The need for an authoritative narrative voice will compel most elements of the news media to quickly re-instate the status quo, and move as quickly as possible to a consensus on the outcome of the presidential election. Setting aside for the moment the possibility that differences between exit polls and election results might indicate the presence of fraud, technical failures, or both, and assuming that the vote accurately reflects the choice of the American electorate, it is neither accurate nor ethical to describe a 51% - 49% majority as some kind of mandate. Nevertheless, it is in news networks' and wire services’ best interest to simplify the results as quickly as possible, in order to “heal the nation” and “move on” (i.e. find a new story before the audience turns the channel). It is true that democracy is built on the principle of majority rule, and in 2004, it appears that Bush the Younger was the choice of slightly (2%) more voters than John Kerry. But it seems both naïve and negligent to presume without question that democratic contests should be “winner take all,” and in stepping to the next chapter of the Election Saga, newspeople in all media – by taking up the question of why the Democrats failed (losing the vote) rather than evidence of how they succeeded (marshalling the largest numbers of votes against a sitting President in history) – tell a story that betrays rather than reflects the democratic process.
Democracy in practice functions most effectively through compromise and coalition. One defender of the Electoral College indicated that this was a Constitutional mechanism for ensuring that regional coalitions – the states – would be guaranteed power and influence in a federal (i.e. nationally centralized) system. Multiple-party systems ensure that politicians must compromise in order to be effective (whereas two-party systems tend to encourage politicians to stonewall whenever they can claim a majority), which in turn ensures that a legitimate debate and discussion must take place in the operation of government. Most important, however, is the notion that representative government can lead to the construction of a collective consensus that legitimately reflects the dividing, converging, and overlapping opinions of the people. When genuine negotiation takes place among opposing viewpoints, each side must listen to and understand the grievances and desires of the other. Such a mechanism – upon which democracy is fundamentally based – can lead to the active construction of agreement based on understanding and dialogue.
What we have now, however, is an understanding of our own system that leads to the imposition or fabrication of consensus, not the building of it. No matter who won, media and political operatives alike (and it is increasingly hard to tell them apart) would prefer to simplify the story, because winners and losers are much easier to describe – in nice, clear, typically black-and-white terms – than shifting alliances and demographic variances. Take the red-state vs. blue-state dichotomy that the press now accepts as Gospel: the map invariably used to demonstrate what entire regions monolithically believe only shows who won, not the margin of victory. All of Ohio appears red (even on the county maps); but what if the map were weighted by population, and not by geography? An entirely different story would appear. But this level of complexity is hard to research, harder to explain, and probably (as a result) very hard to sell, at least for an industry that prefers tried methods over experimentation.
Just as exit pollsters simplified the entire landscape of ethics to an empty set (“moral values” – either a meaninglessly broad descriptor, or a code word for conservative Christian ethics), the story our press sells us is simplified by design from complex reality to clarified melodrama. In fact, reporting in the news industry tends to follow a basic commercial principle – keep the audience coming back for more. One of the simplest ways to do that is to promise more conflict. Unless you’re selling comedy, nuance is hard to market. But the actual goal of the democratic process is to resolve conflict by building mutual agreement. If you love democracy – a system that depends on active and informed discussion and debate – which is more important: the winner, or how the discussion led us (or can lead us) to future agreement rather than greater conflict?
Our narratives are very powerful; our stories sometimes seem to be telling us. Given the extent to which the very means of telling stories – our media – are being seized from the public domain by private companies, perhaps this is the reason that I feel more and more as if American public discourse is becoming a dream, further and further detached from experience. Or perhaps I feel this way because – as a dreamer often feels carried by a dream, and unable to steer it – the story America seems to be telling itself is increasingly told with instruments beyond my control, and by storytellers it seems impossible to hold accountable.
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