If Culture Wars Are Over, Why Is Journalism’s Body Count Still Rising?

Jon Margolis [1], former chief political reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the author of "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964 [2]," lives in northeastern Vermont, where he writes and teaches.

The lion will lie down with the lamb, the fox will romp happily with the chickens, the piranhas will play peacefully with the perch.

Oh, hadn’t you heard? The culture wars are over. The new president, while technically a Baby Boomer (born in 1961; the “boom” lasted from 1945 through 1964), is effectively the first president of the “Post-Boomer” era, and indifferent to the Boomer passions.

“Obama is one of those people who was raised post-Vietnam and really came of age in the ’80s,” Steven Cohen, a Columbia University professor of public administration, told [3] the Associated Press. “It’s a huge generational change and a new kind of politics. He’s trying to be a problem-solver by not getting wrapped up in the right-left ideology underlying them.”
  
Were professor Cohen the lone voice here, one might wonder why expertise in public administration is a credential for cosmic sociological insight. But since the inauguration, it’s almost become the conventional wisdom that Obama, who was a small child at the dawn of the political “culture wars” over the Vietnam War, feminism, affirmative action and gun control, isn’t that much into them. On PBS’ NewHour on inauguration night, liberal commentator Mark Shields and conservative columnist David Brooks agreed that Obama was a pragmatist who wanted to govern the country, not an ideologue consumed by old debates.

Ergo: All that tribal confrontation over whether you are “one of our kind” or “one of their kind” is soooo 2008, if not downright 20th century, that whoever engages in it leaves himself or herself open to be scorned as a retrograde fogey. We will now confront one another pragmatically, debating only what can be empirically determined.

Yeah, right.

For now, this being our business on this Web site, let’s confine ourselves to the journalistic response to the new pragmatism, broadening the definition of “journalism” to include the pseudo-journalism that has transformed the culture wars into a profitable industry.

Start with the pseudo-journalist supreme, Rush Limbaugh – who, to be fair, does not call himself a journalist. Still, he discusses public affairs in public, so he qualifies. A few days before the inauguration, Limbaugh said he didn’t want the Obama presidency to succeed. “I hope he fails,” Limbaugh said [4].

A statement widely derided as politically foolish. And so it was. But it was financially shrewd. Limbaugh knows what he’s doing. Like almost all other talk radio hosts (liberal as well as conservative), Limbaugh’s purpose is not to inform, nor even to opine. It’s to hold – and better yet, to expand – his niche audience. And that niche does not want to be informed. It wants its resentments validated, its prejudices echoed, its angst articulated.

Limbaugh’s mission, in short, is more psychological than political. And it works. By appealing to his audience’s bitterness, he’s made himself a pile of money.

He’s not the only one, and talk radio is not the only medium, raking in the dough like this. Many if not most of the cable news programs (again, liberal as well as conservative) have followed the same path to wealth and fame.

Now here’s a news bulletin: Those who have trod a path to wealth and fame are not likely to divert from said path. At least not willingly and not soon, and certainly not just because a new president may have – or more accurately, is said to have – changed the tone of the public discussion. Not until there is something close to unanimity that the tone has changed, and even then not until the change is so widespread that the path of culture war wrangling no longer leads to fame and wealth will those who tread that path seek an alternate route.

We know this because – alas – the schtick long ago leached into the mainstream media. Just turn on CNN almost any time of day. After giving the news, the anchor will turn to a panel of “experts,” who invariably include one liberal and one conservative, along with one reporter, and, almost always, David Gergen.

What the liberal and the conservative know is that they’re supposed to get at least a little testy with one another. That’s why CNN pays them, assuming (perhaps incorrectly? [5]) that these conflicts boosts ratings. The easiest matters over which to get testy are all those culture war issues. OK, not the Vietnam War any more; that’s too long ago. But the abortion debate persists, and since the Sixties a veritable regiment of new culture war issues has emerged – embryonic stem cell research, intelligent design and most of all gay rights. It’s unrealistic to expect these folks to stop haranguing each other over these issues as long as the networks keep paying them.

It is true that in the past few weeks the conservative commentators on CNN and elsewhere have seemed a tad restrained. A few of them even acknowledged being moved by Obama’s inauguration (and Bill Bennett, at least, seemed to mean it). But chances are they are simply biding time while figuring out the right approach to return to the fray. In fact, any doubts that conservatives – in office, in print and on the air – were itching to use culture war issues should have evaporated when House Republican Leader John Boehner called a proposal to increase Medicaid family planning services an effort to “spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives.”

But there is no need to confine the discussion to conservatives to illustrate the enduring power of the culture wars. Mainstream, straight-news journalists are just as addicted to these symbolic issues.

Consider the nearly universal description of New York’s new senator, Kirsten E. Gillibrand, as a conservative Democrat largely based on her opposition to gun control laws.

It isn’t that there was no reason to deal with this issue. As soon as Gillibrand emerged as Gov. David Paterson’s choice, her fellow New York Democratic congresswoman, Carolyn McCarthy, announced she might run against Gillibrand in the 21010 primary over the gun control issue. McCarthy, who entered politics after her husband was killed by a crazed gunman on a Long Island Rail Road commuter train in 1993, is a passionate gun control advocate.

But Gillibrand has been in Congress for two years. In her first year, her rating [6] from Americans for Democratic Action, an imperfect but widely used measure of a politician’s liberalism, was 95 percent, which happened to be five points higher than McCarthy’s.

Last year, Gillibrand’s ADA rating fell to 70 percent. That’s low for a Democrat, but it was low largely because she voted against the ADA’s position on two measures – a budget resolution that was overwhelmingly rejected (and that McCarthy also voted against), and … a gun control bill – specifically, repeal of the Washington, D.C., gun control law. The one the U.S. Supreme Court found unconstitutional, a law so sweeping and unconditional that one need not be a gun enthusiast to find it excessive.

OK, maybe my perspective is warped now that I live in an area where a great many people – some of them politically well to the left of the ADA – spend half the year looking forward to deer season. But judging a person conservative – or even less than liberal – largely on the basis of this idiosyncratic (and, in the great scheme of things, not very important) issue seems mildly irrational.

Except, of course, insofar as it plays into the “one of our kind” versus “one of their kind” culture war.

Probably a good idea if the lambs, the chickens and the perch continue to be careful about with whom they pal around. The culture wars will be with us for a while.

Jon [7] wants to hear from all kinds, Boomer or not.