|
Lucia
de Vernai
Read Lucia's bio and previous columns
October 29, 2007
From Hillary Clinton
to Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, the Substance is the News
Americans are not a civically involved culture, and even those who do
read the news on a regular basis find it irrelevant or boring. Neither
complaint is without reason. The news you see on Tuesday won’t be news
by Saturday, as the scope of coverage strives to push our boundaries of
knowledge, but somehow trips over Hillary’s pearls or heel height and
falls short. In all our feminist pride, in our sea of efforts to bring
women equal footing and the ocean of advertising to never let us forget
it, newspapers are proud sponsors of the distracted reader.
This is no longer an exclusive feature of national news. If you flip a
few pages in, you may find the “International” section featuring the
presidential election in Argentina. The candidate pool resembles our
domestic situation so much that current president Nestor Kirchner and
his candidate wife, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner are referred to as
“the Clintons of the South.”
Fernandez has a hard act to follow – Kirchner is held responsible for
the country’s economic revival following the 2001 economic crisis.
Argentines like to point out that Fernandez is at a bigger political
disadvantage because, unlike Clinton, there is no eight-year period of
economic and foreign policy disaster to make her look good by default.
Sadly, the opinions of Argentine voters are offset by even relatively
progressive media sources like The New York Times who pepper
their accounts with references to Fernandez’s progression as a fashion
icon.
It is undeniable that, if Hillary becomes the leader of the free world,
the campaign time paradigm will not dissolve, but rather become the
criterion for judging her politics. We can even expect accounts of NAFTA
talks with tidbits about the audience commenting on the length of her
skirt (shall she ever wear one).
To be fair, men do not escape this treatment either, Libyan leader
Mohmmar Khadafy received a nod from the editors for his fine choice of a
deconstructed short-sleeve camouflage shirt at the Sudanese peace talks.
It is difficult to put aside our image-driven understanding of public
life when the country’s most notable newspapers encourage us in every
article. Nowhere else in the world is an account of mass murder
paralleled so nonchalantly by descriptions of irrelevant vanity written
with such detail that one must wonder whether the reporter did not miss
important information while distracted by something new and shiny.
As for the argument that newspapers are also businesses that must cater
to their audiences’ whims, that is certainly true. But the amount of
shoe, jewelry and designer fashion ads that share the pages equally with
stories of human suffering should stimulate everyone who likes the
contrast between famine and fall fashion to be as stark as the black ink
on the white pages.
The coverage of world events peppered with style and beauty observations
not only strengthen the domestic obsession with the role of the
superfluous in politics, but also distort our understanding of foreign
politics.
© 2007 North Star
Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
Click here to talk to our writers and
editors about this column and others in our discussion forum.
To e-mail feedback
about this column,
click here. If you enjoy this writer's
work, please contact your local newspapers editors and ask them to carry
it.
This is Column # LB081.
Request
permission to publish here.
|
