In this article, I’ll be discussing a number of issues and assumptions that are directly impacting the role of the news media in democratic processes and politics.
First the changing role of journalism in the US, second the public expectations on both candidates, third the Obama factor and the challenger’s imbedded racial jabs, fourth the issue of patriotic journalism in the US, and fifth the threat of right wing media to democracy and free speech.
Over the past few months, the global community has been observing the media coverage of the United States Presidential Election between the Democratic Party’s incumbent President, Barack Obama, and his Republicans challenger, Mitt Romney.
Through the media coverage, one could tell that the various news outlets in the United States (right-wing, left-wing etc) have already picked their candidate and stood by their follies at the expense of “truth”. Both candidates have been consistently accused of stretching the “truth” at every stage of the way during the campaign trail.
For many firmed believers of democracy, freedom of expression and media freedom, who are living outside of the USA, but interested in the political leadership and politics of the Free World, I am sure many of us have seen the “best” and “worst” of the US mainstream news media coverage of the election since the height of the bombing of the twin towers and the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions.
This is especially the daily dissecting and analysis of weekly polls, party politics, policies, the candidates’ flip-flops from known policy positions to neutral policies, political rhetoric, and backgrounds of each candidate, their wives, the political debates, and the dreams, hopes and aspirations of the American people.
Economic issues aside, which the Republicans have consistently blamed Obama for creating it, the challenger has created history, for the wrong reason: “The Romnesia factor”, a word now means – flip-flops, dishonest and forgetfulness.
For Romney as a presidential challenger, his luxury is he is from the establishment. There is no pressure on him, outside of his political ambition, to prove himself because he is from the norm. This is reflected in his racially imbedded catch-cry throughout the campaign: “Vote for Romney-Ryan ticket and we will take-back the White House”.
This “take back the white house” has been echoing throughout the campaign without the media probing into the basis of it. Instead, it buried under the rubbles of political satire and sound bits. To take back the “White House” form Obama implies that someone had previously and rightfully owned it.
Historically, both the Republicans (18 presidents) and Democrats (15 presidents) have taken turns over decades to occupy the oval house. But to tell the people of America that Romney-Ryan will take it back from Obama is based on arrogance, pride and narcissism.
Another issue that Romney and his wife have also used successfully during the course of this campaign to indirectly mocked Obama is their claimed that every opportunity that Romney had during the past three presidential debates, his first act was to write the word “DAD” on a piece of paper.
For many people who had read Obama’s book: Dreams From My Father, a memoir, the Romney-wife constant reference to this simple act is an indirect attack on Obama’s suitability as President taking into consideration his disadvantaged childhood upbringing.
For once, no one brought up this issue when the former US President, Bill Clinton, contested and won the presidential election against George Bush sr, yet Clinton was brought up in either similar or worse circumstances than Obama. Yet no one asked about it then. Why now?
Interestingly, the news media in the US appears to be uncomfortable in challenging these racially imbedded mockeries. The notion of “taking back” the “White House” from an Afro-American, despite his white grandparental connection, is quiet cynical. Being a wealthy Anglo-American millionaire presidential candidate is not the exception in the US – it is the norm.
But a middle-class Hawaiian Afro-American to be the President of America, and currently residing in the “White House”, is unheard of and the exception. For now, Romney’s political aspiration appears to be much more than simply a desire to take back what is rightly belonged to them and to regain a loss possession and pride.
One could only read between the lines to find this uncomfortable truth in the media analysis, media statements, satires and commentaries by the Republicans and their right-wing news media backers.
But credit to President Barak Obama, he ignored the racial-jabs and instead carried on with the task of mending a nation needing global partnership and suffering ongoing economic hardships due to the global economic melt down that resulted in 800,000 job losses in the US on monthly basis before Obama took office in 2008. In the end, these hard evidences were gone missing in the media coverage and the minds of many right-wing Americans.
Since the election of Obama as President of the Free World in 2008, he did not only carry the weight and expectations of a nation under attack and dislike in the international community, but the dreams and hopes of Afro-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans and the rest of the developing communities.
Despite the election result on November 6, 2012, Obama’s achievement will always be the pride and inspiration to every leader, government and nation of the developing world.
Obama's failures in the eyes of the Republicans and right wing media hawks hasn’t dampened the optimism and hopes that Obama had brought to a war-weary-nation., dispite a huge debt that he had inherited from eight years of former administrations failed economic policies. Now Obama is blamed for such a mess. What a pity.
Obama’s promise to build friendships through dialogue and not the barrel of a gun, as has been the case with his former predecessors, and his willingness to build trust and unclench his hands/fists and reach out to those who are seeking peace was a breath of fresh air.
This is to a global community, which has been suffering from the consequences of two wars and an increasing death toll of not only US soldiers, but military personnel of other coalition partners, who were taken for a ride over a decade by the previous administrations based on false military intelligence.
After ten years in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, no one has yet found “nuclear” weapons in both countries. But the death toll of coalition forces are mounting daily. Sadly, the children, parents, wives, husbands and families of those fallen soldiers are left to pick up the pieces. The US should thank Obama for ending the wars.
Coming back to the election campaign, one of Obama’s biggest challenges as an Afro-American President is his struggle to make inspirational speeches that are both acted as motivational tools to the mainstream “white “democratic faithfuls, and also to keep alive the expectations, hopes, dreams and aspirations of Afro-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans.
While the main theme of his campaign this year is “Forward”, the reality is the different racial groups (white, black, brown and yellow) have embraced the reality of the theme from different vantage points culturally, socially, politically and economically. In itself, this is a huge challenge that Romney will never understand from his current mainstream and advantaged position.
Over the past four years, the mainstream American media have been trading a fine-line in simply playing down this very interesting phenomenal in American political history by trying not to appear as over-playing the race-card.
But the likability of President Obama, not only on the basis of his optimism and appeal to the younger generation and a war weary nation, but partly due to his racial profile, has also put into perspective that the “American dream” is not a fluke, but a reality.
Many in the developing world are silently proud of Obama’s feat as President of the Free World. History will cast its judgment on some of these issues in decades to come, but for now, the Obama-mania is re-shaping global history and giving hopes to millions outside the boundaries of the US.
The popularity of Obama has also brought with it the ugly side of the American right-wing media. In this case, it is interesting to briefly evaluate and question the role of some mainstream and right-wing news media.
Uncomfortable it may appear, the right-wing and some mainstream “news” media have been playing a destructive role in hijacking the US political agenda by allowing the Tea Party's extreme views, interest groups and mega wealthy individuals to spend over $1 billions on negative ads.
In the end, no one really knows whether or not voters and the electorates in the US are well informed or they are weary of political parties’ bombarding of the airwaves, television and the internet, with negative and dishonest advertisements. This is a huge injustice that prevented the news media from disseminating “objective” information to the public in the processes of democracy.
One of the major problems with this new approach of news media coverage of US politics is the non-separation of political agenda setting and objective reporting of issues. The line between “objective” and “propaganda” journalism is appeared to be nonexistence in such situation.
In part, this unfortunate situation appears to be partly created by the new world order of “patriotism” or "patriotic" when the US invaded Afghanistan and later Iraq, after the 9/11 attacked on the NY twin towers.
Back then the pride of the US as the superpower of the world was crashed by the terrorists attacked on mainland America, an act never been seen since the experience of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, that sparked the US involvement in World Word II.
Emotions were running high and “patriotic journalism” began to emerge in the US mainstream news coverage and presentation of political issues. I use the term “patriotic journalism” to describe the case then, when journalists were virtually given a licence to report issues with a pro-American “biased” under the umbrella of “patriotism”.
Anyone who reported news and events otherwise was deemed unpatriotic. The media was the first casualty and the public was denied the opportunity to make its voice head.
Since 2001, the situation (objective journalism and the lack of it) become worsen when journalists were imbedded with US troops in war zones in Afghanistan, Iraq and many other nations in the Middle East.
The news coverage of the wars was simply from the coalition forces side of the stories. As the wars against terrorism gradually scaled back and journalists return to the States and Europe, the practice of ‘patriotic journalism’ became ingrained in the mainstream US media.
It creates an ethical dilemma for journalists, who are now adopting the practice of “patriotic journalism” as “normal” and part of their daily routine.
This news media reality appears to shape the news coverage of the current presidential election. Lies and more lies are becoming the main-stay of the election campaign, making it harder for ordinary citizens and foreign observers to really believe anything that is coming out of the US media. It also impacts on the traditional notion of media neutrality and objectivity.
Now a day, the US mainstream news media are beaming through to Australia, Europe, Latin America, Asia and other parts of the world, via television networks such as CCN, CBS, ABC News, Fox News, and websites and blogs such as Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and many other infotainment television talk shows and hosts.
The question is – where does the news media and journalists draw the line between facts and fiction, infotainments and hard news, interesting and important, national security and not, factual and professional opinions, biased, satire and reality, racial jabs and fair game, balanced and propaganda?
The worse culprit of blaring and stretching the truth is Fox News, which has a right-wing political agenda and notorious in UK, USA and Australia for its owners’ disregard and contempt of media ethics and editorial independency.
Journalists and their so called experts have no sympathy and respect to the very tenants that formed the basis of journalism ethics: the ‘separation of the truth, fairness, balanced, opinion, facts, discrimination and “public taste” –the very foundation of media responsibilities to society.
Under such a cloud, the public has the rights to be cynical. Sadly, it is the reputation of the media that has been thrown under the bus. This is a sad reality in an era where the reputation of the news media has been under attack within (i.e the existence of right and left wing media outlets and the unregulated social media).
With the exception of few respectable print news media outlets in America, everything and anything in this new media order is a fair game. The casualty of this whole new culture is the “truth”.
Different types of information are cherry-picked by the news media to suit their networks political agenda and party’s propaganda machine. In the end, the public is the biggest loser in this whole process of “selective truth”.
The likelihood of this new way of “journalism objectivity” from spreading to the developing communities of the world is a worrying prospect. The challenge now is how would developing media embrace this new reality?
Hopefully this will not be a direct attack on democracy and “media freedom?” The American media can afford to withstand the changing nature of media freedom, but not the developing world. There are many reasons, but this is a debate for another time.
For the time being, what is most interesting now is whether or not this new ‘culture’ of “patriotic journalism” (the biased coverage of events and issues) will spread across the globe.
This is still to be seen, but as the saying goes – America is the hub and center of globalization and new cultural phenomena. I guess, we just have to wait and see.
This is a view from the side-line.
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The following article is taken from the BBC website under the subheading: Profile: Barak Obama. I have decided to publish part of it. Enjoy your reading. May the best candidate win?
(Barak) Obama was born in 1961 and named for his father, a Kenyan intellectual who met the future president's mother, Ann, a white teenager from Kansas, while studying at the University of Hawaii.
When Mr Obama was a toddler, his father abandoned the family and the couple divorced. Father and son were to meet only once more, during a brief visit to Hawaii in 1971 by the elder Barack Obama. He died in a car crash in 1982 in Nairobi.
When Mr Obama was six, his mother married an Indonesian man and the family moved to Jakarta. Then known as "Barry", Mr Obama later moved back to Hawaii, where he was raised mainly by his grandparents.
Mr Obama's upbringing in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country by population, and his Kenyan-Muslim heritage fueled right-wing conspiracy theories that he was not born in the US, or that he was a secret Muslim.
In 2008 and 2011, Mr Obama produced two separate copies of his birth certificate to prove that he had been born in the US state of Hawaii.
After graduating from Columbia University in New York, Mr Obama worked for three years as a community organizer in poor neighborhoods in Chicago.
He then attended Harvard Law School, becoming the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review.
While working at a Chicago law firm, he met Michelle Robinson. The couple married in 1992 and have two daughters, Malia and Sasha; the Obamas became the first couple since Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter to live in the White House with young children.
After Harvard, Mr Obama returned to Chicago to practise civil rights law, representing victims of housing and employment discrimination.
He joined the law faculty at the University of Chicago, where he was lauded as a popular teacher and an exceptional legal thinker.
In 1995 he published his first book, Dreams from My Father, a memoir, and the following year he was elected to the Illinois state senate.
As a state senator, he spoke out strongly against the coming Iraq war, a position that later helped him win early support in the Democratic primary race.
Mr Obama tried to run for Congress in 2000, but was thrashed by the incumbent in a Democratic primary.
But four years later he was back, running for the US Senate. He won that campaign handily, after electrifying the Democratic National Convention with a speech about self-reliance, aspiration and national unity.
After his landslide election to the Senate a few months later, he became one of the most visible figures in Washington, and soon published a second best-selling book, a politics-and-policy tract entitled The Audacity of Hope.
On Capitol Hill, Mr Obama established a liberal voting record, but also worked with Republican colleagues on HIV/Aids-education and prevention and nuclear weapons proliferation.
When he embarked on his presidential campaign in February 2007, he had been in the Senate only two years, and his opponents sought to cast him as ill-prepared for the presidency.
But his campaign excited millions of liberals - especially young voters - who were yearning for something new in Washington after two terms under George W Bush.
Mr Obama clinched the Democratic nomination after a long and grueling battle against former first lady Hillary Clinton, whom he later appointed secretary of state.
His victory over septuagenarian Republican Senator John McCain was aided in part by public perceptions that Republican policies had contributed to the economic tumble - and that Mr McCain was not the candidate to steer the nation to recovery.
Now, Mr Obama and his team of strategists and advisers hope they can duplicate his 2008 victory.
The recession is over, employment figures have slowly climbed, the housing market is showing signs of a comeback and consumer confidence is up.
But there lingers among the electorate a widespread sense of unease and dissatisfaction with the way things are going.
Mr Romney, his vice-presidential running mate Paul Ryan, and the Republican Party have had their campaign bolstered by big-spending patrons eager to despatch Mr Obama to political oblivion.
They blame Mr Obama's policies for the ongoing economic malaise, and hope voters will overcome their fondness for and political investment in him.
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