To illustrate the problem with American political institutions today, television journalist John Hockenberry described how the producers of "The Blair Witch Project" pitched their next project to David Newman, the head of the Digital Entertainment Network, at the American Comedy Arts Festival in 1999.
At a Pierson College master's tea on March 21, the "Dateline NBC" correspondent described a panel he moderated at the festival that featured Newman, who is interested in purely Internet-based entertainment models, and the producers of "The Blair Witch Project," which grossed over $180 million and had 30 million hits on its website during the summer of its release.
Hockenberry asked the filmmakers to pitch their next Internet content idea to Newman, believing this would shed light on what the filmmakers had learned from their first film and what Newman believed would succeed in the emerging media platform. "One of the 'Blair Witch' guys looks over at Newman and says, 'Hi, dude. We did 'Blair Witch,' okay?'" recalled Hockenberry. "And David Newman says, 'You did 'Blair Witch'? Great. Whatever you want, man.'
"And that was the pitch," continued Hockenberry. "That was it. There was no discussion of what the content was going to be, how it was going to work. Basically, David Newman was interested in one thing, the preexisting audience for 'Blair Witch.'"
What happened at that panel, said the journalist, is a reflection of what is happening throughout society. "Industries, businesses, media outlets are trading eyeballs like the Chicago Board of Trade trades bushels of wheat or soybeans," he said. By focusing on audiences instead of content -- by spending billions of dollars on focus groups, audience research and polling -- what companies in effect are doing is enforcing conservatism because what they really care about are audiences staying the same, he contended.
Political institutions, said Hockenberry, are by definition supposed to function outside the center "on the leading edge of culture, anticipating what problems are out there and attempting to solve them." However, the trading of audiences that goes on in politics and other media outlets ensures the opposite, he argued.
In politics, he noted, this means that candidates move to the center. "They move to that predictable realm of the American electorate that's focused on its prosperity, that has the least amount of problems, that has the most amount of votes," said Hockenberry. "And candidates appeal almost exclusively to those folks. It makes the parties indistinguishable. In fact, it makes the parties buyers and sellers of audiences in the same way that 'The Blair Witch Project' is trying to sell its $180 million-grossing audience to the Digital Entertainment Network."
One result of this centrism is the isolation of Americans from the international community and the absence of almost any discussion of foreign issues in the political sphere, said Hockenberry. Instead of talking about the election of Chen Shui-bian as president of Taiwan or the threat of nuclear war in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh -- issues that could have a devastating effect on the United States in the future -- Bill Clinton discusses the price of gas, the safety of air bags and the hiring of teachers, issues that prove popular with a broad audience, he noted.
"The campaign [in Taiwan] was dominated by China saying if you elect [Chen], we will wipe out your country," recounted Hockenberry, noting that the United States is obligated by treaty to defend Taiwan. "On the day that Chen is elected in Taiwan -- a democratic revolution that threw out the Kuomintang in Taiwan which had ruled since the '40s as a dictatorship -- Bill Clinton's radio address was about helping Americans lower gas prices during the summer months. The Republicans talked about Medicare."
Hockenberry also pointed out that, although Clinton is the first U.S. president in 22 years to visit India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, he did so at the end of his second term "when he is as much of a lame duck as he could possibly be, underscoring to everyone in the region how little South Asia matters at a time when there is a greater nuclear confrontation taking place there than any time since the Cuban missile crisis."
Political institutions which cater exclusively to the center of the population cannot survive indefinitely, Hockenberry argued. "I believe there's a clash brewing," he said. "The conservatism that is enforced by this audience-based, focus group-based politics and discourse in America -- where you find the center, you stay with the center and you don't deviate from the center until the moment the center ceases to be the center -- almost guarantees that political change will happen only when there's some kind of extraordinary upheaval in America that wipes out the center."
-- By JinAh Lee
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