Hello, Columbus

by Katha Pollitt

The Nation magazine, March 16, 1998

Just when it seems like the official media have a total lock on political discourse and nothing will ever again be said except by designated experts in pancake makeup, just when you think the last raw bit of reality has been plastic-wrapped and priced like a slice of processed cheese food- just when, in other words, you are about to consider getting seriously depressed-something wonderful, bizarre and totally unscripted happens.

I am thinking, of course, of the February 18 CNN "Town Meeting" on Iraq at Ohio State University in Columbus, featuring Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Secretary of Defense William Cohen and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger. Here was an occasion that would seem to have offered about as much chance for the unexpected as a pharaoh's funeral. It was worse than propaganda, it was propaganda privatized: The Clinton Administration manufactures a spectacle of consent by normal red-blooded Americans to the bombing of Iraq, which it offers to a giant news conglomerate. This corporation then twists the already-bent occasion to fit its own commercial needs: banning other news organizations, structuring the discussion around advertising breaks, using the crowds who had come expecting a two-way exchange of views to bolster a false image of robust free speech. Not exactly one of those ideal speech communities Jurgen Habermas talks about! On the floor of the sports arena, carefully chosen likely war supporters-veterans, R.O.T.C. cadets, students enrolled in a military history class. Up in the balcony, barred from even the chance to submit a question for prescreening, everyone else.

Including, through an amazing oversight that White House aides publicly bemoaned for days afterward, some 200 to 300 local antiwar activists old-time activists, students, clergy, anarchists, union people who proceeded to make an impressive fuss. (Moderator Bernard Shaw's reference to maybe a "dozen" protesters was, of course, a lie.) Chanting. Heckling. Interrupting. Unfurling a banner-NO WAR-that one woman had smuggled in under her skirt. The protesters made so much noise that, after seven ejections and one arrest, a CNN producer agreed to let one of them ask a question if they agreed to pipe down. Jon Strange, a 22-year-old substitute teacher (who was, let it be noted, properly dressed and wearing a tie), asked a 64,000-dollar one: "Why bomb Iraq when other countries have committed similar violations?" He mentioned Turkey, which bombs the Kurds; Saudi Arabia, which tortures political and religious dissidents; Indonesia, which has slaughtered hundreds of thousands of East Timorese; Israel, which has been censured by the United Nations for bombing Lebanese civilians and brutalizing the Palestinians; and he could have mentioned many other nations as well.

Down on the floor, Rick Theis, a writer and former O.S.U. student body president, was originally first at the mike but was denied the right to speak when he refused to let CNN prescreen his question and ejected when he protested this censorship. By dint of much vocal protest, he managed to speak at the very end of the evening, and he asked some good questions too. How can you call this a town meeting? How do you sleep at night?

Too much free speech equals a major public relations disaster. In a stunning reversal, the very factors that had given the pro-war discourse the false appearance of monolithic consensus also made it vulnerable. Take conglomeratization: Thanks to CNN's global dominance, the whole world really was watching. How could the Clinton Administration persuade foreign governments of a course of action so dubious it couldn't even persuade its own citizens? (Not even Ohio supports the bombing, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said a few days later. Why should Egypt?) Take the media near-blackout of weeks and weeks of antiwar actions across the country. Suddenly people with questions about the) bombing could see they weren't alone and never had been. "I got phone calls from people all over the country saying our protest I gave them courage to do things in their own communities," | Strange told me when we spoke by phone. "I think we cut through people's feelings of isolation and hopelessness."

Now if Jon Strange and Rick Theis and their fellow protesters had been, say, first graders suspended for kissing classmates, they would have been on every talk show in the country the next day- like the veteran who wondered at the town meeting if we're "ready and willing to send in the troops." Was this not a news story? Did it not have a hook, an angle, timeliness, human interest, edge and attitude all those things we leftists are constantly being told we lack when we ask why the mainstream media short-shrift our perspectives and reject our Op-Eds? After he'd had dinner and calmed down, Strange told me, he called Nightline, CNN, a newsroom at ABC and the Associated Press. ``NO one was interested." Only Pacifica's Democracy Now! and a few liberal-hosted regional talk shows invited Strange or Theis to be a guest. Theis's well-written and eminently newsworthy account of the evening appeared not in The New York Times or The Washington Post but in The Lantern, O.S.U.'s student paper, where, I must say, I found a level of discussion both of the town meeting and the proposed bombing itself that easily equaled that in the mainstream press.

Columbus wasn't the only protest sidelined in the reporting. An appearance by Albright at Columbia, South Carolina, was met with demonstrators (best placard: CLINTON: MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR). U.N. ambassador Bill Richardson was confronted with such an unruly audience at the University of Minnesota that he left without speaking, a story no major paper saw fit to print.

An interesting clue to the willful media misperception of widespread antiwar feeling lies in the persistent suggestion that the town meeting protesters were members of the famously sectarian and pugnacious Spartacist League. No one I spoke to from Columbus had seen a single Spart. I asked peace activist Mark Stansbery why he thought the press would say such a thing. "Maybe because we were so aggressive," he replied. "People don't expect that of Ohioans."

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