Some background: The rate of media illiteracy in America is about 99.5 percent. In May 2007, U.S. Dept. of Labor statistics indicated 1.07 million media professionals in an adult population (15 and over) of 240 million. The other 238.93 million Americans have received no media education because it is not a required subject in the American educational system. Media professionals work in businesses whose missions are to provide information, entertainment and persuasion products to media consumers. The products can be complex, but all are based on 12 media values and one definition. The definition: News is anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo. The 12 media values: conflict, progress, disaster, consequence, prominence, proximity, timeliness, human interest, novelty, sex, sensationalism and curiosity.
Here is the way a media literate sees the campaign.
Barack Obama is a natural newsmaker. He exhales news. News flies off of him the way bees fly out from the hive on the audacious mission to find sweet nectar and pollinate the world.
John McCain is plain, a hard-working uncle with a war story. As a newsmaker he is an anchor, reading news from a script, and he knows it. He suffers from crotch, which of course does not look comfortable on camera. His appearance regularly suggests the character Howard Beale from the movie "Network."
The media is the battleground on which the campaign is fought, in a long series of battles. There is little time for issues in a 24-hour media war cycle. The adversaries have the same mission, to make the most news which resolves conflict for the greatest number of viewers. The man who achieves that will win.
Obama has had a consistent advantage in the timeliness and novelty values. His being the first black American running for president will not get old. Nor, after the last eight years, will his initial campaign strategy of change. In fact change is so durable a topic that McCain's media team has worked to co-opt it.
In June, McCain realized his newsmaker disadvantages against such opposition and brought in a team of veteran media professionals from the 2004 Bush campaign. Their hard-hitting expertise helped create numerous media opportunities for McCain. Obama's lack of experience and his former associations became conflict items for the McCain team. A "celebrity" angle was tried, but didn't work very well because viewers like celebrities.
In the debates, Obama looked cool, collected and lawyerly, McCain came across as crotchety. Most of the news – polls, money, huge crowds, war, crashing economy, GOP defections – was breaking Obama's way. Then McCain made the biggest news of the campaign: Sarah Palin. She brought with her a "Sarah who?" conflict, but her novelty and sensational values were off the chart and she represented an untapped demographic.
Novelty and sensationalism erode quickly, though, and soon they needed some other value to give them legs. Palin's experience conflict was coming into news play, and into "SNL" scripts, while Colin Powell's endorsement removed Obama's experience conflict altogether. GOP crowd reactions made news and introduced a thread of dread into the campaign that McCain had to address. Obama provided the McCain team some new grist in Joe the Plumber, and Main Street, with its proximity value, became a theme that gave Palin folksy continuity in targeting Obama with an "elitist" conflict. That theme was severely compromised by the news of Palin's $150,000 campaign wardrobe.
In the closing days, the media community is wondering how McCain's team could have so badly mismanaged his newsmaking. It is the subject of a long analysis in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine.
In this media literate's view, McCain has one last hole card. He can pop. The hard-working uncle can get out from behind the anchor desk, tell his inept media managers to go to hell, take Cindy and Sarah by the hand, lean into the camera and yell, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore. I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: 'I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!'"
That will definitely make news the old-fashioned way. How it played out on election day would be the last exciting threat to the status quo of the campaign.
This view of the campaign is a simplification, as an Ibsen play or a Faulkner novel is a simplification. The advantage of literacy, in this case media literacy, in viewing these works is that it lets the viewer grasp the complexities, because he understands the shorthand.
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