News media ogles Jackson - Guest column

Admittedly, I wasn't paying attention when Janet Jackson's breast was liberated from its constraining bustier. The animated uproar that followed in the room, far more inspired than any cheers heard during nearly the entire first half of the Super Bowl, hinted at the attention the sparking solar accoutrement would receive in subsequent discourse.

With contagious brio, morning talk shows, newspapers and other media outlets happily obliged. At first the scenario seemed outlandish -- public outrage, calls for an FCC investigation and threats that MTV would never produce another half-time show. Were five months in Europe, where nipples are so commonly on display that they're easily found in drug store ads next to the Tylenol aisle, enough to desensitize me?

My musings were quickly answered as I turned to CNN for refuge from the Super Bowl strip down. But instead of the expected political analysis on the upcoming Democratic primaries I found the lead story was again Janet's perky piercing. Later, when the broadcast finally turned to political analysis, the discussion focused on a joke presidential candidate Howard Dean had made about fellow candidate John Kerry's supposed Botox injections to mask his wrinkles. Where was the discussion of the war? The economy? Where were the issues?

Sadly, they're buried beneath more sand than Saddam's spider hole. So the next obvious questions became: Who is shielding us from what? In a time of instantaneous communication, when news can be transmitted to all parts of the world as it happens, discussion rages not about how the president used the State of the Union speech to make a lame plea to "get tough and get rid of steroids" but on updates from Martha Stewart's trial instead.

I don't think Americans are so fickle that we can't stand discussing the events that really matter in our lives. In his most recent column this past Sunday, The New York Times' Thomas Friedman claimed that if the economy, with its dual trade and fiscal deficits that are "so irresponsible they will end in tears ... is not an election issue, I don't know what is." Yet the president focused his early January remarks not on the continuing lack of new jobs but on the success of phasing out the death tax. Where was the outcry in the media then?

For all its surreptitious indecency, Janet and Justin's breast-acular is far less likely to disturb viewers than most evening news reports on terrorist attacks, many of which feature up-close shots of grieving, bleeding victims. But that's just the point, isn't it? The inconsistency is obvious: After all, why report on "thinking" issues when sensationalism, violence or heaven forbid, nudity, gets so many more viewers.

That's not to say the media more or less ignoring Bush's comments about performance enhancers proves Senator Clinton's old talk of a "vast right wing conspiracy." Or even that the media is implicitly endorsing the White House. But what is clear is that like any victim of con men, we have all been willingly led along.

Bush's regular-guy image assures us that he's "speakin' straight" to us "folks." When the president claims, as he did again in his State of the Union, that the economic gains from the deficit-raising tax cuts that he passed prove that, "American people are using their money far better than government would have -- and [Congress was] right to return it." More than anything, these comments are insulting. I can't pay for environmental programs to protect land on my own. I can't fund state universities to bring down tuition. Congress can't anymore either.

More benignly, the White House commented that the candidate they feared most in the upcoming election was Howard Dean. But as CNN correspondent Robert Novak said the other day, this "leak" was intended to encourage support for the candidate Bush's advisors thought would be easiest to defeat. But then we know that the Administration will stage events and spin words to suit its needs. What we shouldn't expect is for the media to lamely accept its fate as the reporter of mass blandness.

More and more, it seems that people aren't. It's not surprising that during interviews with South Carolina voters on Tuesday night, a state that lost 41,000 jobs in just the last year alone, the economy is among the central topics on their minds -- despite what they see on TV. Undaunted by supercilious reports and reporting, and more than any episode of Survivor, what still matters most is peoples' own reality.

So where are the issues? They're right in front of us. The cameras just aren't focused yet.

David Leiman is a senior. He recently returned from studying abroad in Denmark.