(HOST) Even as the lame duck session of Congress is underway, the results of the mid-term elections are still being dissected and analyzed. Today commentator and veteran ABC News diplomatic correspondent Barrie Dunsmore examines the role of the "new" news media.
(DUNSMORE) President Harry Truman said that one of the most important powers of the presidency is the power to persuade. The man he replaced, President Franklin Roosevelt, was of course one of the great persuaders. His fireside chats on radio were powerful instruments in the selling and implementation of his New Deal policies.
Subsequent presidents up through Ronald Reagan could pretty much tell the major television networks that they had something they’d like to say in prime time – and then could count on getting the attention of the vast majority of the American people.
However, in the new 21st century media environment – with hundreds of cable and satellite program options and multiple 24/7 all news channels; with the Internet and its social networks; its search engines like Google and Yahoo; and its literally millions of web sites – the presidential persuading business has gotten a lot, lot tougher.
In the aftermath of the drubbing President Obama’s Democratics took in the mid-term elections, I have been bemused by the self-proclaimed pundits who are absolutely certain that Obama’s problem was his failure to communicate. Their premise is: if only he had said this or that, voters would have been kinder to him. My guess is that Obama probably did say this or that. In the month of October alone Obama made 57 speeches. He has made many more during his short presidency – which other critics say is his problem – that he’s over-exposed. What is true is that it’s far more difficult than ever before, for a president to break through the cacophony of all those often angry voices competing for public attention.
One result of all this noise is that millions of voters are developing firmly held views, often based on dubious sources. The recent story that Obama’s Asian trip was going to cost $200 million a day – a totally discredited Internet fabrication, amplified by the right-wing echo-chamber of Limbaugh and FOX News – is a classic case in point. The Internet, it is argued, is a great liberator, as it allows people to discover the truth for themselves rather than rely on politicians or the old news media. Nothing wrong with that. But broadcast ratings and web site hits clearly show that consumers of the new media are much more attracted to opinions than facts. And in this fact-free zone, millions of Americans are evidently turning only to those the Internet sites or cable channels with biases and prejudices they share – and where, increasingly, ignorance is a virtue and compromise is a vice.
The harsh reality for Obama, as it will be for all subsequent presidents unless they repeal the First Amendment, is that the vast, fragmented new media have essentially destroyed the old media’s former role as a credible institution that people once turned to in time of crisis. Another reality is the irony that while average Americans do have greater access to more information than ever before – they may actually be less informed than their grandparents were.