Reality check bounces
Topic: media criticism
What a way to end a nice vacation – listening to host Bob Smith and his guests talk around the issues rather than deal with them.

For the January 3 WXXI blatherfest, Bob spoked with new Monroe County Legislature minority leader Carla Palumbo. The second hour went to Jay Gallagher, Gannett News Service’s man in Albany and latest manifestation of the WXXI-Gannett experiment in “civic journalism” (read: public broadcasting sells out to the corporate press).

One exchange with Palumbo set me off. The discussion had moved to Medicaid and access to health care, and Palumbo made her best Democratic effort at explicating a general principle of reform. To paraphrase: she thinks what we need is simply to get people into well-paying jobs with benefits. In other words, leave the system alone, and keep health insurance subject to the magic of the marketplace.

You’d think that at this stage, any politician worth her salt would say something like this: health care is a human right, and as such it should be guaranteed to everyone – and the guarantee must be implemented by the only practical and affordable means, a single-payer national or state insurance program.

But no, we get nothing better than a pseudo-liberal version of “get a job.” Thanks for nothing, Carla.

As for the Gallagher hour, nothing much stands out in my mind. Maybe my senses were dulled by the discussion’s unexpressed but hard-as-rebar theoretical foundation – the commonplace idea that by uncovering corruption and inefficiencies in state government (Gallagher’s journalistic bread and butter) and advancing petty political reforms (say, six rather than three men in a room?) we will turn the New York economy around.

Okay, there’s plenty in Albany worth criticizing. And certainly state leaders should make some bold moves - proportional representation, a massive public-housing initiative, support for worker and consumer cooperatives, and other planks of the social-democratic platform. But our state government has been corrupt from Day One. I mean, isn’t New York the wellspring of Tammany Hall and its small-town imitators? And hasn’t the Mob been around for a while? Going further back: wasn’t the state pieced together from what were essentially land-grabs and frauds? Yet through all the vileness, New York prospered and grew pretty consistently from – to pick some convenient mileposts - the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 to the postwar boom that started going bust-ward in the mid-1970s.

They don’t call it the Empire State for nothing, with all the term implies about New York as an outstanding example of how moral flexibility breeds worldly success.

So what theoretical framework would I like to hear? For one thing, I’d like to hear some corporations indicted in the media. It’s clear that corporate abandonment, more than any other factor, precipitated New York’s fall from the top. So how come the Smiths and Gallaghers don’t go after Bethlehem Steel, GM, Ford, various auto-industry suppliers, Union Carbide, Dupont, Kodak, a whole raft of smaller metals and chemical companies, shipping firms and railroads? Are the media personalities afraid of what the CEOs and flunkies will say?

Here’s number two on my media wish-list: I’d like to hear a full, candid discussion of how racism New York-style has devastated our urban areas – and thus made a healthy economy practically impossible. (By the way, I don’t see anything healthy in the production of rich people, of whom New York seems to be increasing its share.) Is it impolite to suggest that the forces of apartheid in Rochester-Monroe County have been more than marginal or incidental to the area’s economic decline?

All I’m asking for is a real dialogue on real issues. But again I have to pinch myself. Reality is exactly what the pols and pundits want to avoid.