Fairness

In the last frenzied weekend of the recall campaign, the Arnold army is screaming that he isn't being treated fairly. Arnold is being accused of a variety of possibly criminal acts, allegedly committed at various times and in various places over the past thirty years. As of Saturday, the number of women publicly making these charges reached 11. The election is Tuesday.

The rhetoric on both sides heated up, with Governor Davis suggesting some of the alleged offenses are of a criminal nature, and likely to distract a governor from governing the state. At the same time, Arnold charged that Davis was behind these "dirty campaign" tactics, and his campaign manager fumed that the L.A. Times was politically motivated, and not fit to own a printing press.

The Los Angeles Times newspaper, which broke these stories, claims it printed them as soon as they were deemed ready, using ordinary professional journalistic standards. Arnold's opponents claim they are not the sources of the stories, nor has any evidence surfaced that they are.

A barrage of such charges so close to election day allows little time for point by point refutation, and unleashing them at this time certainly seems unfair. But the entire recall process is unfair. Apart from its basic injustice, especially when it resembles a prosecution of a duly elected governor on unspecified crimes, the recall does not follow the normal rules of elections. The Arnold campaign didn't balk at the comparatively short period of campaigning when it was to Arnold's advantage.

As a major celebrity, Arnold had an easy time promoting his candidacy. Major media was quivering at his feet. His visibility and celebrity persona behind a feckless but focus group tested emotional message moved the polls. Together with the money this celebrity and this apparently foregone coronation attracted, his millions bought still more air time for slick celebrity commercials. There was not very much time to look at his ideas, his policies, his past, and his fitness for office. Millions got a chance to see and hear him. No one got a chance to know him.

In a normal campaign cycle, these allegations might well have surfaced weeks or months before the election. The Arnold people must have hoped they would outrun this barrage. They didn't quite make it. Arnold may still become governor, but it's not clear he could govern.

Still, there is another issue of fairness that is quite troubling. Last week the polls seemed to indicate that Arnold would win. Someone interpreted the numbers to a single story line: it was an Arnold vs. Davis race. This despite the actual poll numbers which showed Governor Davis being recalled by a margin greater than that between Arnold and his main challenger, Cruz Bustamante.

This so-called campaign began with a media blitz of Arnold images. Despite that first barrage, early polls showed Bustamante ahead. He was actually seen on television news and interview programs a few times after that. Then new polls showed Arnold ahead, and Cruz completely disappeared. Even after these allegations became news, the pictures were still of Arnold and occasionally of Davis. Bustamante had to be content with debating the other Republican on state PBS stations.

Cruz Bustamante is Latino. He has been criticized for championing, and being supported by, California Indian casinos. In a week that saw a powerful white male media creation get booted from a sports show for a "racially insensitive" (and pretty stupid) comment concerning a black quarterback, there was no visible awareness of the racial implications of this campaign and how it is covered.

But even apart from issues of fairness concerning race, there are basic issues of fairness in covering elections. As electronic media in this country grew, a civic culture that treated elections as serious matters and news as important, together with laws and FCC regulations such as "equal time" provisions and the Fairness Doctrine, generally ensured as a matter of course that the major candidates would get fair and more or less equal treatment. There would be some attempt at balance, and it was likely that on every news report, what each major candidate said and did that day would be reported. On television, pictures of one candidate would invariably be followed by pictures of the other.

As limited as it was (especially on non-major candidates) all of that is gone now. The basic fairness necessary for fair elections has been sacrificed to the same market-driven, celebrity-dependent and sensationalist priorities as rule entertainment and commercials.

The Reagan era death of the Fairness Doctrine has permitted the wholesale takeover of radio and cable TV talk by self-righteous, self-promoting rabid right know-it-alls. The wholesale takeover of broadcasting frequencies and cable bandwidth by a handful of conglomerates keeps discourse within profitable bounds. They have all learned how to push the glandular fight-or-flight buttons of the public, and so they compete for the highest numbers with lowest common denominator violence seasoned with eye-candy and brain-nicotine.

After all those sweaty monosyllabic epics, Arnold the Barbarian should have figured out by now that he who lives by the sword can die by the sword after the next commercial.