Fundamentals of Interactive Journalism

Over the summer, I had the great fortune of reading Nixonland, Rick Perlstein’s engrossing account of the rise of Richard Nixon and culture war politics in America. One of the key planks of Nixon’s politics of polarization was the notion that the press was made up of mendacious and maniuplative liberal elites who could hardly hide their disdan for conservative ideas and politicians. Nixon, convinced that the press was out to get him, played up his victimhood as a way to rally people to his side. However, Nixon was no shrinking violet and was not averse to using his immense political skills to weaken foes. While he made calm appeals to the so-called “silent majority”, he loosed his primary attack dog, Vice President Spiro Agnew, to savage the press with reckless abandon. Agnew famously called the press “nattering nabobs of negativism” and “an effete corps of impudent snobs“. (more…)

I’ll be the first to admit it: Enough ink has been spilled about Sarah Palin.  Still, one of the best editorials so far has been Judith Warner’s “The Mirrored Ceiling,” which appeared in her New York Times blog “Domestic Disturbances” on Sept. 4.

Warner dedicates the “Domestic Disturbances” blog to parenting.  And she tears into Palin for this.  Some of the most troubling and confusing praise of the wannabe-veep has been of her family values.  When I write this, I’m not thinking about her pregnant and unmarried 17-year-old daughter Bristol, or the rumors that her 19-year-old son Track was a drug addict.  

Yet Palin willingly sacrifices the dignity of her family to her own raw ambition.  And this ambition remains unjustified by the paucity of her record as a mayor and governor.  I can’t say it better than Warner:

Why does this woman – who to some of us seems as fake as they can come, with her delicate infant son hauled out night after night under the klieg lights and her pregnant teenage daughter shamelessly instrumentalized for political purposes [italics mine] — deserve, to a unique extent among political women, to rank as so “real”?

While Republicans cry foul about liberals’ supposed sexist remarks about Palin, let’s remember what Republicans think of her:

Thanks to the level of general esteem that greeted her ascent to the podium, it seems we’ve all got to celebrate the fact that America’s Hottest Governor (Princess of the Fur Rendezvous 1983, Miss Wasilla 1984) could speak at all.

Could there be a more thoroughgoing humiliation for America’s women?

It’s as humiliating as the implication that American women are too stupid to look beyond Palin’s gender to her political positions.  But I can think of a more “thoroughgoing humiliation” for American women: having the grossly unqualified Palin represent us as Vice President.

In a letter to the Irish Times on Nov 16th 2007, Trina Vargo, President of the US-Ireland Alliance caused an uproar both in Ireland and the U.S. for claiming that the Irish were seeking a ’special’ deal with the U.S. Government to obtain legal status for its undocumented in America, following the failure of The Kennedy-McCain Bill.  People in the Irish and Irish American community took exception not only to her criticism but to her choice of words:

“There is also talk of trying to mask a “special deal” by cloaking it in innocuous immigration provisions but this is just an attempt to, as they say on Wall Street, ‘put lipstick on that pig.’”

People took this phrase in a literal sense, believing it to be a direct insult to the Irish as a race of people.  In a show of solidarity, prominent Irish actress Fionnula Flanagan US-Ireland Alliance pre-Oscar awards party where she was slated as an honoree.  An article in the Irish Voice (April Drew, 1/16/08), quoted Flanagan:

“..she was particularly incensed over the term “lipstick on a pig” used by Vargo to describe efforts to help the undocumented Irish. “That is outrageous language” she stated.

And so it rears its ugly head again.  Senator Obama is feeling the backlash for using the pig with the lipstick vibe to criticize what he claims was McCain’s ecomonic policies. “You can put lipstick on a pig.  But it’s still a pig,” he says.  But the literal translators are out for blood and view his use of this metaphor as a direct hit against Sarah Palin.  So why did Palin’s joke about the difference between hockey moms and pitbulls not cause offense?  Why aren’t the moms outraged for being one colored mouth away from a man’s best friend?

In the New York Post’s article ‘O Blasts Lipstick Smear As Hogwash,’ citizen Cheryl Snyder’s describes her defiant action against Obama’s comment  “I even ran to the store and got another tube of lipstick.”  Another offended citizen, Jean Hope said “There’s no cause for behavior like that…He just insulted all of us who wear lipstick.”

Seriously.  Isn’t this missing the whole point?