Op-Ed

More than two months have passed since America Online and Time Warner announced plans to merge. Big news at the time, the formation of the world's largest media firm is already old hat. And so it goes: Like the rest of us, journalists quickly get used to the latest consolidation of media power.

One of the country's most perceptive media critics, Herbert Schiller, died a few weeks after the unveiling of AOL Time Warner. A professor of communication, Schiller had been warning against such corporate trends for decades. He urged people to consider the dire consequences when giant companies dominate and wield the latest media technologies.

"It is not necessary to construct a theory of intentional cultural control," Schiller observed in 1989. "In truth, the strength of the control process rests in its apparent absence. The desired systemic result is achieved ordinarily by a loose though effective institutional process."

For Americans watching TV news, March began in typical fashion. When five people were shot on the first day of the month in a town near Pittsburgh, cable networks swiftly jumped into action. They devoted hour after hour to the tragedy -- giving viewers plenty of live footage from helicopters, interviews with terrified eyewitnesses and grim official briefings. Correspondents functioned much like schizoid ghouls.

The television industry is good at deploring bloodshed -- while milking it to boost ratings. But the hypocrisy only begins there.

On the last day of February, the shocking news was that a 6-year-old boy in Michigan killed a classmate. How would a little boy get the impression that pointing a gun at someone and pulling the trigger is appropriate behavior? Not exactly a tough question.

But it's too tough for the nation's up-to-the-minute TV journalists -- especially when their jobs involve playing dumb.

AUSTIN, Texas -- The trouble with Granny D, the 90-year-old crusader who walked across the entire country to support campaign finance reform, is that she makes the rest of us look like such schlumps. Whew, what a record for citizen action: 3,200 miles. Sure makes me feel like an armchair warrior.

Granny D's real name is Doris Haddock, and she's been walking for 14 months -- from Pasadena, Calif., to Washington, D.C., including all of last spring in Texas. (It always takes a spell to walk across Texas.)

She got to D.C. on Tuesday by walking about 10 miles a day. She had to be hospitalized for dehydration in the Mojave Desert. She got snowed on, rained on and sleeted on; she has arthritis and emphysema; and she just kept going. And all to draw attention to the root of the rot in American politics: money.

Failed presidential bids often have a terrible afterlife, plaguing us long after the bidder has faded from the scene. Remember Gov. Pete Wilson, an exceptionally nasty Republican governor of California? Years ago, Wilson geared up for his doomed hopes for national office by putting forward savage laws aimed at young people, of whom respectable California voters supposedly live in mortal fear.

Wilson passed on to all the usual rewards awaiting an ex-governor, but his anti-youth bill survives, and has a rendezvous with California's voters as an initiative on the ballot, March 7, designated as Prop. 21, nestling next to its consort in intolerance, Prop. 22, which is the Knight initiative, banning all forms of marriage except those between a girl and a guy.

These are the only two props on the California ballot that get a specific thumbs up from the state's Republican Party. Mindful of the gay voter, the Democrats are against the Knight initiative, and on Prop. 21, they take no position at all.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Oh, come now, Gov. Bush. None of us minds a little exaggeration; a little polishing of the positive when it comes to your record here in Texas. But now it's "liar, liar, pants on fire." Your nose is growing, Governor.

George W. Bush is now running a TV ad around the country that claims: "While Washington was deadlocked, he passed a patients' bill of rights. Under Gov. Bush, Texas enacted some of the most comprehensive patient-protection laws in the nation."

Excuse me, but if anyone is interested in the truth, George Dubya vetoed the patients' bill of rights in Texas when it was first passed by the legislators in 1995; and when they passed it again, over his opposition, by a veto-proof majority in 1997, he threatened to veto it again and then let it become law without his signature because a veto wouldn't hold.

He never even signed the patients' bill of rights, and you can look it up. Claiming that "he passed" or "delivered" the patients' bill of rights is turning the truth on its head.

Let us return to those thrilling days of yesteryear in the 74th and 75th sessions of the Texas Lege.

Twenty million listeners are accustomed to hearing the refrain on the radio: "I'm Dr. Laura Schlesinger." While many assume that she's a licensed physician or psychologist, her doctorate is actually in physiology. What's most unfortunate is that Schlesinger uses her enormous media power to violate a key precept of health care: First, do no harm.

Dr. Laura does a lot of harm. Sitting at a powerful microphone, she spews abuse at those who live outside the circle she has drawn around humanity. Being gay is "a biological error," Schlesinger proclaims.

Many of the people listening are youngsters. The other day, I heard a 10-year-old caller on Schlesinger's program, deferentially seeking advice. He got plenty of it, like everyone else within earshot.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Like all the other political junkies, I am just loving this -- wow, a white-hot primary; pollsters confounded; pundits wrong; he's up, no, he's down; the people calling the shots; experts looking like fools. What fun.

One must admit, anent our boy George Dubya, that if you can't even get a two-day bounce -- from Saturday in South Carolina to Tuesday in Michigan -- after spending $30 million, you could be in trouble.

What a slugfest that was in South Carolina -- the best East Texas campaign I've seen in years. Open thuggery! John McCain accused Bush of being like Bill Clinton (horror of horrors), while Bush's supporters were accusing McCain of being gay, a womanizer, having a Jewish campaign chairman, a black daughter and a drug-addict wife. Boy, that was some goin' there. The Bushies must be proud of that one.

The great mystery at this point is why so many Republicans are still voting for Bush on the theory that he's their strongest candidate. One can see why the big-money Republicans are still for him -- McCain actually threatens to do something about big money in politics. But what about the rest of the R's?

What if a big restaurant chain announced that it was hiring a chief inspector -- and filled the job with the person who'd been in charge of the company's kitchens? We might roll our eyes if the incoming inspector proclaimed from the outset that the meals on the menu were delicious and nutritious.

National Public Radio has hired an ombudsman -- "to receive, independently investigate and respond to queries from the public regarding editorial standards in its programming." Jeffrey Dvorkin, the NPR vice president for news and information since 1997, is moving into the new position. A press release quotes him as saying that the creation of the ombudsman post "keeps NPR at the forefront of editorial excellence."

In this context, NPR's first ombudsman in two decades is not off to an auspicious start. The boosterism should make us wary. But Dvorkin seems committed to dialogue. "I'm the agent for the listener, and I'm there to help raise issues to the editorial staff that are of concern to the public," he told me in a recent interview.

A specter is haunting cyberspace -- the specter of e-vandalism.

Media alarms have been loud recently: Electronic commerce is under siege. A virtual crime wave threatens to wreak havoc on the World Wide Web. Any site is vulnerable, no matter how big.

Let's not bother to shed tears for the likes of E*Trade, Amazon.com and Buy.com. Sympathy seems misplaced for massive outfits that are blights on the Web as they strip-mall every pixel in reach. And I can't summon much empathy for the targeted website run by the Time Warner subsidiary CNN, a cable giant with millions of viewers every day.

But at the same time, even when electronic attacks occur against corporate sites with little or no socially redeeming value, I won't cheer for cyber-saboteurs. Efforts to censor or block communication are odious -- whether based in government offices, corporate suites or secret hacker locations. What we need is not less but more speech: and especially more diverse speech.

AUSTIN, Texas -- I laughed until tears ran down my cheeks Sunday morning. There was Karl Rove (a.k.a. "Bush's Brain") on television, chatting with the Sabbath gasbags about how the real champion of campaign finance reform is ... George W. Bush.

This was funny enough, but Rove went on to say solemnly that John McCain has taken money from lobbyists and special-interest groups! Of course, by then I was on the floor.

And then Rove said: "He (McCain) is the only candidate to accept a $2 million contribution. He took $2 million raised for a Senate campaign and transferred it over to his presidential campaign. He benefits from the current sort of insider way that we handle campaign finance laws in America, and he sees nothing wrong with that." By then I was in hysterics. Let's take a look at the record.

George W. Bush has raised the unheard-of sum of $70 million for his presidential campaign. He has collected so much money that he can afford to ignore the caps on campaign spending that accompany federal matching funds.