What? Me(dia) Worry About The Fiscal Cliff?

The media need to take some measure of responsibility for the brinkmanship being played out between Obama and the Hill. It is not sufficient for news media to simply stand by and report on the possible disaster–to take a wait-and-see approach to the fiscal cliff debacle. Social media doesn’t count in this; the cacophony, stupidity and brutality of their Babel-ish voices make Twitter, Facebook, and other soapbox screamers irrelevant to serious problem solving.

But some culpability must be assigned to the working press, national and local, for standing by, cameras and microphones at the ready, to watch and tut-tut as the Congress and the White House, linked together on an anchor chain they’ve just both flung into the chasm, drag the innocents off the deck of the Ship of State.

There’s an old Arab story about a scorpion and a frog on the banks of the Suez Canal. The scorpion wants to get across and asks the frog if it can ride on the frog’s back to the other side. The frog, appropriately reluctant, asks, “How do I know you won’t sting me?” The scorpion replies, “Why would I do that? If you die, I die.”  The logic seems reasonable to the frog, and so, with the scorpion on his back, the frog begins to swim across the canal. Halfway across, the scorpion, unable to resist its nature, stings the frog. Before it dies and sinks to the bottom—taking the scorpion with it—the frog asks, “Why did you do that?” To which the scorpion, with its last breath, replies, “Because this is the Middle East.”

The news media would have covered that event much as it is covering the pending drowning of the economy—Congress on Obama’s back, or vice versa (it’s the same story)—with an insouciance that is more than maddening; it is almost criminal. Several weeks ago, the public ire was focused on a man who took pictures of fellow human being having fallen to his death in front of a subway train. Oh, how the media did wring their collective hands over the callousness of the photographer who did nothing as the train rushed into the station. It didn’t make any difference that the photographer wasn’t a member of the media—news outlets ran with the pictures anyway—because that’s what the media do. My colleague, Howard Kurtz, got it right (sadly) when he said, “The media don’t usually worry about such things. It was accurate and captured an important story.”

Well, the train of recession—maybe even depression—was rushing into the station on this last day of 2012.  The public—at least the majority of them who will be slammed by White House and congressional recalcitrance—is already over the brink, with nothing more than a fingernail grasp on the edge of the abyss.

The media are doing what they do best—waiting for the crunch, eager to capture, from every angle, the mutilation of the bodies politic and public.

When it’s all over, the talk shows, the nightly news, the morning papers, the myriad media blogs will be hurrying to see whose crocodilian tears flow fastest in their race to cover a death they chose to watch with callous disregard for the consequences. The CBS logo…an unblinking eye…apparently works for all other news organizations as well. But we shouldn’t be surprised. As Don Henley sings in his media-punching Dirty Laundry, “It’s interesting when people die.”

Could the news media make a difference? Could an informed press have done more to put pressure on the Congress and the White House by leading the news with stories of real Americans who are going to suffer at the hands of government leaders so wealthy that no economic disaster will affect them?

Yes, the media have the power to do more—and they have chosen not to, in favor of covering the street fighting up and down Pennsylvania Avenue much as it covers besieged cities of the Middle East. Frogs and scorpions, presidents and members of Congress, politicians and the public—it makes no difference; it’s just another story.

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