A good illustration of the collusion between axe-grinding
victims and the cynical media that exploit them appeared after one
of last year’s presidential debates: a placard was crassly put up
in “spin alley” to direct reporters to “9-11 widows” who were eager
to provide them with quotes disparaging George Bush for not making
the right noises during the debate.
Cindy Sheehan and the media’s manipulative use of her brings
this episode back to mind. We’re witnessing a replay of the media’s
cynical catering to the 9-11 widows, dubbed the “Jersey Girls,”
which began with great interest but then trailed off in proportion
to the media’s embarrassment about their wildly imprecise and
boring charges. The media, thrilled to have something to work with
during the dog days of August, will soon lose interest in Sheehan
too.
Owing in large part to the microscopic powers of the Internet
and talk radio, the mainstream media now realize that they can only
get away with using axe-grinding victims to advance their agenda
for so long. As news of the victims’ dangerously ill-conceived
views becomes well-known through the alternative media, mainstream
reporters, if only out of self-consciousness, stop using these
victims as proxies for their biases.
The media know that grief doesn’t confer upon a person instant
lucidity and authority, though they act as if it does, provided the
grief inspires a political position they favor. Had Sarah Brady,
say, responded to her husband’s gun injury by joining the staff of
the NRA, the media wouldn’t have paid the slightest bit of
attention to her except maybe for purposes of mockery. Obviously
the media aren’t interested in assuaging Sheehan’s grief — were a
bigger story to break they would desert her in a second, as they
even did to their persecuted colleague Judith Miller after Bush
announced John Roberts as his Supreme Court nominee.
What the media are interested in is Sheehan’s politics, and the
window of that interest will close for good once the public learns
of her ambitiously radical views — that Bush should be impeached
as a war criminal, that America is an abomination not worth
defending against terrorists, and so forth. In the end, the media
will probably have added to her grief once they take away from her
the new life of celebrity activism they have encouraged her to
pursue in the absence of the life of her son.
Sheehan doesn’t speak for war widows and grieving moms any more
than the Jersey Girls spoke for all relatives of 9-11 victims. And
like them, Sheehan hasn’t crafted her case very carefully or
modestly. Just as the Jersey Girls acted as though their grief
somehow made them experts on rearranging the CIA and entitled them
to harangue Condi Rice, so Sheehan is making outrageous demands
upon the military’s commander in chief — demands only possible in
a democracy in which a fatuous media can get its leaders, who are
supposed to be thinking about the common good, entangled in all
sorts of absurd and superficial controversies.
What the Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz said
about the 9/11 windows is worth recalling in light of the Sheehan
spectacle. One of them, Kristen Breitwester, had submitted an op-ed
to the Wall Street Journal. Rabinowitz advised against
running it, saying that it was “total and complete nonsense — not
to mention repetitive nonsense — nonsense from people given
endless media access to repeat the very same stupid charges,
suspicions, and the rest….this is just an opportunity for these
absurd products of the zeitgeist — women clearly in the grip of
the delusion that they know something, have some policy, and wisdom
not given to the rest of us to know — to grab the spotlight.”
Ultimately, the media tuned them out, especially, as liberals
complained, after they endorsed John Kerry and their overt liberal
partisanship made it impossible for the media to treat them as
sainted experts.
Sheehan is one of these absurd products of the zeitgeist that
Rabinowitz describes — a zeitgeist that gravitates to grief for
commercial and ideological, not human, reasons. Sheehan, too, may
find herself, as Breitwester did, standing forlornly beneath a
placard announcing her grief and loss, hoping that some reporter
will stop and give her the jolt of celebrity that substitutes in a
twisted culture for the comfort of real compassion.
