Looking for Morality

Politicians use the concept only when it is beneficial to them.

by Ron Harris

erman wasn’t having any of it.

“It’s a conspiracy, man,” he shouted into the telephone. “It’s a damn media conspiracy. You just don’t want to admit it because you’re in the damned media too.”

“Trust me, Kerman, it’s not a conspiracy,” I answered, trying to stay calm. “The media just aren’t that organized. Hell, most journalists are lucky if they can conspire with themselves to meet their deadline and get all of the words spelled right.”

We didn’t sound too friendly, but Kerman and I have been friends for some 16 years. We met when I was a reporter for The Los Angeles Times and he was an aide to then-State Rep. Maxine Waters. She went on to become a congresswoman and Kerman went on to become a lot of stuff: college instructor, political campaign advisor, TV commentator, and entrepreneur.

Kerman and I have this debate periodically, the media conspiracy theory. Other folks hit me with it too, from time to time. I could never quite fathom how intelligent folks could believe that these huge competing news organizations would conspire together to bring down politicians or hide the truth about space invaders, the latest medical cure, or an impending environmental disaster. At least not until now.

My 23 years of experience in journalism tell me that there is no media conspiracy to get Bill Clinton, and I know that there isn’t. But it certainly feels like one.

Intellectually, I know what’s happening. “Kerman,” I said, “try to look at it this way. What you are seeing is more like a bunch of sharks attacking a sick whale. The big feeders, the top four newspapers and all those political TV talk shows, have taken big chunks out of the carcass so that now there is real blood in the water and everybody’s wading in for a bite. The feeding frenzy has started, and you’ve watched enough nature shows to know what that’s like.

“See what I’m saying. It’s not a conspiracy, but to an outside observer, it certainly looks like one. But it’s not, trust me.”

“Right,” Kerman replied, and hung up the phone in a huff. The answer may have been right, but Kerman didn’t like it. I didn’t like it either.

As I have watched this story unfold, I have come to feel dirty, unclean. Oh no, it’s not the sexual details or the stain on Monica Lewinsky’s dress. It’s the media’s role in the process. I have felt tarnished as a journalist.

For months now, reporters have been pushing, prodding, and shoving to tell us that a man committed adultery and then lied about it.

“Now, gee, that’s a novel concept. What news!!!!! I’m sure that doesn’t happen often.”

When the American people said they weren’t interested in the story, that they had more pressing concerns, we continued down the same trivial path, leaning hard on the venerable phrase, “the public’s right to know.”

What about the public’s right to know about health care, child care, welfare-to-work, education, affordable housing, violence against and by our children? The problem is not that Clinton’s affair is on the front page, but that everything else keeps getting kicked off.

On August 30th, The Commercial Appeal featured in its Sunday Appeal section stories about the rise in the use of a drug called Ritalin to control children with attention deficit disorder in the nation’s schools. It was a disturbing story with one particularly disturbing number. In 1990, there were 900,000 children diagnosed with ADD. By 1997, the number had skyrocketed to 5 million. Why didn’t that story make page one and why aren’t we talking about it right now?

Our children are massacring each other and being daily drugged at an alarming rate, and our national debate turns on whether the president should have told us about his extramarital affair. Please.

The politicians wade in with their lofty sound bites. These are the same politicians who couldn’t give us a tobacco bill even though the number of teenagers who smoke has risen from 27 percent to 41 percent in seven years.

Mississippi Senator Trent Lott started talking about the “moral compass” long before Kenneth Starr released his report. Where was his moral compass when big tobacco came calling? Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney claims, “We’re all poorer because of the mistake of a man who has squandered a historic opportunity, disgracing himself in the eyes of the world and his family.” Tell that to the 2,600 children who are literally born into poverty daily.

“The moral dimension of this is more important than any legislation that we can exact,” says Nebraska Senator Bob Kerry.

I don’t think the “moral dimension” was more important to the parents of the 15-year-old gunned down outside of a Memphis school a few weeks ago, or to the 10,800 children nationally who will drop out before the day’s over, or the 8,650 children who will be reported abused or neglected, or the 5,760 who will be arrested, or the 4,404 black students who will be suspended from school, or the 3,000 who will start smoking, the 12 who will be murdered, or the lone black child under 15 who will die from HIV infection.

Where is the morality in the fact that every 18 minutes an infant dies in America?

“Morality,” explains Arkansas Senator Dale Bumpers, (D-Ark.), “is often like beauty. It’s in the eye of the beholder. Allowing children to go without health care is immoral, too.”

At least it should be.