What ‘Gatesgate’ says about the mainstream media

[Updated Below]

This is the first, and hopefully only, post I’ll contribute to the continuing debate surrounding the controversial arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. The entire episode jumped into the national consciousness last week after Lynn Sweet, a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, asked President Obama to weigh in on the matter during a prime-time press conference that followed his remarks about his health care plan.

Set to one side whether or not it was relevant to ask this kind of question at an event designed to focus the national debate on an important topic (Sweet says the press corps was not told they had to ask questions only about health care reform) because I think that’s neither here nor there. I do think, however, that there are a few points that can be made about the mainstream press and their handling of this situation, though.

We Still Can’t Talk About Race Like Adults

Writing in yesterday’s New York Times, Glenn Loury, a professor of economics and social sciences at Brown, says that “Gatesgate” – does every scandal need to be tabbed a  “-gate” anyway? – goes a long way toward proving true Attorney General Eric Holder’s assertion, made earlier this year, that America remains a “nation of cowards” when it comes to talking about the explosive topic of race. It would be hard to disagree with that after wading through the initial reactions to the story.

There seems to have been some sort of general consensus among the press, and perhaps a considerable swath of the country, that Barack Obama wouldn’t comment so directly on issues of race because he was, in fact, “post-racial.” (Whatever that nebulous phrase was supposed to mean, it surely should be retired in light of recent events.) This is, and of course always was, nonsense. While it’s certainly true that the president is not a  grievance “race man” in the mold of say, a Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, he’s obviously dealt with the topic in a way that many other politicians and public figures could or would not. That Obama’s “race speech” was delivered as a politically expedient act during the heat of a presidential campaign shouldn’t diminish its significance, which primarily sprang from the frank and direct manner the then candidate spoke about the topic.

So it was strange to see reports like this one, opening with the following lede:

Americans got a rare glimpse Wednesday night of the perspective that a black president can bring to a racially charged situation.

I’m not sure what that’s even supposed to mean. Did Americans forget that Obama is black? Did they assume that wasn’t part of his identity or that it might not affect his outlook on life? Is Obama only allowed to give “tough love” to African-Americans, but when talking to the rest of the country, he must choose to measure his words?

If we want to have a “national conversation on race” (or perhaps we’re already having it), we have to acknowledge that we have a black president and recognize what that means. We need to acknowledge, and it is indeed a fact as President Obama said it was, that communities of color have legitimate reasons to be wary of law enforcement. Also we need to acknowledge that police often have to make snap decisions under duress. They will sometimes make honest mistakes, and we should resist the temptation to ascribe motivations until a full accounting of events can be presented, especially in cases like this where the stories from the parties involved differ so much on the narrative.

But we also can’t fail to acknowledge that a citizen, acting within his constitutional rights inside his own home, shouldn’t be arrested for screaming at a cop, lest it end with his being pumped full of lead.

The Press Will Elevate the Trivial Over the Substantive

Let me say that I consider racism and racial profiling to be more than trivial issues, but the Gates case is an outlier, and consumers should recognize that many more egregious examples of police misconduct happen every day and pass without much comment.

But what’s interesting is how the entire other 57 minutes of the press conference have gone down the memory hole, even though the topic, health care, is the leading issue on the president’s domestic agenda and it’s currently the major concern of the American public. The talking heads, however, deemed the president’s performance a failure because he seemed to understand the issue too well. An illustrative headline from MSNBC’s First Read blog:

“Honest question: Is there a point when the president knows too much about an issue?

The elite media has shown itself to be averse to digging in on big, complicated policy stories and has instead elevated style over substance. Process stories don’t snag eyeballs, and they can confuse the masses:

“The problem with health care is that it’s so big and so complicated that the public is never really going to understand all the moving parts of this,” NPR health policy correspondent Julie Rovner said on air Wednesday.

“So the public is really always going to be sort of amenable, if you will, to demagoguery and arguments one way or the other that don’t necessarily link to what the substance is,” Rovner continued. “We saw this during the Clinton efforts.”

While this is all no doubt true, it doesn’t excuse the fact that people need to be able to understand what it is they are being sold so that they can make informed choices and that a profit motive isn’t a reason to abdicate journalistic responsibility. One of the jobs of reporters is to break the complex down into something that’s readily understandable. That doesn’t mean it needs to be simple-minded, but it does need to define, in clear and concise terms, the contours of the debate, the players and the consequences.

The mainstream press is held in low regard by the general public and the reasons laid out above help to explain why. Until journalists can figure out how to engage readers seriously about the issues that matter to them and avoid chasing the low-hanging fruit that’s easy to report, the press will continue its long, slow slide into irrelevance.

[Update]

I want to make clear something that might not have come through in the initial post, and that is I have a healthy respect for the daily challenges that police officers face and that they are due a certain amount of respect and cooperation…but only to a point. As Radley Balko pointed out:

Police officers deserve the same courtesy we afford anyone else we encounter in public life—basic respect and civility. If they’re investigating a crime, they deserve cooperation as required by law, and beyond that only to the extent to which the person with whom they’re speaking is comfortable. Verbally disrespecting a cop may well be rude, but in a free society we can’t allow it to become a crime, any more than we can criminalize criticism of the president, a senator, or the city council. There’s no excuse for the harassment or arrest of those who merely inquire about their rights, who ask for an explanation of what laws they’re breaking, or who photograph or otherwise document police officers on the job.

Another point is that, in the end, this ended up being less about race and more about pride. Gates, enraged that he was being arrested in his own home, refused to calm down and the police officer, bristling at the suggestion that he was racist, declined to walk away. If one of those two things happens, we probably aren’t talking about this at all.