Muzzled (31 page)

Would it explode their identities—some essential part of their sense of self that requires them to wear the label like an all-defining badge, “liberal” or “conservative”? Is it like fans of the Yankees and Red Sox being so locked into rooting for their team—and hating the other team—that they forget about their mutual love of baseball? Would it threaten them to hear about the stories, the passions, driving fellow Americans who think differently about the world but share the same destiny as Americans?

As this book shows, we, the American people, are not shy about speaking out and voicing our dissent. But it also shows that such disagreements are not the end of the conversation. Our debates are the
start
of the conversation.

Freedom of speech is arguably the defining aspect of the American way of life. It has been exalted by every American generation. The brightest moments in our history have come when we have gone beyond the obligation of fulfilling the
constitutional grant to allow one another the right to speak and stood up to insist on it for ourselves or others who face being silenced by government or popular opinion.

America fulfills its grant of rights best when we trust that every one of us is speaking with integrity, love of country, and the best of intentions until there is contrary evidence. Even after the arguments that led to the Civil War, President Lincoln reaffirmed the Founding Fathers’ dedication to the idea of free speech with the pledge that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The politically correct among us, on the Left and the Right, so self-righteous in claiming to want to protect the feelings of some minority or constituency, really want to put us all in a box to be controlled by them and their agenda. In the case of my controversial comments about Muslims dressed in religious clothes, my critics claimed to be muzzling me to protect the feelings of people wearing Muslim garb at airports. At that point all of us have to ask who benefits from insisting on this straitjacket for our thoughts and opinions. My words stand as a true expression of my feelings and a good starting point for talking about the difficult feelings many Americans have about Muslims in an era when terrorism is inextricably linked to Islam. Only corruption benefits by closing the door and shuttering the sunlight of honest dialogue among free people.

I find it endlessly interesting to openly converse with people, to get inside the minds of those who are richer, poorer, younger, older, Jewish rabbis and Christian nuns, people who live in a different part of town, have been to war, have never been enlisted, or listen to a different set of media personalities.
But apparently getting to know a varied cast of characters, even in the land of one people out of many, strikes some people as dangerous. I guess that is why NPR’s president suggested that I share my feelings only with a psychiatrist.

But to my mind it is worthwhile to take the risk of saying what I am thinking and feeling, and to hear the same from other people. It is the politically correct crowd that assumes that anyone who thinks and looks different is a dork or a danger. Maybe their real fear is being open to admitting that they were wrong about “those people.”

Americans on both sides of the political fence complain about how one-sided, personality-driven, and partisan the news shows have become. I tell them we get the media we deserve. The fact is the politically polarized, personality-heavy programs attract a lot of eyeballs. They consistently get high ratings, and that is why there are more and more of them. But it is also clear that on both Left and Right the viewers and listeners are in on the joke. They know it is a frivolous, guilty pleasure to sit back and get a kick out of the petty behavior, the spin doctors, the posturing, and the celebrity gossip on most of the talk news programs. But when the news is serious, like a 9/11 attack or a presidential election, Americans want more—they want hard news—real news.

They agree with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the former senator, who said: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” But, unfortunately, much of the time we have to deal with a climate that seems to favor people like Senator Jon Kyl, who, as reported by Slate’s Dave Weigel, “made the
defining Republican stumble of the [2011 spring government shutdown] debate, saying on the Senate floor that ‘90 percent’ of Planned Parenthood’s work was abortion. Within hours, his office clarified that this was not intended as a fact.…” You can’t make this stuff up.

Perhaps the reason Americans feel so bereft is that with careless claims thrown left and right, there’s no longer the comfort (even if it was an illusion) of a single trusted news source.

The days of people across the political spectrum trusting journalists such as Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and David Brinkley are long gone. None of those outstanding journalists, for all their credibility, could compete in the current media environment. They’d be disparaged as lacking personality and being too tied to the details of a story as opposed to debating the meaning of the story. Their successors are chosen for their personalities, their number of followers on Twitter, and their glamorous looks. Television executives now assume that the audience is coming to see a personality and not simply to get the news. The news is secondary.

The reason for that is that the nature of the news business has changed with advances in technology. At work, at home, in the car, people are listening to the radio, and they’re catching a few minutes here and there from cable’s twenty-four-hour coverage throughout the day. On their computers they are reading the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report, The Hill and
Foxnews.com
. They have links to conservative or liberal blog postings sent to their Facebook pages, which are, in turn, sent to their cell phones. If they bother to turn on the major-network evening news broadcasts, what they are getting is no longer the “news” because they’ve heard
it already. They are really tuning in to see which stories are played at the top of the broadcast, what the network slant is on a given story. And they don’t feel the need to watch regularly.

The problem of declining relevance to people also bedevils the big morning newspapers. Only a decade ago print editions paid the bills for having top reporters covering city hall and the school board. Now the Web sites for many major metropolitan newspapers get a bigger audience than the print editions. But while the Web sites have grown, the news organizations have not figured out how to get readers and advertisers to pay for the online news product. As a result, once-indispensable metropolitan dailies like the
Washington Post
have been forced to scale back their operations. Some have closed their doors entirely. If your newspaper arrives at your door by 6:00 a.m. every morning, its stories have been on the paper’s Web site for at least a few hours. The stories are no longer news. Jay Leno, the late-night comedian, said in a monologue a few years ago that the
New York Times
had won seven Pulitzer Prizes that day, but he read about it on Google News.

What people do want is to make sense of the news. Most people don’t have the time or energy to make sense of the complex and often frustrating political problems of our times. They are busy holding down a job, driving the kids to soccer, and paying the bills. They don’t have enough time to get a good night’s sleep, much less dedicate time to understanding the news when it requires context, history, and assessment of the motivations of the key players involved.

As a result, most people look for simple answers, uncomplicated interpretations, infotainment and satire, good guys and
bad guys. More and more people look for one-stop shopping—news coverage they can trust to digest the news for them and help them reach a conclusion. And it has to be fun to watch, read, or listen to. However, polls show people don’t feel they are getting the trustworthy part. What they get is predictable political spin, along with big doses of fear, fright, and fury. Which is why many Americans have lost trust in the news media. A surprising number of people, mostly young people and especially young women, report in surveys that they have become disengaged from the news—even as the media is swimming in news programs.

In moments of crisis, people yearn for media that have the guts to provide honest and open accounts of events, fair debates that show a willingness to consistently cross the lines of political dialogue in search of the truth, not close the door on it. And too often they don’t find it. Amid the sideshow of commentary and canned news, they realize that an ever-increasing number of media outlets pretend to honor open dialogue, a symphony of ideas and opinions, but only offer a one-note performance: their niche brand. That leaves us with a lot of free speech, but free speech at the fringes. And the fringes do not promote sincere debate between Left and Right. At best, they give us shouting matches.

The honest middle, where much of the nation lives, can’t find a place to hear a genuine discussion. And this bothers people all over the political spectrum, including the Far Right and Far Left. Smart people, including those on the political extremes, consistently tell me they want to know what the other side is thinking, even if only to be certain they are right and everyone else is wrong.

————

I believe there is an audience for honest, credible, intelligent coverage of the changing political, social, and economic landscape. And there is so much seismic change taking place in the world. The budget deficit is going over the cliff; racial and ethnic population shifts are altering the cultural DNA of the country; global economics are unsettling the structural base of manufacturing and service-industry jobs in the United States.

Those big storms are creating winds of change of hurricane force. In the last dozen years the American public has seen a president impeached, a controversial presidential election settled by the Supreme Court, and a massive terror attack on the United States. They have watched the country enter two long-running wars overseas. They have participated in three straight elections in which political power has shifted between the parties in the legislative or executive branches.

These gales are blowing through every town in America.

The nation’s racial and ethnic makeup is shifting daily. About 92 percent of the increase in the nation’s population in the last decade resulted from the increased number of minorities, mostly Hispanics and Asians. For the first time in our nation’s history, minorities are a third of the population.

The role of women in American life is also changing fast, as is the structure of the American family.

Women are now the majority of the nation’s high-school and college graduates. They are the majority of the workforce. The number of single, divorced, and widowed women has never been higher, especially among minorities. Women vote in higher numbers than men, and their influence on politics,
including as officeholders, continues to grow. A record number of women sit on the Supreme Court, and in recent years a record number of women have held seats in Congress, led states as governors, and run major corporations.

Immigrants, both legal and illegal, are transforming our neighborhoods and states, as they arrive from Mexico, Asia, and Central America. The number of Muslims in the United States has also increased. Christian, Western European countries historically provided the bulk of America’s immigrants. But it is a new day. The need for honest conversations across racial as well as ethnic and religious lines has never been greater.

The magnitude of the shift in the nation’s population is most obvious in looking at the surge in people of Hispanic origin. Their numbers grew by more than 40 percent between 2000 and 2010. Hispanics are now the nation’s largest minority, making up 16 percent of the population (Asians are 5 percent of the population). In Texas, the state whose population grew the most in the first decade of the century, 95 percent of the growth in people under eighteen was among Hispanics. Nationwide the birthrate among Hispanics and Asians is far higher than that among whites, meaning more diversity is on the way. The Census Bureau estimates that most American children will be minorities by 2023 and that there will be no racial majority in the country in about thirty years.

Blacks held steady at 12 percent of the population. This is bumping up the growth of the black middle class, blacks living in the suburbs, and blacks in political power, including as president. All of this signals the dawning of a new face of America.

While baby boomers over fifty now make up about 30 percent of the population, that demographic is close to the
quarter of the population younger than eighteen. Americans in both these demographic groups say the economy is their top priority, but each has very different concerns. Seniors over sixty-five are focused on the immediate cost of living—on retaining their Social Security and Medicare programs—while younger people are worried about education and the tight job market.

Seniors, overwhelmingly white, are pessimistic about the nation’s future. The young are overwhelmingly diverse and, while cynical, are not as pessimistic as the seniors. The young vote heavily for Democrats, while the seniors cast their votes for Republicans. When it comes to tough issues like budget cuts, the need for honest debate between these generations is greater than ever. Today’s Americans are confronting bigger divisions of age and race and class than ever before.

“Politically, an age-race divide could create even sharper divisions between candidates and parties that espouse more or less government support for measures benefitting the young, like education or affordable housing, and those benefitting the old, like Social Security and Medicare,” says William Frey, a demographer for the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

What this all suggests is that the nation is going through significant realignment, something that happens every few generations. These hurricane forces are social, political, and economic. And when they occur, people get frightened, and—to paraphrase President Obama—they cling to what they know, what is familiar and comforting, and sometimes to the
loudest, most commanding voice present, including bombastic media personalities. But it is harder to have an honest debate when the starting point is anxiety laced with resentment and the biggest TV and radio personalities are playing to our fears.