Bitterness Sours Politics, Newsman Says
It is not the winter of discontent, television journalist Sander Vanocur said Monday. It is all four seasons of discontent.
Where Walt Whitman once heard America singing, he would now say, “I hear America bitching,” Vanocur said.
And while he may have witnessed nearly four decades of bitter political debate, Vanocur said nothing compares to the current wave of aroundthe-clock “toxic informational chaff” that is turning the democratic forum into “an around-theclock Tower of Babel - b-a-b-b-l-e.”
The American mood is souring in the process, spoiling democracy with it, he said.
Delivering the Edward R. Murrow Symposium Lecture at Washington State University on Monday night, Vanocur blamed the rising speed with which information is transmitted and the growing number of talk and tabloid television shows for whom the watchwords “seem to be anything goes.”
News often lacks context, being made and magnified by the mere presence of a television camera, he said.
“It isn’t that you have a lack of information now,” he said in an interview earlier in the day. “You have this Tower of Babble going at you all the time. And because the editing function is not there, it’s difficult to sort out what is important and not.”
Vanocur’s resume goes back to the mid-1950s and includes work for the Manchester Guardian, The New York Times - which fired him after 18 months because his speech was too “colloquial” - and both NBC and ABC News. He now is a visiting professional scholar to the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, where he has been producing a three-part series on television and the presidency.
In his speech in the WSU coliseum, Vanocur credited President Ronald Reagan with returning civility to the political process after a “toxicity” similar to today’s was spawned by the Kennedy assassination, the war in Vietnam, Watergate and more.
While Reagan was a fierce partisan, his disputes with political opponents like House Speaker Tip O’Neill remained cordial.
That civility has waned, Vanocur said, with a new dose of spleen being aimed at politicians.
Such bitterness is unwarranted, he said.
Moreover, he said, “it’s unfair, it’s dangerous and it will cause great long-term damage to our political institutions if it continues unchecked,” he said.
As part of Monday’s symposium activities, Spokesman-Review reporter Karen Dorn Steele was inducted into the State Hall of Journalistic Achievement. The newspaper’s environment and special projects reporter, Dorn Steele has reported extensively on the secret irradiation of Eastern Washington residents and broke the story on the “Green Run,” the federal government’s deliberate release of radioactivity at Hanford.