MoveOn.org and Robert Greenwald's BraveNewFilms.org have recently and fairly frequently solicited me to support the films and ads they're distributing criticizing the war, Bush, McCain, Fox News, the non-existent oil policy of this administration, etc. These are subjects that cry out for this media attention and critical analysis. Clearly the Democratic Party must use videos like these in its political ads. Unfortunately, it pains me to conclude, based on some of my observations and some sloppy and private small scale opinion research, these videos are largely seen only by the choir. Is that enough? I don't think so.
These products must be seen by the nay-saying chorus and the undecided, acapella back-up singers. Ordinarily I only see these films on the Net, almost never on broadcast TV and only occasionally at cable venues like Olbermann's Count Down and sometime on C-SPAN (thank you Lord for bringing us C-SPAN). Major media outlets have complex sets of considerations for accepting ads and are very costly. So how valuable are these films and related products in changing hearts and minds? I certainly have no idea if my hats and bumper stickers and posters do anything more than amuse and annoy.
Recently I wrote to people at MoveOn.org and BraveNewFilms.org and asked them whether they have applied any metrics to gauge the viewerships of their videos and whether or not there is any attempt at measuring attitude changes toward issues or voting preferences by, for example, audience testing or other opinion measure formats and procedures. I asked this in anticipation of sending them (more) money and I told them so. I have never gotten a response. That troubles me. Good intentions are great. Good outcomes are better.
Fact is, there are more documentaries, books, videos made exposing or opposing Bush and/or the war and/or U.S. policies than have ever been produced at any time in our wartime history. Yet we have no evidence that any of it is working to change attitudes or votes. Do they reassure the people already into their messages? I'm sure they do. These products frequently give the choir facts and figures and authorities to quote or to back up their feelings and beliefs in the event they get into debates with the other side(s). Works for me. Reassures me. Give me good words to convey strong feelings. Is that enough? I don't think so. Perhaps they even increase the likelihood for those who are pro-Democrats or pro-Obama to vote. This is obviously good.
But what of the ones who support the Bush/McCain/war policy? Do they believe the facts and messages and analyses in these magazine articles, books, videos and documentary films? From the emails I get, not very likely. There are always converts who swing widely from right to left or left to right, but they usually have personal experiences, epiphanies; people like John Dean or Arianna Huffington, and Dennis Miller are celebrated examples. But the messages to the rest are apparently deaf-eared or blind-sighted. Counter-arguments to their staunch beliefs are ignored or quickly dismissed by the Bush talking pointers and ditto heads and Main Street supporters by denigrating the messenger, in the fashion that was recently used to neutralize the book and talk show circuit barnstorm trekked by Scott McClellen, former White House press Secretary.
Do these Bush supporters even see the assaults on the administration's "facts" and tactics and justifications and defenses of them? And if they see they, how do they process them? Facts never speak for themselves.
There has been a change in this country. The majority think we're on the wrong track and that Bush's policies are not working. But to what degree has the tsunami of media product critical of the Bush administration been responsible? From what I can discern, it's only the results on the ground in the U.S., not on the fields of the Middle East (viz., higher gas prices, inflation, contracting economy, global warming, military deaths, Katrina, etc.) that are leveraging the attitude changes in the population.
I'm a believer in media impact but I'm not a True Believer. If I give money to support the production and distribution of these political long and short films, I'd like to have some sense that they're working; helping to change hearts and minds. I'm just not sure that these media can penetrate the minds of those who need to believe that the Government knows best. At least not in the way they are going about it. Heady, intellectual, clever, scathing, but not touching.
If McCain loses (or Obama wins), it will be the multi-factorial pain felt at home that probably will have had the greatest impact on crystallized or changed votes, not how we've lost respect in the eyes of the world and, importantly, of our allies. It will be the loss of treasure and its effects on the home front and the open-ended commitment to continuing that loss until some indeterminate future time, across some barely visible horizon. It won't be morality. It won't be criticism of our torture policy. It won't be our body count. And it won't be a sense of shame that we have allowed so much that is bad to be committed in our nation's name. Our name. Our America's name. It will be nothing so lofty. It will be pragmatics.
We are a pragmatic people. We like to think of ourselves as citizens of that shining city on the hill. Sometimes we are, but not recently and frequently not in our post-legendary past. Lord help us if we had really won the war in Iraq quickly, as naively predicted. All the lies that preceded it, that legitimated the call to war, would have been swept under the rug of secrecy that covers the oval office. We would be awash in Colbert's truthies.
But we didn't win it (whatever "win" would look like) and the books and articles and tell-alls and confessions, and documentaries and theatrical motions pictures and cartoons and caricatures marched across the media bourses and have become cottage industries.
The media have truly covered the turf of this war and this administration's politics of politics, its war on words, its need to win at all costs (and losing in the process). Interestingly, much of this came into the public eye right before the 2004 election. Yet, Bush won again. Fairly or unfairly, I don't know. But even if it was barely a tolerably honest election, Bush won because most Americans didn't want to believe that what our President was doing in our name was morally questionable or strategically misguided. Or, if they did believe that, it wasn't enough to get them into the voting booths or take responsibility, as true patriots, for shepherding this nation back on course.
Maybe they felt it was too late, too hard, required too much effort or they were too busy with their lives and problems. And all the media-distributed information that they had available to inform themselves and make informed electoral decision seemed to float away in feeling-winds of delusion, resignation, fatalism or impotence.
This will be the most chronicled misadventurous, ongoing war in American history. Will Americans sit and watch a movie about that, take it seriously, and come to realize that true patriotism is not "my country right or wrong" but, as Sen. Carl Schurz articulated it in 1872, "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right"? That's patriotism. Patriotism is not chauvinism, not jingoism, not the empty rhetoric of flag lapel pins. Will Americans sit and watch such films? That's my Frank Capra Meet John Doe while Mr. Deeds Goes to Washington hope.
Maybe we need another Frank Capra. These are troubled times. Capra times. Maybe they are the times that make us, move us, lead us to calls to greatness and pull from our collective national unconscious the archetypal fervor that swelled in past times when we considered what we thought it was to be an American and felt good about it. For me it was during the Kennedy years; and for a while during the Clinton years.
