the city’s hosting a national political convention in the year 2000.
In both cases, the debate focuses on stories that appeared in the Philadelphia Daily News. And in both cases, the issues really go far beyond what’s been in any one paper or on any one newscast and speak to who we are as a city and where we are headed.
On Jan. 19 the Daily News front page featured a phone-in poll on likely black mayoral candidates John Street, Dwight Evans and John White, Jr.
Street, in particular, was incensed. And not, he insists, because the results of the survey, published after many technical difficulties, showed him lagging far behind Evans and White.
Street criticized the poll for over-emphasizing race by singling out black candidates. In a letter to the editors referring to other “racially incendiary” cover stories in the paper, he proposed “that an appropriate organization be commissioned to monitor the quality and fairness of the coverage of the 1999 mayoral campaign by local media outlets and that the same committee also be asked to monitor and provide public commentary on the political tactics and messages employed by the candidates themselves with regard to race or other potentially negative issues.”
Street says his goal is “a mayoral campaign free of racially inflammatory tactics, free of negative campaigning…”
A racially harmonious campaign is a lofty goal.
A goal that, if met, would make the city a better place to live, no doubt. As the Annenberg’s Phyllis Kaniss pointed out in her marvelous and amazingly prophetic book about the divisive ’91 campaign, The Media and The Mayor’s Race, the black candidates never got the chance to focus on anything other than racial issues because we in the media, especially the meatheads on television, were too lazy or too stupid or some combination of both to ask them about anything else.
One thing Street and I agree on is a repeat of that mistake does have the potential of ruining this city.
So I applaud him for trying to do something positive. I always welcome the input of anyone who wants to be the watcher of the watchdogs. If City Paper is doing something wrong, stupid or otherwise hurtful, I want to know. We in the media should be held accountable for what we do, because our pens and microphones and television cameras give us awesome power. Like anyone else with power, we must wield that power responsibly.
But no panel, organization or other agency overseeing the press and the pols is going to make that happen. Let’s face facts. Short of being faced with some punishment, we are going to go about our business regardless of what some panel says. And the path that begins with monitoring the press leads down the slippery slope to censorship—the very thing the original boys of summer tried to prevent here in Philadelphia two centuries ago.
Street doesn’t see it that way.
“This will be all voluntary,” Street said in a telephone interview Tuesday, without providing any specifics about how such a panel should be created. “When you write something, you’ll just know that people who are disinterested are making sure that the stories are fair, aboveboard, reasonable and non-inflammatory. We can’t tell you what to do. We just want you to be careful. There is nothing wrong with that.”
I tried, unsuccessfully, to argue—as I did when I debunked the notion of an all-black primary—that the vast majority of Philadelphians are smart enough to make their own decisions about what they’ve read, what they’ve watched and for whom they will vote.
Can’t the public find its own way through the maze of media madness without, as Street is urging, “a group that is capable of doing content analysis”?
“The public is not capable of doing that,” Street said.
He is mistaken, but at least his argument has some merit.
Which is a lot more than I can say for the other troubling perspective on my business expressed this week—by Kevin Feeley, who is paid way too much to defend unflinchingly a mayor who, for the most part, has gotten better press than God.
A mayor, don’t forget, who likes to laugh off his annoying habit of duking out reporters and photographers who don’t toe the party line.
Feeley, appearing on Tuesday’s edition of Marty Moss-Coane’s Radio Times on WHYY-FM, was whining about how the Daily News dissed the city with its front page treatment of a story about the poor condition of some of the 30,000 hotel and motel rooms the city says are available for any national political convention.
Theresa Conroy’s story was excellent, and even Feeley took pains to say that it was warranted, because the city made a mistake by not checking out all the rooms.
A few breaths later, he complained that the headline, “Bates and Switch,” and the picture of Janet Leigh in her infamous Psycho shower scene, “has enormous potential to do enormous damage to the city’s ability to attract a convention. The number one criticism [of Philadelphia] is that there are not enough hotel rooms.”
Get over yourself, Kevin.
Is the economic vitality of Philadelphia important?
Absolutely.
Is it the media’s job to make sure that happens?
Hell no.
There is a lot more potential danger in a lapdog media capable of nothing more than boosterism.
Check out the sour economy, ever-skyrocketing crime rate and environmental crises of the former Soviet Union if you need proof.
