Before the Shooting Begins

Last summer Pat Buchanan announced to the Republican National Convention that "there is a religious war going on for the soul of America." Others have called it a culture war -- a term that has been variously defined to encompass conflicts over such issues as freedom of expression versus community standards, the right to an abortion versus the rights of the fetus, and the rights of homosexuals, and, on the local level, skirmishes over school curricula.

On May 7, CJR hosted a conference titled "Covering the Culture War," to raise -- and, if possible, come up with answers to -- a number of questions. Among them: How serious is this war? Who's covering it? Who should be covering it? Can we cover it fairly -- and how?

A week later, Buchanan held a conference titled "Winning the Culture War," attended by more than 300 followers of his newly formed organization, The American Cause. Who covered it? Not The Washington Post. Not The New York Times. (Newsday did, and The Christian Science Monitor.)

The following articles, comments, and Resource Guide are adapted from presentations at the CJR conference, which was funded by the Nathan Cummings Foundation, with additional support from the Saul and Janice Poliak Center for the Study of First Amendment Issues.

We are inclined toward skepticism. When asked to reflect on the conflict over various cultural issues raging today -- funding for the arts, prayer at school commencements and football rallies, gender-specific language -- many journalists (and academics) are inclined to dismiss them as simply the "politics of distraction." The real issues, they say, are unemployment, national debt, trade policy, and so on. But are those cultural issues really just distractions? Though Republicans trivialized the matter last year during their convention by invoking the term as a new political slogan, there is in fact a culture war under way in American society -- a conflict far more consequential than most politicians and, I daresay, journalists and academics have supposed.

Our first clue as to its importance is that we find a deeper conflict underneath the various changing shibboleths of public discourse. Last year's tiff over Murphy Brown is just an artifact of a deeper dispute over the nature and structure of the American Family. The conflict over affirmative action is not just the politics of race but a contention over the standards of justice by which we will live. Even the quarrel over the accomplishments of Christopher Columbus -- great explorer or contemptible exploiter -- is a debate over the American legacy and whether that legacy should be a cause for celebration or a source of shame. And on it goes through a long list of contemporary controversies: abortion, gays in the military, AIDS policy, sexual harassment, euthanasia, the composition of the Supreme Court, debates about freedom of expression versus community standards, church-state issues, and so on. Cumulatively, these disputes amount to a fundamental struggle over the "first principles" of how we will ordeour life together. It is through these seemingly disparate issues that we struggle to define ourselves as Americans and the kind of communities we will build and sustain.

These headliner issues, then, are anything but mere distractions. At stake are competing non-negotiable claims about how public life ought to be ordered; these claims emerge out of our ultimate beliefs and commitments, our most cherished sense of what is right, true, and good, and they are directly linked to competing ideals of national identity. (Sound like Bosnia? Northern Ireland? Lebanon?) In this situation, tension, conflict, and, before it is all over, perhaps even violence are inevitable.

Violence? The suggestion that violence can occur is not made lightly: culture wars always precede shooting wars. It is culture, after all, that justifies the use of violence. Indeed, we remember that the last time this country "debated" the issues of human life, personhood, liberty, and the rights of citizenship all together, the result was the bloodiest war ever to take place on this continent -- the Civil War. We are truly in the midst of a culture war of great social and historical consequence.

The question I want to raise, and suggest journalists begin to grapple with, is whether American democracy can face up to conflict of this subtlety and significance and potential volatility. Can democratic practice today mediate our differences, or will one side, through the tactics of power politics, simply impose its vision on all others?

The question is not an idle one, because cultural conflict is inherently anti-democratic. It is anti-democratic first because the weapons of such warfare are reality definitions that presuppose from the outset the illegitimacy of the opposition and the opposition's claims. This is seen when claims are posited as fundamental rights that transcend democratic process. The right to have an abortion and the right to life, for example, are both put forward as fundamental rights that transcend democratic deliberation. Similarly opposing claims are made on behalf of gay rights, women's rights, the rights of the terminally ill, and so on.

I would contend that if the culture war is really a war over first principles of how we will order our lives together, then the only just and democratic way beyond the culture war is through it -- by facing up to the perplexing, messy, and seemingly endless task of working through what kind of people we are and what kind of communities we will live in. This means that we have to face up to our deepest differences through serious, substantive, and civil argument.

Here, of course, political theory leads us to the institutions of civil society -- schools, churches and synagogues, professional associations, and, not least, the press. Without these institutions the very idea of serious, substantive, and civil argument becomes a joke. These are the institutions that make democracy work, for they stand in between the individual and the state, mediating controversy and equipping the citizenry for "enlightened" engagement in public affairs -- at least in principle. Of the press, Thomas Jefferson himself argued that it was "the best instrument for enlightening the mind of man, and improving him as a rational, moral, and social being." Journalists are not being boastful to agree.

Has the press taken sides in the contemporary culture war? The answer invariably depends on who is doing the criticizing. A far greater problem, in my view, is superficiality -- the failure, or perhaps the inability, to explore the deeper issues and implications of the various controversies of the culture war. On abortion, for example, one must look very hard to find any discussion of what leads abortion providers to risk their lives to end unwanted pregnancies and anti-abortion protestors to risk jail sentences to protect life in the womb. Similarly, with regard to homosexuality, one would be hard pressed to find any discussion exploring the important distinctions between orientation, behavior, social movement, and public policy and the different ways ordinary Americans, politicians, and the military leadership think about each of these. So, too, the debates over the role of religion and religious institutions in public life and the implications of different (and legitimate) interpretations of the Firstmendment are, for all practical purposes, nonexistent. In other areas as well -- education, the arts, family values and policy, and so on -- the complexity of issues is largely ignored or, at best, given only cursory treatment.

There are al least five interrelated factors that contribute to this.

The first factor is a predisposition to dichotomize the subject. Newspapers, radio, and television have long been dramatic media. The narrative structure of most journalism depends in large part upon the interplay of antagonists and protagonists, heroes and villains, victims and victimizers, and so on. Conflict involving competing interest groups, highly visible litigation, and inflamed partisan rhetoric obviously plays to this predisposition. Yet is is partly in the failure to listen to voices that don't fit neatly in the grid of rhetorical extremes -- the voices of scholars, of people genuinely and thoughtfully ambivalent, and of people whose otherwise ordinary lives have been caught up in public dispute -- that public discourse becomes more polarized than we as a nation are.

A second factor is the tendency to reduce controversy to the struggle for power. Cultural disputes obviously develop a political dimension, but journalists tend to frame everything in terms of the question, Who has power and who doesn't? When the cultural, moral, and aesthetic dimensions of controversy are ignored or overlooked in favor of the legal or political, public sensibilities and expectations cannot help but be framed by the zero-sum logic of winners and losers. We come to imagine that what divides us can be addressed merely through administrative manipulation or technical innovation. This renders the possibility of serious, substantive argument even more difficult.

A third factor, related to the first two, is the commercial pressure to make news reporting competitive with prime-time entertainment. The point need not be belabored, but clearly ratings, market share, and advertising dollars create tremendous pressure to substitute style for substance in news reporting. As Eric Sevareid reflected a decade ago about the decline of CBS News, the trouble began when the news organizations began to turn a profit. ("People forget," he said, "that television news started out as a loss leader.") MTV's entree into political reporting only accelerates this trend. As MTV becomes "a full-service network," as officials plan, even the new and improved forms of infotainment that exist in the major networks today will increasingly look like dinosaurs. Print media, and newspapers in particular, are not exempt from these pressure either, as USA Today and the competition it represents illustrate.

A fourth factor is the news "beat" itself, a euphemism for journalistic specialization. The increasing specialization of tasks is commonplace in all work and professions in the modern world, but it has particular consequences in covering the culture war. The problem here is that most of the controversies associated with today's culture war typically involve several layers of meaning. The conflict over the funding priorities of the National Endowment for the Arts, for example, does not fit neatly into any particular beat. It isn't arts reporting or religion reporting or legal reporting or even political reporting, strictly speaking, but a curious amalgam of all of these. Getting to the heart of the issue requires multiple competencies. My intuition, is that most journalists, living with a deadline and not wanting to make mistakes, simply fall back on what they know. More often than not, this means a reporting of the dynamics of power politics in the situation.

A fifth factor is the culture of the newsroom. In sociology it is a commonplace that one's location is the social world fundamentally shapes one's world view. It is no different with the news media. The disproportionately white, middle- and upper-middle class, highly educated background of most journalists is fertile soil for a liberal world view, and this cannot help but influence their framing of issues. Let me be clear. I would affirm the sincerity of journalists in their trade -- their lack of conscious bias, their effort to be fair. I would also affirm the ability of journalists to transcend their class culture. The problem, as I see it, is not one of bias but one of "tone-deafness" born of class/culture predispositions. What this means is that a good many journalists are simply unfamiliar with the experiences and subleties of meaning that people outside of elite, urban culture impute to their lives. The recent observation of a Washington Post reporter that evangelical Christians are "largely po, uneducated, and easy to command" is just one illustration of this brand of ethnocentrism. The recent calamity in Waco, Texas, is a more disastrous illustration of the same thing. As Neal Stephenson, writing on the op-ed page of The New York Times, put it, "No three cultures could be more mutually incomprehensible than the trinity at Waco: Branch Davidians, G-men, and the media." Both examples illustrate the need for a broadening and deepening of our understanding.

Clearly, some organizations and some journalists have demonstrated admirable feats of fairness, as well as serious, thoughtful, and probing reporting. But the structural pressures toward superficiality are beyond doubt. Carl Bernstein has written that "the really significant trends in journalism have not been toward a commitment to the best and most complex obtainable version of the truth, [and] not toward building a new journalism based on serious, thoughtful reporting."

Bernstein is not alone in his view that journalism has rarely gone beyond the surface. Peter Steinfels of The New York times has made a similar case, adding, "If, in fact, the public debate is a lousy debate, is it sufficient for the media to cover that lousy debate fairly? If we thought of a question like nuclear waste and we found out that both sides of that issue were simply shouting at each other, repeating the same things, would we as reporters want to explore some of the aspects of the nuclear waste issue beyond those making their voice heard publicly? Are there critical aspects of [controversy] that we do not cover because they are not well represented in the public manifestations of the loud voices?" The point is well taken.

Neither people nor institutions are perfect. But the issues of the culture war are enormously sensitive, complex, and contentious, and precisely because of that, the institutions of civil society, not least the press, bear a particular burden to mediate the controversy carefully, even if not entirely fairly. Far too often they have not done so. Rather than penetrate the distortions, they perpetuate them, reinforcing the dominant ideologies and factions. In this sense, rather than protecting individuals from special interests, as Jefferson hoped, the media often becomes de facto special interest groups themselves.

The idea that civil society --and the press in particular --could inform the citizenry far better than it does presently sounds idealistic and academic until we consider the options. One option is "shallow democracy," in which public discourse is little more than a veneer for power politics. The other options is "substantive democracy." Here the search is not for the middle ground of compromise, but for the common ground in which rational and moral suasion regarding the basic values and issues of society are our first and last means to engage each other. Without a journalistic establishment capable of going beneath the superficiality that too frequently characterizes public discourse concerning the culture war, there is little chance of substantive democracy being renewed. In this situation, journalism will be part of the problem rather than part of the solution, and resolution, of the conflicts that divide us.

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