PART 1 OF 2
14. THE LOST GENERATION
In the long-ago American past, politics was itself a principal form of entertainment, and people would travel many miles to hear the oratory and share in the spectacle of popular rallies. In the modern culture of mass-media communications, politics has been overwhelmed by entertainment. The many new channels of communication created by broadcasting and other technologies ought to have enriched democracy. In practice, the rise of mass media as the dominant venue for political dialogue completed the alienation of citizens from politics.
People are now lost in a bewildering display of sound and light, from the random anger of talk radio to the manipulative images of television commercials, from the celebrity culture fostered by mass media to the emotional directness of instant TV news. It is not that people are isolated from public affairs and utterly ignorant, as earlier generations of Americans were. Their problem is that they are inundated with messages -- a raging river of information that is fake or true or alluring distraction. As a result, people are reduced to the role of sullen spectators, listening and watching without necessarily believing what they are told.
The paradox of modern media, as almost everyone senses, envelops contemporary politics and is central to the democratic problem. Television and other new technologies connect with people powerfully through vivid immediacy. Yet, because they are centrally controlled, one-way channels of communication, they are also distancing. The media can be liberating for ordinary people, carrying them into distant realms. Yet they also destroy the old social connections that once held people together in community. Broadcasting is inescapably populist in its quick accessibility yet also elitist in its organizational structure. The sound and light are exciting but, strangely enough, foster a benumbed passivity in the general audience.
The mass-media culture has created one other paradox for democracy that is seldom noted: It divided Americans into two distinct nations, two tribes of citizens who see the world quite differently. They are the young and the old. There are the people under forty-five years old who grew up entirely in the age of television and were largely educated according to its definitions of reality. Then there are the rest of us, the older citizens whose perceptions of politics and everything else were shaped in childhood by more abstract sources of information, books and newspapers and magazines.
This dividing lined defines another central dislocation in American democracy. The conventional view, usually expressed by the elders, describes television as a mindlessly destructive force. The contrary view, which I share, is that the new technologies of communication have truth-telling capacities that, in time, can help restore democratic sensibilities to the political culture.
Has the mass-media culture destroyed any possibility for genuine democracy? Or is it perhaps a key to salvaging democracy's future? How one answers that question may determine whether one believes that democracy has a future at all.
***
The formless anger and disconnectedness of mass media are played out every afternoon in the darkened studio of KFI 640 radio in Los Angeles. Tom Leykis stands under a single overhead spotlight, rocking on his heels, pacing back and forth before the console, while he fumes at the city and stokes the anger of its citizens.
"We're talking about the Department of Water and Power's ridiculous attempts to get us to conserve water. While private industry is wasting water all over Southern California! While Mayor Bradley wants to send the secret water police around to see if we're washing the dog! What's going on? It's ridiculous!"
Under the spotlight, Leykis looked like a solitary vaudevillian, performing forlornly before an imaginary audience. Young and plump, with billowy long hair floating on his shoulders, he was wearing dark glasses and a black satin Kings jacket. His dramatic pauses and well- punctuated exclamations are familiar to legions of Los Angeles commuters. Leykis is KFI radio's drive-time voice of populist outrage.
"Am I supposed to let my yard go brown while Dodger Stadium has a green outfield? What about Caltrans watering the freeways? Even when it's raining! It's a perfect example of how the little guy gets crushed while special interests and big business get more and more and more. The little guy gets to conserve and the big guys get whatever the hell they want."
Larry from La Mirada was on the line, objecting. Water conservation is important, Larry said, and people should cooperate. Leykis listened for a moment, then blew him off with a tart put-down.
David from Rialto jumped in: "It's just like the war on drugs, like the malathion they're spraying on us for the medfly. It's putting more and more regulations on the little guy and getting us used to more and more control over our lives."
Craig, a first-time caller from Ventura, came on to argue for civic responsibility. "Why don't you go down to your City Hall and demand that they pass laws that make big business conserve water too?" Craig asked. Leykis pounced.
"Are you registered to vote, Craig? Are you?" Craig said he wasn't. "How did I guess?" Leykis sneered. "You don't give a crap. You don't even vote."
"I'm an artist," Craig said meekly. ''I'm not up on all the issues."
"Mister artiste," Leykis crooned. "Isn't that wonderful. You hypocrite! Thank you, Craig, for making my point."
Then there were Kevin from Corona and Richard from Ontario and Jim from Valencia and Chris on a car phone from Vista. All of them picked up the beat of Tom Leykis's accusation and amplified the outrage with personal anecdotes-industries they had observed wasting water flagrantly, while citizens like Richard got a ticket for washing his car.
"I tell you what I told the municipal guy who gave me the ticket," Richard said. "You can take that ticket and stick it where the sun doesn't shine-unless you're willing to shut down those car-wash businesses too."
"Good for you, good for you," Leykis said. "What I'd like to see is more people flipping these guys the bird."
When the broadcast concluded, Leykis was still bouncing around with nervous energy, his adrenaline pumped up by two hours of needling, exhorting and instructing the faceless voices who are his daily listeners. His mood level dropped precipitously, however, as he talked about these citizens.
"It's real easy for somebody to call in and whine," Leykis explained. "But do they ever get off their ass and do something? They love the idea of punching on the touch tone and calling in and getting back at everybody. They get this vicarious thrill. But that's it. The people who call talk shows actually think they're doing something, but it's not the same as voting or going out and passing petitions. Then when things go bad and the air is brown, people call in and say, 'This is awful. How did this happen?' Then they say: 'Tom, you ought to do a campaign.' Great. Call Tom. It's like calling Domino's Pizza."
Talk radio, it was supposed a few years ago, was becoming a new channel for democratic dialogue -- a place where unorganized citizens could come together and speak directly to power. In the media age it might even be a device for assembling citizens in collective action. When dozens of talk radio hosts across the nation joined Ralph Nader in attacking the congressional pay raises in 1989, the resonating chorus of public anger traumatized Washington, at least briefly. In the end, Congress got its pay raise anyway.
As Leykis pointed out, several of the radio personalities who led that pay-raise crusade were subsequently fired, not for offending politicians, but because their ratings were down. "Some of the talk radio hosts are passionately political," he said, "and a lot of them are naive and believe that, just by going on the radio, they can make people care about an issue. Baloney. And some are just blatant opportunists looking for their next big gig."
The electronic media -- radio and television and, in the emerging future, personal computer networks -- produce such contradictions. By their nature, these media empower ordinary citizens -- providing access and information that did not previously exist for them, connecting them with distant events and authorities. But it is not clear, as yet, whether the new culture created by modern communications will someday lead to a revitalized democracy or simply debase the imperfect politics that already existed.
Tom Leykis engages the paradox every afternoon, from a liberal-libertarian perspective. In the mornings, KFI broadcasts the nation's most popular talk-radio host, Rush Limbaugh, who is a voice of populist outrage coming from the right. Despite their differences, Leykis and Limbaugh are essentially delivering the same message -- flipping the bird at power -- and they are speaking to the same audience, the vast sea of disaffected and impotent citizens.
"The one thing talk radio does that is positive," Leykis said, "is that it finds the rage bubbling underneath the surface and allows people to see that they're not the only ones who feel that way."
Leykis is more idealistic than his corrosive opinions suggest and, on occasion, he has tried to mobilize his listeners in collective political action. When the California Department of Agriculture conducted aerial pesticide spraying of suburban L.A. neighborhoods to eradicate the medfly, Leykis rallied the protest movement. One evening, he broadcast from a parking lot in Irwindale, a community that was regularly sprayed with malathion. "We told people to bring surgical masks, we handed out umbrellas, we warned the department we were going to be there," he said. "But eight hundred listeners showed up in this parking lot, even though there was a risk they'd get sprayed. And they were. We were sprayed -- live -- on the air."
The pesticide spraying was halted eventually, but Leykis did not claim victory. "It was public relations," he said. "They disarmed the entire protest movement with the announcement they were going to stop -- then they went on spraying until they were finished with the job."
Tom Leykis holds a darkly pessimistic opinion of the electronic media's influence on democracy -- the view that is widely shared in conventional politics. Broadcasting will not reinvigorate politics, he said, because it has fostered the very culture of shallowness and passive privacy that subverts political action.
"That pay raise issue was easy -- a guy listens to the radio and hears that congressmen want a $35,000 raise," he said. ''The savings and loan campaign on talk radio was a dismal failure,. too complicated for the average person. We have a society that now, because of pop culture, the MTV-Sesame Street culture, has a short attention span. If you can't say it in twenty-five words or less, people don't want to be bothered. So everyone stays home, playing Nintendo.
"That's the essence of this country -- convenience. As long as you've got the color TV and the VCR and the video games, why vote? It will take a crisis -- a war, a great depression -- to get people to vote. That's the only time we can get political movement in this country. The air is brown two or three days a week and apparently that's not a crisis. If there was a political movement that went into people's living rooms and dragged off their color TVs, then you'd see them voting."
***
Virtually all children in America, regardless of their family station, learn the same dispiriting lesson from television, and at a very early age. They discover that the television set sometimes lies to them. Typically, they learn this from the toy commercials. On screen, the robot performs miraculous feats or the little radio-controlled race car zooms around the track like the real thing or the doll baby coos and cries with lifelike charm. Every American child remembers the shock of recognition when the toy comes home from the store. It is just a toy, a piece of sculpted plastic and metal. Even if it works, the object delivers none of the magic qualities promised on television.
Every parent, likewise, remembers the awkward moment of having to deal with a child's disappointment. What does this experience teach small children about life? Does it make them wary of appearances and more astute? Or simply cynical and inured to deceitful manipulation? Parents feel helpless, sensing that they have lost control of their own children's education to this powerful teacher called television.
The medium makes children grow up faster, for discoveries and disillusionments that one used to first encounter in the adolescent years are now visited upon four-year-olds. When I asked my own daughter, who is now an adult, how she analyzed television's impact on her generation's political behavior, her first insight was about the toy commercials.
Everyone has some personal sense of the paradoxes of television but no one, including the experts, has a definite understanding of what the medium has done for the society and done to it. Parents and children, voters and politicians, church and state and business enterprise -- everyone is still learning to live with it.
Some critics argue that the seductive culture spawned by television and related communications technologies has already obliterated, beyond repair, the very premises of democratic promise. Its directness disintegrated the old lines of loyalty and accountability and control in politics, from party organizations to representative newspapers. Its alluring images enabled politicians to manipulate the public with deceptive persuasion, an art form that each election season becomes more effective, more elusive. Its attractive surfaces destroyed the deeper content of political discourse.
This pessimistic view is widely shared, especially among older people, and supported by abundant evidence from everyday reality. Citizens, especially younger citizens, do seem dumber about politics. The people and political institutions trying to build strands of common interests among citizens are undercut by the competing glow of the tube. To critics, television seems like a primitive beast stumbling through the village and aimlessly wrecking political relations, education, values. [1]
On the other side, optimists are able to see the modern communications revolution as a great democratic leveler. They acknowledge that people and societies are still adjusting to its disorienting qualities, but the potential for democratic empowerment is enormous. Jacques Cousteau, the French marine biologist who, thanks to television, is known and loved by school children around the world, described the revolutionary implications of the medium:
"When people were illiterate, they had to elect the lawyer or the doctor or whoever had access to information and knowledge to represent them in government. But today the peasant has more information than the politicians, who lose their time in sterile partisan fighting. This kind of democracy is out of date." [2]
Cousteau, somewhat airily, imagines a politics without politicians. Citizens of the world, including peasants and school children, inform themselves and develop the consensus for public action, in spite of governments, in spite of vested political interests. This sense of media's power does not seem far-fetched when one considers the popular upheavals that destroyed the dictatorial regimes in eastern Europe. Radio and television from the western democracies seeped through the closed borders and delivered their subversive messages; the revolutionary music in Czechoslovakia, East Germany and elsewhere was American rock 'n roll. Coming back the other way leading politicians in western Europe grumbled that on French and British television Gorbachev got more air time than they did. In a free society, they are powerless to prevent it.
As readers might guess, I place myself among the optimists in this argument. My own impression, as a reporter who has traveled widely in the country, is that Americans everywhere -- especially in provincial backwaters -- are now more richly informed about public affairs because of television. The polls and studies, I know, document an opposite conclusion, but I am regularly struck by how much Americans know -- how even people in the most remote places seem to be talking about the same important items that preoccupy the people at more exalted levels.
Television, at the very least, has unified the American population in new ways, even if it also debased the content of the political dialogue. This unity has been reflected in the outcomes of most of the presidential elections during the last twenty years. Despite the elaborate electoral-vote strategies based on America's regional differences, the nation is more or less voting in unison, responding to the same themes and issues.
Still, in the absence of more intimate venues for communications, politics is captured and confined by omnipresent television. Given the nature of TV news, every important question is reduced to the "Dan Rather rule" of tax politics. If it can't be explained in ten seconds, the public won't find out. That trap, however, is created by the failure of other mediating institutions at least as much as it can be blamed on TV.
My own optimism, in any case, rests partly on faith. If the pessimists (like Tom Leykis) are right, then most of what I have explored in this book is beside the point. If the mass-media culture has permanently robbed people of their democratic capacities, then the deeper governing problems -- or their remedies -- will have no meaning to ordinary citizens. If people have been rendered hopelessly inert, then these complicated questions will be left to the governing circles that already control most outcomes. Obviously, I do not accept such a fatalistic prognosis, about either the technology or the human spirit.
***
For a disconcerting glimpse of the contemporary culture, spend an evening watching MTV and its marvelously facile storytelling. Or even watch for fifteen minutes. The music-video channel is so fast moving -- and essentially repetitious -- that even a brief encounter conveys its content: a promise of high production values and trivial intellectual stimulus. The rock videos often play out dramas with simple story lines, many with surprisingly wholesome messages (don't use drugs, don't cheat on your girlfriend), but the real appeal is their visual-aural display. A few introduce strikingly original imagery, moody high-tech fantasies of light and color. Most of them borrow familiar visual cliches from movies and television.
The essence of MTV is expressed by one of its video logos -- a high-speed flash of obscure images that are propelled at the viewer like a frenzied sight gag, too quick to understand. A butterfly dissolves into a pyramid, a human eye, a rush of disorganized color, a face like John Lennon's, an exploding flower that turns into what? Maybe it wasn't a flower, but an exploding butterfly that turned into John Lennon. It is all too quick -- and pointless -- for the mind to record.
For anyone who is older, anyone who grew up on books and newspapers before there was television, MTV is a disturbing experience. Is this what the minds of American youth are consuming? One envisions a nation of college dormitories nodding off on MTV's brainless trivia. One imagines decline and fall. Worst of all, one senses that there is a hip joke in these lightning images that old folks are not in on. The founder of MTV once said its programming is designed to drive everyone over fifty crazy.
The American electorate is astride an inescapable faultline that divides those who grew up on TV, fully acculturated by it, and those who didn'1. Neither side fully understands the other or speaks the same language or sees quite the same reality in their perceptions of the world. The older half still generally controls things, including politics and government and the most important private institutions. But the younger half is inexorably replacing them, as the children raised by the TV culture grow older and the oldest of them now approach middle age themselves. The future of democracy -- if it has a future -- inevitably belongs to those who can watch MTV without feeling crazy.
The younger half learned to read from Sesame Street, a program widely applauded for its imaginative use of video for educational purposes. But what else did Sesame Street teach? That intellectual exercises are primarily visual and tactile experiences, rather than processes of abstraction. "Sesame Street is insidious because it implies that you can't learn your letters and numbers without colors and sounds," writer Linda Greider has observed. "Seeing the images for a minute and a half makes you feel like you've dealt with it. It makes you think: Now I know my letters. But what you really know are the marching colors. It's not reading anymore -- it's TV."
Between MTV and Sesame Street and video games, the TV generation "knows" many things that older people do not know, but the accumulating evidence (mostly accumulated by the older people) emphasizes what is lost on them -- the hard facts of political life and the daily action that is the important "news" to older citizens. Younger people know less about public affairs and they seem to care less. The children of TV, now the adults from eighteen to roughly forty-five years old, have more years of schooling than previous generations, a demographic fact that used to predict greater political involvement, but no longer does. Most citizens under forty-five have withdrawn from politics and, indeed, never entered that realm of American life.
They are the dropouts who are pulling down the formal meaning of electoral politics. It is their voting participation that has fallen most drastically during the last twenty years, not that of the people who are older than forty-five years. From 1972 to 1988, the voting level declined by more than one fourth among those who are eighteen to twenty-four years old. By 1988, only 36 percent of these young adults were voting. But voting has also declined among those who are twenty-five to forty-four years old. In 1972, 63 percent of them voted; by 1988, only 54 percent did.
Meanwhile, voting participation among older citizens held roughly constant -- fluctuating around 70 percent. This divergence is explained by more than a question of settled maturity. The older voters were taught about democracy and the meaning of elections in the age before television; the younger people learned their civics from TV.
These statistics predict that the deterioration of electoral politics and voting participation is going to continue as the older citizens who still participate in elections die off and are replaced by the tuned-out citizens coming along behind them. [3]
The same divergence is visible in the "news" of public affairs that younger people tune out. The most memorable news event in the decade of the 1980s was the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle in 1986. Second was the San Francisco earthquake, third was the little girl in Texas who was rescued from a well. All were TV stories with terrific footage -- riveting human dramas that appealed to everyone but especially to younger people. In contrast, the historic political upheavals of eastern Europe never absorbed the attention of more than 42 percent of people under thirty, even at the highly videogenic climax in the fall of 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell.
Only 11 percent of people under thirty followed President Bush's summit meeting with Gorbachev very closely. Only 9 percent were interested in the Japanese purchase of Rockefeller Center. Only 5 percent cared about the scandal that brought down Representative Jim Wright, the Speaker of the House of Representatives. They know Corazon Aquino (53 percent) because she plays a compelling role in a continuing TV soap opera about the Philippine government. They do not know House Speaker Thomas Foley (only 8 percent do) because he is merely the nice-looking man who sits in the background, next to Dan Quayle, when George Bush gives important speeches on TV.
These data are drawn from studies made by the Times Mirror Company's Center for The People & The Press, which monitors the attention span of news consumers. In a 1990 study, "The Age of Indifference," the center charted the gaps between the generations in attention and knowledge and concluded gloomily: "The ultimate irony ... is that the Information Age has spawned such an uninformed and uninvolved population.'"
By comparing Gallup Poll opinion surveys over five decades, the study identified a break- way point in the mid-1970s when the attention level of younger adults began to diminish -- diverging from what the rest of the country knew and considered important. From the 1940s to the 1970s, the polls had found that young people knew as much about public affairs as their elders (and sometimes more) and that they followed major news events with approximately the same intensity. Starting in the years following the Watergate scandal and the war in Vietnam, the news attention of young people fell away sharply; so did their factual knowledge of political issues and personalities; so did their voting participation.
That decline could be attributed to the disillusionment fostered by those events, the cynicism bred by an era of political failures, except for this: The trend persisted throughout the 1980s, a time when Ronald Reagan restored political success to the presidency and was especially admired among the younger citizens. They liked Ronald Reagan, but his popularity did not persuade them to pay more attention or to vote.
A more likely explanation for the divergence is that in the 1970s, for the first time, the age group from eighteen to thirty consisted entirely of children who had been raised on TV. Those same people are now in their late thirties or early forties and, though they became somewhat more attentive and knowledgeable as they grew older, the age group from thirty to forty-five also now displays a deteriorating interest in the standard facts and events of politics.
Older people read Time or Newsweek to catch up on the week's news. Younger people, even well-educated ones, read People magazine as their idea of "hard news." Older citizens watch 60 Minutes for its familiar format of methodical exposes of wrongdoing. Younger people watch A Current Affair or Geraldo or Oprah for their edgy sense of personal melodrama -- an unabashed emotionalism that is not unlike the old working-class tabloids. Traditionalists shudder at the implications. Is television gradually producing a brain-dead citizenry, making it impossible to imagine a functioning democracy?
Or is it perhaps the opposite -- that these younger viewers are able to see things through television that are not really visible to their elders? Possibly, they know something about politics that the rest of us were not taught when we were growing up, a reality that contradicts the comfortable civic faith instilled in us. Clearly, the system of political communication is malfunctioning when so many millions of citizens turn away from the continuing story of politics. But it may be the story itself or the storytelling system -- not the audience -- that is maladjusted.
What is it that the young and disaffected see in politics that leads them to switch channels? For one thing, they see a dispiriting sameness. It is not just the "talking heads" that, as every TV producer knows, make for boring television, but generally it is the same "talking heads" over and over again. Given the quickness that television values, a viewer will be bombarded with a succession of quick flashes-unfamiliar faces with tightly cropped opinions- that provide no context for understanding who is on which side or why they are being presented as glib authorities or what led them to their quickie opinions.
If one watches the evening news without much background understanding of public affairs, without regularly reading a daily newspaper (as most young people do not), much of the content is unfathomable, random sound bites and a boring blur that seems aimed at some other audience. For these sensibilities, the evening news may look as quick and mindless as MTV. Television politics -- like Sesame Street -- is experienced, not learned in an abstract mode. If the facts seem inconsistent with the images, the images will overwhelm the facts and refute them.
At least the rock videos tell a recognizable human story, however simpleminded. Many provide a vague sense of narrative -- responding to the ancient human yearning for a story with a beginning, a middle and an ending -- and deliver a passionate message that invites an emotional response (if not an intellectual one) from the audience. MTV invites its viewers to identify with its content. For that matter, so does Sesame Street.
Politics and political news, on the other hand, is a story about someone else, told in a not very coherent fashion. Politics on TV is a recurring blip of details about a fairly small group of people (mostly older people and some who seem ancient) who are off somewhere else doing important things. Without context, their words and actions will seem remote and meaningless to ordinary young viewers. The political events seem to be following a logic that is not revealed in the broadcast. People whom TV taught to be hip and wary and impatient naturally lose interest in what seems opaque and distant. The remoteness makes them feel passive, impotent.
The hottest public-affairs shows -- frequently denounced as sleaze television -- at least deliver a human drama (including even the possibility of a fistfight) and opinionmongers who seem recognizable since they are usually not politicians talking in the distant language of officialisms. Jim Bellows, former editor of the defunct Washington Star and now a television consultant, thinks shows like A Current Affair prosper because they deliver "a sense of outrage and passion.... The newspapers are much more dispassionate.... You don't have the alternative voices there that you used to have. Now, television, all of a sudden, is doing that. In some respects, the stuff is terrible, all that sleaze, but people want some kind of different voices and higher and lower emotional levels.
TV portrays politics largely in the orthodox formats of "news," emulating the factuality and story lines originally fashioned for print, yet the sound and pictures frequently convey something else. Politicians frequently look like the salesmen who peddle kitchen gadgets on late-night TV. Their rhetorical exaggerations may remind one of deceptive toy commercials. If the words are not confirmed by the aural-visual imagery, the words lose their veracity. If the political story goes on and on repetitively, without any subsequent resolution or connection to real life, then it is just another TV concoction and not a very compelling one.
Beyond these questions of technique, there is a deeper explanation for why television deadens politics among the young: In its own way, television tells them the truth about politics, almost in spite of itself. For the generation that is fully attuned to the evocative contours of TV images, the medium delivers a most subversive message: The civic mythologies about politics and democracy that your parents believe are nonsense, since any viewer can see that the pictures tell a different story. The civic faith is not borne out by the political story told on television and, in fact, is regularly contradicted by it.
This truth-telling quality is partly the curse of intimacy that television inescapably promotes. When one can see the senator up close and personally witness his performance rather than read about it the next day in the newspaper, the senator inevitably becomes a less exalted figure, less magisterial and less mystifying, especially if he is yapping incoherently in a fifteen-second sound bite. Congress seemed a more noble deliberative body when people only read about it. Actually "experiencing" politics with the physical immediacy of TV makes it much harder to believe in the received truths about democracy that older people routinely accepted.
Now we can see democracy -- live and in color -- and it does not look much like what the civics textbooks taught. For older people, schooled to accept the civics abstractions, it is thrilling to watch the televised proceedings of the U.S. Senate on C-Span. For most younger people, the same broadcast simply seems boring and bizarre. After all, the U.S. Senate looks like an empty chamber lined with antique desks and a pretend "debate" to which no one seems to be listening.
"Television makes the events transparent, regardless of what it says about them," said Jann Wenner, editor and publisher of Rolling Stone, a mass-circulation magazine whose readers span the TV generation. "There is no real debate in politics. That's what younger people see on television and they're right. TV communicates that politics is controlled by a very few people and for everyone else it's meaningless. That's the message from TV and people got it. How many presidential elections do you have to watch before you conclude that the results don't make much difference? Things will go on the same. Why bother? That's an accurate message and TV conveys that message.
"Television is so unvarnished in the way it communicated -- even aside from the manipulation in campaigns -- that it has told the truth about government and politics so much better than ever before. That's why everyone is so dispirited about politics. They understand."
The question then is: Who sees the truth about American politics more clearly, the old or the young? Like Wenner and Jacques Cousteau, I would vote for the young. Like every generation, they are bound by their own illusions and vulnerable to deception and evasion in their own peculiar ways. But their basic perceptions, however shallow and out-of-focus, are not wrong. The democratic challenge, among its other aspects, lies in convincing the children of TV not only that politics matters, but that they matter in politics.