Election2000: To much of America, there's no crisis

To much of America, there's no crisis

But there is a big divide in how the public and journalists and pundits view the fight for the presidency.

©Los Angeles Times

NEW YORK -- Several hours after the Florida Supreme Court announced its bombshell decision ordering ballot recounts Friday, University of California, Los Angeles history professor Joyce Appleby couldn't help but overhear random conversations as she and other passengers waited for a plane to depart the Oakland, Calif., Airport.

"Some people were very interested in this, several were amused and some Republicans seemed disappointed," she said. "But it didn't stop life in its tracks, it didn't even dig very deeply into people's emotions. It certainly didn't seem to produce a great deal of anger or worry."

Compare that scene to the hyperbolic reaction of the all-news cable TV networks -- where clashing views and bold punditry became more shrill than ever: The nation could be headed for "political civil war," said NBC's Tim Russert. "We're watching total madness unfold," claimed Fox News' Sean Hannity. "This whole thing is getting really, really tense," worried the New Republic's Michelle Cottle on CNN. "The watchwords of the day?" asked George Stephanopoulos on ABC's Nightline. "Bitterness and chaos."

Once again, a great, yawning divide seems to have opened between the American public and the media at a moment of national controversy.

As with previous national debates -- over the 1995-96 federal government shutdown and the impeachment of President Clinton -- there has been no shortage of fulminating in the wake of Friday's court decision and Saturday's move by the U.S. Supreme Court to halt the recounts. Yet the vast majority of Americans have been going about their business since the election -- paying close attention yet hardly holding their breath. And the same appeared to be true as the nation settled in for yet another weekend of uncertainty.

A slew of public opinion polls have revealed fluctuating public attitudes, with a growing number in recent weeks voicing impatience with the stalemate. But there is nothing in the polls to mirror the harsh, partisan rhetoric and personal attacks pouring out of the media.

Taken as a whole, the strident commentary and apocalyptic predictions on all-news cable TV, newspaper opinion pages, network news broadcasts, talk radio and the Internet might suggest a national emergency. But amid these displays, "it's great that we have patience in the public as a whole, a consensus that we'll get through this," said Alan Wolfe, a political science professor and author of One Nation After All. "If we didn't, the system couldn't survive."

There are many theories to explain the gap: While a host of journalists see the story as a life and death struggle, fewer Americans are driven by partisan politics than ever and most don't feel an intense connection to either Al Gore or George W. Bush, according to some experts. Only half of the nation's eligible voters even bothered to cast ballots in the most recent election.

"This is a very turbulent, and sometimes frustrating, moment -- but I don't see it as a crisis," Columbia University history professor Alan Brinkley said. "It might get even uglier in the days ahead, but that's what politics is all about. And the worst I think that is likely to happen is a delay in the presidential transition, which we've already experienced."

Another source of the divide is that journalists -- especially the growing number of pundits, commentators and other "experts" on all-news cable channels -- must compete fiercely for ratings and often turn up the decibel level of their coverage to attract more viewers.