Ending the Split-Scream, by John P. Avlon

Ending the Split-Scream

By John P. Avlon, New York Sun
January 11, 2005

Even in an era when most pundits sound like paid political operatives shilling for one of the two parties, it was still somehow surprising to find that Armstrong Williams was paid nearly a quarter of a million taxpayer dollars by the Bush administration to promote its No Child Left Behind legislation in his column, radio, and television show.

At the same time, on the opposite side of the aisle, CBS News released its internal audit on the falsified Bush-bashing National Guard memo it paraded during the closing months of the campaign, finding that "myopic zeal" had led its producers to ignore journalistic standards of objectivity, giving the Kerry team a heads-up about the breaking "story" before it was properly verified and released to the public.

Both these incidents are symptoms of a larger problem: the attempted hijacking of the news industry by partisan political interests. This corruption has helped to artificially polarize the nation, and hurt the credibility of all news organizations. We are in the process of devolving back to 19th-century standards of journalism, where newspapers acted as wholly owned subsidiaries of political parties. It's time to end the "split-scream" mentality that pits predictable and equally intolerant voices from the left and right against each other and pretends that all the heat generated amounts to light as well.

Which is why the concurrent decision by CNN to cancel its long-running screamfest "Crossfire" offers an opportunity to reassess the road we're on. As the comic nemesis of "Crossfire," Jon Stewart, pointed out, the show was "named after what innocent bystanders get caught in during gang violence," and in a sense that describes the state of our nation's political debate as well. A tribal mentality has infused our politics, where Democrats and Republicans function as Crips and Bloods, firing off personal attacks and ratcheting up the political body count in the belief that you're either with us or against us. Extremism is rewarded and ideological conformity is mistaken for personal courage. This ignores the fact that at the end of the day, we are all on the same team as Americans. In the crossfire between special interests, the national interest is the first casualty.

We are in the middle of a real war with an enemy who sees the world through the jihadist lens of "us against them." We don't have the luxury of subdividing ourselves at this time. And yet, with all the hyped-up left-right, black-white, blue and red state divides we are obsessed with exacerbating our fairly modest differences.

Nowhere is this worse than in Washington, which is the only town in America where your political registration is the most important thing about you. If you're wondering why Congress is so poisonously polarized, walk into any representative's office: If they are Republican, they will likely have Fox News on in the background and a copy of the Washington Times on the coffee table; if they are a Democrat, their news choice is likely to be CNN and the Washington Post. It's no surprise that they interpret the same events in fundamentally different ways. The fish is rotting from the head down.

Ironically, the proliferation of information in the age of cable news and the Internet has instead led to a self-segregation on the part of viewers, who want to impose the order of news sources that affirm their own biases. A Pew Research Center poll from June of 2004 showed that Fox News ranks as the most trusted news source among Republicans, but among the least for Democrats. Because politics tends to follow the laws of physics, the proliferation of conservative talk radio has inspired an equal and opposite reaction with the attempted launch of liberal radio network Air America. Rush Limbaugh has provoked a left-wing response from a Jerry Springer radio show beginning national syndication next month. As the dialogue gets more partisan and more polarized, the moderate majority of Americans withdraw in discouragement and disgust.

The time-honored idea that trusted figures like Edward R. Murrow could serve as honest brokers amid partisan warfare logically suffers when journalists enthusiastically become part of the spin cycle. The cost of this is evidenced in the dramatically declining credibility of all print, cable and broadcast news. No one knows where to go for the unbiased truth. Even C-Span, which offers unedited coverage of public events without commentary, has experienced a decline in believability, suggesting that in this hyper partisan environment people are reluctant to trust what they see with their own eyes.

So what is a practical solution for ending this split-scream epidemic? First, the broad popularity of figures like John McCain suggest the thirst for people who are willing to criticize wrong-doing across party lines. It is only common sense that a Democratic criminal is no better or worse than a Republican criminal, but in this polarized time it is difficult to find people who are willing to break ranks with the party line. Second, it is up to executives and producers to recognize that there is a backlash brewing against the steady diet of partisan talking points we are fed daily. As the new chief executive officer of CNN, Jonathan Klein, said in a statement explaining the cancellation of "Crossfire," "I doubt that when the President sits down with his advisers they scream at him to bring him up to date on all of the issues...I don't know why we don't treat the audience with the same respect."

There is an untapped market for a real alternative to the split-scream phenomena, a desire for compelling figures who can punch both left and right as equal opportunity offenders - keeping a sense of humor while respecting the audience's intelligence.

Integrity has real appeal. Even Armstrong Williams understood this: In an televised interview with Tina Brown on CNBC this past October he said, "One of the things that I struggle with when I go on television like, let's say, a 'Crossfire,' [or] Wolf Blitzer, I'm expected to take a certain side. I'm expected to defend the president. Now there are some areas I don't want to defend the president in because I don't necessarily believe that, but you're put in that position. And I think sometimes you're in a predicament that the public is not really getting what you think is their best interests served, so I think sometimes we get caught up in these labels and these stereotypes...we do the public a disservice...It's something that we really should think about." Even as a sad coda from a conflicted man, it is still good advice.

After all the damaging disclosures of the past week, away from the din of an election year, news organizations have an opportunity to confront this underlying problem directly. Cooling the split-scream spin cycle would not only improve the battered reputation of the press, but also help heal the increasingly bitter political divisions in our nation.

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