COMM 150: Civility, coarsening of public discourse - a couple of quotes

Two bits in last week's issue of Newsweek on the question I've been posing in class lately - is there a coarsening of public debate, as President Obama charges? Do the media have anything to do with it, and does it have anything to do with the way they make their money.

One is is in an interview with former U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson. Simpson, R-Wyo., is chairman of Obama's deficit commission.

[Q.] You're a conservative Republican, coming back to Washington to help out with this commission, and you wind up getting attacked by Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives for supposedly cozying up with Democrats. What is with that?

[A.] Well, that's how they make their money. I never considered Rush-babe to be anything more than an entertainer. He gets people all riled up all day long, get them filled up with gas, ulcers, heartburn, B.O., and fear. Hell, that's pretty good. You really are an entertainer if you can get that done!

Simpson is technically correct. Limbaugh's salary is paid out of his network's entertainment budget.

The other is an opinion column headed "Drowning in Hate" by Ellis Cose. Quoting U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., Cose gives a more long-term historical view. But he doesn't let the media off the hook:

When I asked Frank whether the rhetoric was worse than during the Clinton era, he said it was. To find its equivalent, said Frank, "I think you have to go back to the '60s, early '70s." The crazy talk then, he noted, was from the radical left, the likes of SDS. But at least in that era, respectable liberals denounced the radical fringe. Now the Republican establishment quietly acquiesces. And the right-wing media egg it on. "Instead of damning with faint praise, it is praising with faint damns," said Frank.

And precisely because it is so faintly damned by on-air pundits and other prominent figures, much of this poisonous talk is absorbed, undiluted, into the body politic. An analysis by Media Matters for America, a liberal media-watchdog group, blames the irresponsible and harshly partisan language for much of the misinformation accepted by a shockingly high percentage of the public. A majority of Republicans, reported a new Harris poll, believe President Obama to be a Muslim and a socialist—notions that, as Media Matters points out, are widely propagated in right-wing outlets (even though they don't particularly seem to go together). A majority of Republicans, reports Harris, also believe that Obama "wants to turn over the sovereignty of the United States to a one-world government."

When patriots are being taught that the president is a religiously suspect traitor ready to hand the country over to some sinister international cabal, it's hardly surprising they feel entitled to hurl hateful words at him or his presumed allies.