The Today Show Needs to Get Real

The lead political story today on the Today Show (NBC) was about Rudy Giuliani’s prospects of winning the Republican nomination for president. Although certainly worthy of political speculation, the race for the presidency is not the most pressing issue at present for their viewing public. It is, however, an easy substantive issue for people to grasp. People understand elections and political personalities. This is why these subjects have, for lack of a better term, legs. However what is substantially more difficult to grasp are where any of these people stand on anything – a hurdle we may never jump. Bush did a good job showing what kind of candidate he was in 2000 only to reverse his entire profile as an isolationist and compassionate conservative a year after inauguration.

I can’t blame the public for wanting to focus on someone other than President Bush. To do so gives one hope that there may be better days ahead. Likewise, the media longs to cover the campaign because, well, it gives them something to report other than the very complicated state of domestic and international politics. It’s a lot easier and a lot more fun to follow candidates and report on the thrusts and parries of the campaign stomp. You can report on these subjects with a smirk. There is nothing to smirk about when reporting yet another multiple car bombing just outside of the Green Zone.

So this morning they reported on Giuliani’s status with the evangelicals. Its a much easier topic for a morning show's roundtable than the growing and escalating problems in the Middle East. But this is precisely what they should be reporting instead of hyping the race for the White House a full year before the political conventions next summer. Although the Today Show is not exactly where we turn for hard news, it is about time that these fluff shows got serious about the war and the sacrifices being made in Baghdad and Afghanistan.

Contrary to the official line, wars aren’t won by tax cuts, shopping trips, and Disneyland. After 9-11 the President told us to go on with our daily lives in the face of something that was culturally and historically transformative. Thus was the beginning of our paradox – remember 9-11 and the fallen but don’t let the war get too close for comfort. Since that time, the burden of this conflict has been only felt by the families of the deployed or fallen – the military husbands, wives, friends, fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, and children. For the rest of us, we understand the sacrifice only in terms of sporadic casualty reports on the local news, mostly a distant name, or occasionally, a face back dropped in an official US Army flag.

But instead of the Today Show devoting time for a daily segment memorializing a dead soldier, we get more coverage on politicians and their race for office. Instead of a segment on the struggle to walk again by an amputee, we have the political analysis of Giuliani’s multiple wives and Obama’s smoking. There are real issues at present that are more worthy of our focus.

We have nineteen months left of the Bush Presidency. If recent casualty estimates remain consistent, that will be at least another thousand troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan before the president goes back to Midland. Before we begin trumpeting candidates, it is the obligation of the media to show the public exactly what is at risk in the next election, and not just in terms of the personalities of the candidates. We need to understand the full scope of this world crisis so that the next person we chose, we can do so based on leadership and policy and not just in terms of posturing and personality.