Why let the public in?

In the midst of those endless, artsy, black-and-white investment firm ads that advise us to get our IRAs in shape now or face a retirement of grubbing through garbage cans, in the midst of yet another debate about whether Kenneth Starr has gone too far, we got to see something nearly extinct on television: regular folks questioning, even yelling at, government officials about American foreign policy.

While some letters to the editor around the country -- and especially in the Columbus Dispatch -- expressed embarrassment and irritation over the questioning of authority at the now infamous Ohio State "town meeting," I think many viewers were exhilarated to see something that wasn't staged and managed by the White House. The tough questions and reasoned views of many "ordinary" people captured what is missing from TV news -- public discourse about public policy.

Miffed that CNN had an exclusive on the event, the other networks were happy to give the demonstrators a brief platform in the service of showing up their competitor. Nevertheless, these were still demonstrators. Rare was the story that did not use the terms "unruly," "raucous," and "disruptive." The New York Times trivialized the protesters as "over-caffeinated students." Few reported that Bernard Shaw -- who you may remember hiding under his hotel bed in terror while assigned to cover Desert Storm from Baghdad -- screamed at protesters that they were "not going to be allowed to disrupt" his ninety-minute program.

The news media did what they usually do unless there are 750,000 people out in the streets. They emphasized issues of spin over issues of substance and failed to follow up on this well-coordinated outburst of student activism in America. With their rolodexes filled with the numbers of former generals, their market research insisting that people would rather hear about liposuction than foreign policy, their assumption that young people don't care about current affairs, the mainstream media have become uninterested in, even hostile to, the sort of energy that burst forth at Ohio State.

While the Charleston Post and Courier wrote that "unruly democracy broke out" at the Ohio State "town meeting," CBS summed up the conventional line about the event: "a public relations disaster." Peter Jennings also cast the encounter between citizens and officials as a story primarily about public relations, with an Administration that "took it right between the eyes." Meredith Bagby, the Generation X commentator for CNN financial network, described it as "a useful event, maybe not orchestrated in the best way."

The night of the "town meeting," The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer hosted a panel of experts that included no anti-war activists to discuss opposition to the proposed bombing. Instead, straight out of mothballs, we saw Nixon's CIA director Richard Helms and other former State Department officials. Helms insisted that "the whole issue here is to get rid of Saddam Hussein."

Repeatedly, the press used the word "surprising" to describe the level of opposition against bombing Iraq. But the media didn't pursue the story, so it may be surprised again. Who were these demonstrators? How did they organize? Were they part of a national movement against U.S. policy in Iraq? What kind of a response were they getting? It would have been so refreshing to have these questions covered instead of ignored.

But news routines have become so ossified in the 1990s that the mainstream press seems incapable of pursuing such a story. All an assignment editor needed to do was tell a reporter to get on the web and type in "anti-war activism." Instead, in the days leading up to Ohio State, they ran op-ed after op-ed by old warriors on whether the U.S. should bomb Baghdad, assassinate Saddam Hussein, or send in the ground troops. But they rarely aired viewpoints about the morality or the consistency of U.S. foreign policy. The questioners and hecklers in Ohio sounded like recent Mensa inductees by comparison.

The treatment was nothing new. As Todd Gitlin documented twenty years ago in The Whole World Is Watching, the media trivialize and marginalize voices of the principled opposition.

The news media also tend to ignore the interests, concerns, and opinions of those under thirty -- they're a market niche, not citizens. Instead of regurgitating cliches about Generation X and its successor, reporters could have hit the pavement before Ohio State -- or, at the very least, afterward.

But no, it was back to the Drudge Report for the latest rumors about the possible mingling of bodily fluids in the Oval Office.

For many of us, Ohio State was a breath of fresh air in the suffocating media smog. For others, it was a Pandora's Box of an out-of-control, unpredictable event. The box is now closed up again -- safe, quiet. contained, and papered over with the latest sales figures for Titanic and yet more black-and-white ads insisting that the future isn't ensured by public discourse about current affairs -- it's ensured by the right 401(k).