If ignorance is bliss, rapture may have descended on America.
To have lived in the capital in these early days of the Age of Newt, and to have watched a few of the 2,463 weekly talk shows, is to assume that from Bangor, Maine, to Portland, Ore., the land has been convulsed with congressional politics, specifically the Republican “Contract With America.”
It was thus reassuring-or, now that I think again, depressing-to encounter Bill McInturff, a Deerfield and Glen Ellyn native who’s a well-liked GOP pollster with a deep affinity for George Bush and, now, an in with presidential candidate Bob Dole.
He puts it simply: “It’s scary to see how little people know about what’s happening.”
McInturff, 41, whose firm has done early polling for Dole and might handle his campaign, found that “only 75 percent of Americans knew of the `Contract.’ “
When you factor in that there’s usually a 10 to 15 percent overstatement of awareness in such polling-people may be loathe to admit they don’t have a clue-that may bring the acknowledgement of the “Contract” to 60 percent.
(Related factoid: Proving the overstatement impulse, McInturff will occasionally put his own name on a list when his firm polls for citizen awareness of politicians in their state or nationally. Inevitably, 10 to 15 percent will claim they know him. “I have high awareness numbers in the Dakotas,” he says.)
Here are tidbits on what people know and don’t know:
– In October, right before the November elections, a mere 25 to 30 percent knew of Newt Gingrich despite growing, even huge publicity. Now it’s around 60 percent.
– After more than two years of the Clinton presidency, 51 percent of Americans can’t name a single Clinton accomplishment or associate a single issue with him. Give the guy a break.
– Two thirds can’t name one element of the “Contract.” Not one of the 10 elements registers in double digits when it comes to citizen awareness.
– Ask them about the federal budget, and 40 percent of America rates foreign aid as the first- or second-biggest element. In fact, it’s constitutes about 1 percent of the budget.
“They clearly don’t understand where the money goes in terms of entitlements,” McInturff says. Americans don’t have a clue that one-third of the budget is consumed by Social Security and Medicare.
This being the case, what does the pollster tell the client politician?
“I’d say that the American public is ill-informed but not stupid,” McInturff declared. “They have a sensitive b.s. meter. They may not know the details, but they tend to know whether you’re telling the truth.”
He may be rather solicitous in that assessment; it probably would not be politically correct to announce publicly that, “Yes, Jim, I agree with your own view that there are millions of TV-watching, uninformed idiots out there with neither brains nor b.s. meters.”
But that assessment is one that suffuses advice to clients. It’s why he, and other political consultants, will tell them to keep it simple, “focus on big messages” which those legions of stupid-oops, I mean ill-informed-citizens can comprehend.
“They don’t want to hear about reconciliation of a bill in such-and-such committee,” he said, alluding to a very inside, legislative process. “They want to know the end purpose” of legislation.
Self-inflicted wound
The Tribune wins this week’s John Dillinger Award for Maladroit Timing, named after the most famous patron of Chicago’s Biograph Theater, who picked the wrong time to see a flick there in July 1932.
On the cover of the Sunday magazine is a smiling Carol Moseley-Braun, with a profile inside of Illinois’ junior senator and photos by free-lancer Martin Simon, son of the senior senator, Paul Simon. As usual, the cover story is promoted on Page 1 of the paper.
The profile comes amid recent disclosures that Braun successfully lobbied for a $13 million tax break for Tribune Co. as part of a Tribune agreement with a group headed by producer Quincy Jones to buy TV stations in Atlanta and New Orleans. The deal thus benefits from a controversial provision that brings tax breaks to firms selling broadcasting or cable-TV outlets to minority-owned companies, no matter how overprivileged the minorities.
Forget that the Chicago Tribune has not been a Braun cheerleader, endorsing her neither in her historic 1992 primary nor general election victories, and that it has often skewered her since.
Forget that Sunday’s even-handed, far-from-puffy profile was reported long before word of Braun’s tax help via her Finance Committee position and was headed to the printer (and could not be changed) before the New York Daily News broke word of the tax-break approval April 1 (the color photos went to the printer March 22, the story itself March 29).
The timing is rather awful.
Media bucks
Jeff Greenfield is the bright, droll ABC News reporter who does many stories on the media. He confirms that last week he spoke for pay to a major media-industry trade group, the National Association of Broadcasters in Las Vegas.
The NAB says the check is for $12,000.
ABC has supposed new conflict-of-interest rules, barring taking money from trade and for-profit groups. In the process it makes an untenable differentiation between for-profits and non-profits, which often act much like trade associations, especially when it comes to political lobbying.
Nevertheless, Greenfield said ABC has carved out an exception when it comes to speaking for pay to groups within the media industry. He says he understands and agrees with ABC’s position on that exception. And since he gets most of his income from a broadcasting company to begin with, he contends, there’s really not much difference in speaking to their trade group or related communications entities.
“Philosophically, I think they’ve (ABC) gone overboard” via their new conflict rules, Greenfield said. “ABC always had the power to say no to individual speeches,” so he doesn’t understand why such a case-by-case review would not still be better.
Echoing sentiments of other media moonlighters, Greenfield wonders, “Is this a case of people who think you’re an overpaid correspondent trying to make more money, or is there actual concern about taking money from a group you have a reporting relationship with?
“I think a lot of this has to do with how much we get. If it was just $200 a speech, nobody would care.”
Greenfield noted, correctly, that “things are so intertwined” in media these days, with growing concentration of separate companies under one corporate banner. For example, he has a political novel coming out in November, via Putnam, which is now owned by MCA, which will soon be owned by Seagram’s.
That’s why, he said, you have to look at each case separately.
It’s a seemingly level-headed, pragmatic perspective. But it might be dead wrong.
The check-out-each-case separately thesis may drown one in needless complexity and obscure a simpler, clearer maxim: Reporters shouldn’t take any money from groups on whom they might report.
Does an ABC-like rule mean a reporter working for a legal publication that covers the American Bar Association doesn’t have a problem taking money from the ABA? After all, a loose-enough definition of that reporter’s industry might conclude that he does work in the legal business too, right?
One might make a case that Greenfield is the very last person at ABC News who should be granted that media industry “exception.” Maybe Greenfield, who for years has freely taken money from various media trade groups and firms, is the last guy in the shop to take money from the National Association of Broadcasters. Unlike the Pentagon reporter, he covers their industry.
And as far as full public disclosure of outside speaking fees, which ABC colleague John Stossel submitted to in this space last week, Greenfield says the following:
“I first thought disclosure (by reporters) was obnoxious. Now, I’m not so sure.”
