There you are standing in front of a class of squirming adolescents, trying to interest them in how cells divide and mitosis and how biology is the key to life. It's a tough sell. But, then, suddenly, every newspaper and every television station is explaining what blastocysts are and showing pictures of luminous green and red embryos, and a lot of your work has been done for you. We've known for a long time that biology is destiny, but we didn't know that it could trump Chandra Levy. I told you, class, that biology wasn't boring.
And do you know who we have to thank for this? The media. Yes, the same media that gave you OJ and Jon Benet and Chandra are also giving you detailed diagrams of embryos, and meditations on when life begins, and what science can do for previously untreatable diseases. See, class, I told you news didn't have to be tawdry.
Now, was this done out of the deeply altruistic need of the media to educate the American public? Well, not exactly. Here's a clue: there's nothing that whets the press's appetite for a story more than not knowing what's going to happen. It gives a story drama. It gives it narrative. Day after day, reporters were pestering the White House press office as to when Bush was going to make his stem cell decision. Remember, there's no particular deadline for this decision, nothing pressing that need force the president's hand. Federal funding had been halted. What forced Bush's hand was the needy, childish anxiousness of the press to have an answer. Hence, the nationally televised address from Crawford.
Media hunger is neutral. It's like the ancient Greek argument about the power of rhetoric. Plato condemned rhetoric as dangerous and pernicious, but Aristotle countered that it was neutral and could be used for good or ill. Same thing with the media. In this case, media pressure has brought to life (no pun intended) a critical ethical and political issue and has helped educate the American public about it. But at heart, the drive and curiosity of the media about the stem cell decision is the same impetus that makes camera crews follow Gary Condit into his favorite hair salon.
Where the media came up a bit short was in its consistent depiction of Bush as "agonizing" over this decision. That word was used again and again in print and on the air. Now I'm not suggesting that Bush did not struggle with this issue. What I am suggesting is that it was in the White House's interest to depict him as "agonizing" over it. The virtue of the debate from the White House angle was that it could help transform Bush from the clueless frat boy to Philosopher King. Gee, he even mentioned a novel by an English intellectual in his speech last night. I bet that was a first.
I was on MSNBC a few weeks ago talking about the stem cell debate and I made this very same point, that the White House was promoting the idea that Bush was deeply pondering this profound issue. The MSNBC anchor replied, "But everyone knows this president is a deeply thoughtful and spiritual man." I glanced quickly at the monitor to see if he was perhaps being ironic. But, no, he was far too earnest for that. And besides, everyone knows that irony doesn't work on TV.