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There is an old saying: never let anybody see how smart you are, they will cut you off at the knees. Certainly President Obama never heeded this little aphorism. He has shown us how smart he was time and again and he is paying a price. Smart persons have to be careful. You do not want to show up your boss, your colleagues, your teachers, even your family members with your keen clear or deep perception or trenchant diatribes on politics, religion, or even the price of mayonnaise. Some persons are just not comfortable with the sneaking suspicion somebody is rapidly and without delay on the draw, better educated, or more knowledgeable. We would like to think we want the best man or woman for the occupation of President, but our history says otherwise.
Take Woodrow Wilson. President of Princeton, the extreme educated WASP with glasses pinched to his nose, he was veritably our heavy obligation scholar in chief. World War I breaks out and Wilson is on the spot, crafting The League of Nations to make World War I the war to end all wars. The League was Wilson’s cerebral answer to the foolish squabbling amongst nation states. The problem was the American public did not portion Wilson’s Utopian view and congress never ratified The League. Wilson lost touch and was defeated. Criticisms of too cold, too aloof, too intellectual. Cut to Jimmy Carter. A well read man with lust in his heart who couldn’t inspire the country to save his life and was substituted with an actor. Ronald Reagan was not a smart man, but he was a great communicator. People loved Reagan. Fast forward to Billy Clinton. Smart. Everyone knows this. Voluminous knowledge, but capable to break it down to folksy populist sentiment. He had the outstanding vantage of being smart, but sounding like a guy who could work on your car. Too bad he couldn’t keep his pants zipped.
Slip up to the disaster of John Kerry–the talking head. East Coast intellectualism takes one on the chin from a guy from Texas who may hardly put a sentence together. But he sounds like the guy next door you could have a barbecue with. George Bush the rambler knocks out Captain Ozone in the next election with the same old folksy I’m just like you (funny vote counting) and aint all that global warming stuff weird? Al Gore goes down. Then something happens that no one counted on. A Harvard Law Professor hits the jackpot with populist rage for change. He may deliver a hell of a speech and he is black.
Barack Obama is elected on the tails of a bestseller and starts to work. But he begins to lose the populace. There is something in regards to his speeches that is at times undecipherable. He thinks when it comes to his decisions. The media loves him because they recognize his wit, his play on words, and he may write memoirs that have literary merit. Unemployment blasts past ten percent and public distrust starts to seep in like a gas. He makes a case for saving the banks, but at times humans don’t rather understand what he is doing. He is accused of being a socialist. There are comparings to Woodrow Wilson and his reliance on cold intellectualism to solve the issues of the day.
American history is built on a distrust of any individual who is too privileged or any individual who is too educated. This is rooted in our history of rugged individualism and a fierce distrust of centralized power. The frontier was not settled by a bunch of college graduates. It was settled by men who could work with their hands and improvise. They employed homespun logic that any man could understand. The real American is a self taught, self starter, and may speak in the plain language of a carpenter. Eggheads are decidedly unAmerican.
Now we are at the present. A woman emerges from a frozen state and is thrown onto the national stage. She speaks of hockey moms, and gives shoutouts to sixpack Joe’s and likes to hunt. She speaks in colloquialisms and has no real understand of Washington politics. She is great looking and has a raft of kids and blows it each time she has interview. She may see Russia from her back door and warns versus death panels. She is not educated. In fact she cares little for real facts. She is riding a wave of populist discontent like a surfer on a perfective wave and she releases a book that attacks the media and the Republican idiots who blew the last election. She is a rogue and might be the Republican front runner in the next election.
So we are back to square one with the question: do Americans actually want a smart President? I guess we will find out, but one thing is for sure, you genuinely don’t want to show persons how smart you are…especially if you are running for President.
William Hazelgrove writes in Ernest Hemingway’s attic. His latest book is Rocket Man.
Media American Politics Doris Graber
The eighth edition of Graber s classic text is exhaustively modified to reflect major structural changes that have shaken the world of political news. Graber combines comprehensive coverage and cutting-edge theory as she shows students how the media influence governmental originations and functions, and in turn how the government shapes the way the media disseminate information. Her wide coverage has three focal points: the media s role in both the public and private sectors; it is affect on the complex mental states of popular Americans and political elites; and the ways in which the news media cover government and politics.
In addition to new photos, cartoons, screen shots, and data, this edition includes:
- major changes in reporting, notably in the 2008 elections, brought when it comes to by the Internet;
- the subsequent erosion of the mainstream media s influence on the political agenda;
- new media, including more on blogging, social networking, and political amusement shows;
- the latest on media laws and recent court cases;
- the evolution and current state of war-time reporting;
- and how the FCC regulates media ownership and content.
About the AuthorDoris Graber is professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has written and edited a lot of articles and books on the media and public opinion, including Media Power in Politics, Fifth Edition (2006), The Power of Communication: Managing Information in Public Organizations (2003), and Processing Politics: Learning from Television in the Internet Age (2001), which won the 2003 Goldsmith Book Prize. This award is given by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Media American Politics Doris Graber Photo
Media American Politics Doris Graber Image
Media American Politics Doris Graber Picture
Media American Politics Doris Graber Picture
A Good All-Inclusive Introductory Text
This well-compiled textbook gathers basic theoretical introductions to all distinct features of the kinship amidst the American media and the political system. Included are basic mass communicating conceptions such as agenda setting and gatekeeping, which are then projected into more prominent media trends and governmental/media interactions in all applicable directions. The book provides descriptions of how government affects media (ownership regulations, First Amendment rules, libel laws), how media affects government (building of public opinion, muckraking, watchdog responsibilities), and how the connections amongst government and media affect the public (opinion patterns, voting behavior, political noesis levels). One recurring problem here is that the book is ofttimes noncommittal in describing contentious political issues, which is a result of attempting to present arguments from all sides. This have a tendancy to reduce the sensed importance of some crucial issues in the reader’s mind, exceptionally difficulties with media ownership patterns in recent years, and issues arising from progressed deregulation. Meanwhile, the book’s sectional arrangement, as is true for a lot of textbooks, leads to a reasonable amount of repetition and re-explanations of basic conceptions (a real problem in the adjoining chapters for the dissimilar subdivisions of government, for example). In any case this book is a very utile introduction to a wide range of theoretical areas, and impressively prepares the reader for more in-depth exploration endeavors. [~doomsdayer520~]
Interesting
For an introduction to Media politics Graber provides the perfective setting. She discloses respective theories to Media’s influence on Americans. In fact, I commend anybody going into venture work to give this book a brief scan; it’s an easy read.
Mass Media and Politics: Shall We Dance?
Graber’s dissertation distinctly illustrates how the mass media effects person beliefs, attitudes, and activities. Consider how much of the working day is expended talking about top news stories, political issues, and social situations. The intermediate American spends seven hours of exposure per day to galore form of mass media news or amusement [television, newspapers, magazines, radio, etc.] (p.2). Taking this into consideration, the intermediate person will ordinarily talk when it comes to that which they are most familiar, or that in which they are most interested. Based on these statistics, it is inevitable that news stories will be the topic of discussion, thence influence, in American’s daily life.
Using children as an analogy, the fighting, bickering, fingerpointing, and blaming stops when someone is in trouble. Then disturb comes around, Americans band together, getting unpenetrable to the adversary. Graber points this out in the chapters on Foreign Affairs Coverage and Crisis Coverage. Everyone has experienced a time of ‘crisis’, either locally, nationally, or globally. Once a crisis occurs, newspapers, magazines, talk shows, radio, etc. band together. This one aspect keeps America free, and democratic.
I agree with Graber that the mass media effects person beliefs, attitudes, and activities. She has proven her point effectively.
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