Creatures of Politics: Media, Message, and the American Presidency

7. What Goes Around . . .

200 Seven What Goes Around . . . How much of what a candidate or incumbent says and does makes it through the concentric layers of media filtration to reach at least a segment or sector of the public? And in what form do the doings and sayings as they are represented by media reports advance or counter the Message intended by the occasion of those doings and sayings? Here we deal with the circulation of Message—that is, with the chains of reports of reports of reports of . . . happenings or events the apparent movement of which through social space-time is controlled, in our political public sphere, by the organized political press across a variety of media. Reporting a prior event, in print journalism or elsewhere, is never merely a report, never a passive, disinterested relay of narrated event in the past to addressees in the present. It is well known that one’s personal or organizationally derived attitude toward how a prior event should or should not become newsworthy colors how we report it, and that this coloring can have consequences—“media effects” as students of communication are wont to say. Less obvious is the fact that our very sense that we can follow the principals of a reportable political event by tracking the circulation of their Message-worthy images in social spacetime depends on many such events of reporting. As prior events get reported and re-reported, extended chains of interdiscursivity form, and these chains across events of reporting events that themselves report events . . . elaborate a network across which we feel the palpable illusion What Goes Around . . . | 201 of Message-in-motion. Understanding the crystallization of Message requires that we break up this illusion, especially, as in this extraordinary example, when there are competing Messages sent through the highly reticulated institutional structure of the White House press corps and its sponsoring press organizations. Soletusconsiderinthislightthatmostimportantmodeofcirculation: the circulation, via mass media, of news of happenings and doings that will affect us as members of society and participants in one or more levels of polity. In the mass democratic polities, such as the United States, complex structures of circulation across the socio-spatiotemporal trajectories of communication via print, radio, television, websites, and other media give the citizenry a deferred and vicarious glimpse into the workings of government (itself a complex organizational structure of differentiated powers exercised by those who are incumbent in its various offices). In particular, politicians in the institutional order of mass electoral politics have always had an interdependent relationship to “the press” or “the media,” precisely because of their utility in publicity, tantalizingly availableforstrategicallyattemptingtoshapereportageonbehalfofapolitical interest, group, or figure.1 ThemodernAmericanpresidencyinparticular,andallfractallylowertier orders of electoral office, have increasingly depended on the fact that in such polities it is understood to be an obligation of the media to report the doings, sayings, and other goings-on of any candidate for high office as it is for the incumbent of such office. Political folk learn the rhythms of production of such reports and benefit from study of them and of the wider effect of them on the consumers of media: the electoral populace . Political professionals shape and reshape the doings and sayings of political figures to aid their efforts to get into or stay effective in office. Such professionals speak in their own technical discourse of a political figure’s Message, which, as we have seen, is an intentionally stimulated public-sphere imaginary of a sustained, circulating biographical or character image that allows the populace to frame and understand the doings and sayings of the politician. Message in this sense is, as we have said, a cultural concept akin to “brand” in the more general field of marketing, an auratic je ne sais quoi that in many cases differentiates one otherwise 202 | Creatures of Politics chemicallyorfunctionallysameorsimilarproductlinefromacompeting one.2 Thesemioticsofbrandinvolvepackaging,anditisusefultothinkof the modalities through which a political figure is thus packaged for Message , both by presentation in certain ways and by avoiding other kinds of presentation that would be deleterious to the coherence of the Message already in process. In politics, with its presumptive default connection to policy and thus to issues relative to which governmental policy is made, a great deal of Message involves at least suggesting a value relationship to certain issues through the complex son et lumière of occasion, of staged governmental ritual, designed and carried off just so—even if a specific policy on such Message-relevant...