A Culture Threatening to Dog
Straining to keep the Rod Blagojevich story bubbling until such time as something else actually happens, and to imbue it with presidential significance (the only sort of significance the national political media seems to recognize), the New York Times yesterday resorted to a trope I call the “disappearing subject.” This is where the media’s desperate efforts to flog a story get elided by personifying (or in this case, animalizing) the story so that it can appear to be harassing the target all on its own: classically, questions the media obsessively raise are said to “dog” the candidate or official. This was the strategy the Times and many other outlets used to keep non-events like Whitewater and Travelgate going as scandals during the Clinton years. So here we are again, with Kate Zernike introducing her little piece on Illinois’s history of corruption with a truly stellar bit of chin-stroking non-analysis of a vague strictly mental and perceptual event that has not yet occurred, even on that meta level :
In Illinois, a Virtual Expectation of Corruption – NYTimes.com
. . . Now the culture of his adopted home state threatens to dog President-elect Barack Obama, whose vacated seat in the Senate Mr. Blagojevich is accused of putting up for auction, much as swampy Arkansas politics dogged the last young Democratic politician elected on a platform of change, Bill Clinton.Prosecutors say Mr. Obama is not a subject of the investigation. And he has been a champion of ethics reform in the Illinois Legislature and in the Senate. But some Republicans have seized the opportunity to try to tie him to the worst side of Illinois politics.
Get that? The dogging, though only threatened, has been perpetrated not even by the story, but the thin pretext for writing it in a way that might touch president-elect Barack Obama (“the culture of his adopted home state”). I hate it when adopted home state cultures do that. Oh yes, and the very fact that the media used the same rhetorical tactics against Clinton, actually links Obama to the Clinton scandals, in the sense that NYT can bring up the two in the same sentence.
Who can take “ideas” like these seriously without being professionally invested in keeping American politics stupid?
Every journalist always wants to find some hidden, dirty connection. Ever since Watergate, many want to be the next Woodard or Bernstein. So with these allegations against Blagojevich, some in the media want to draw a line to Obama. It is quite clear that Obama had no part in this scandal; especially since Obama’s refusal to cooperate triggered those obscenities Blagojevich used.
Comment by Ryan Morman — December 19, 2008 @ 9:48 am
It may well be true that papers and writers do this to further their partisan causes. But I tend to think money is at the root of the whole thing. I worked for three small papers during the early 90′s and my experience was that if you can rile them up you can get them to read – and buy.
On a connected but side note – have you every wondered how publishers and editors determined how many pages would be in your daily edition. It’s simple. They add up the total number of column inches of ads they have and figure those will make up between 66% and 75% of the total. Slapping in the other 34% to 25% they take the total number of inches and see how many pages that will provide. The final number of pages generally has to be divisible by 4 (or sometimes just by 2).
This just one additional factor as to why some important stories don’t fit into your paper, or why totally meaningless ones are included.
Sorry for the tangent. I’ll go back to my first cup of coffee now.
Comment by Mike Gordon — January 7, 2009 @ 6:47 am
hell of a lot more interesting than what I was supposed to be searching for, (cant believe I’ve got to work on a sunday!) came across your site by accident really and gave the thumbs up on stumbleupon. Thanks for the diversion! bp.
Comment by management consultancy — December 13, 2009 @ 9:43 am
how about a culture threatening to “man”?
Comment by dog lawyer — August 5, 2010 @ 1:13 pm