I don’t think the media should tell be people what to think, exactly, but would it be so hard for them to kind of intimate what people ought not to think? To take an obvious example, the cable news programs are discussing Michelle Obama’s speech. That’s appropriate. She gave a speech; it should be discussed. But what they really want to know without coming right out and saying it, is whether her speech is going to be effective in calming the nerves of white racists that ‘don’t really know who she is’ and are maybe a little concerned about a ‘couple of things she has said in the past’.
And, to be fair, maybe the people the pundits have in mind are not what we’d call classic racists. Maybe they just need to overcome a feeling of alienation or a jarring sense of newness. Whatever you want to call it. The soft bigotry of entrenched expectations?
My point here is that I think racism and lazy bigotry are nearly universally seen as illegitimate and unworthy points of view (even by the majority of people that hold those views and feelings). We’ve reached that point in our ethical evolution where I think it is permissible for media pundits to come right out and say that anyone who isn’t going to consider voting for Obama because of his race or his wife’s race or the fact that Obama comes from Hawaii and lived for a time in Indonesia, is a stupid, close-minded person.
I don’t think that media pundits should lecture people but it is unseemly to sit up there in front of the cameras and debate whether or not people are too racist to vote for Obama and whether this or that speech or video may have converted enough racists to make the election winnable. It’s doubly unseemly when those pundits tiptoe around the subject rather than tackling it directly. Obama has been consistently up in the polls all year. If the election had been held on any day this summer it is likely that Obama would have won. That, in itself, should defuse this notion that Obama needs to do something dramatic to win over racist voters. But, it’s true that Obama could still lose this election and that there are millions of people he still has not won over.
So, the subject of racism and prejudice is a legitimate topic for discussion. But it should be tackled directly and there is nothing wrong with saying, pretty consistently, that insofar as racism and prejudice are playing a role, it is unfortunate and illegitimate. What the media is doing now is making it seem like the ‘I won’t vote for the black guy’ vote is legitimate and persuadable, and that it is Obama’s responsibility to persuade them. That’s not objectivity…it’s moral degeneracy.
