Where Is The Outrage?

So apparently the entire nation was up in arms (or legs) last fall because the producers of ABC’s hit show Dancin’ With the Stars selected Chaz Bono, the transgendered son of legendary 60s and 70s singing stars Sonny and Cher, to compete as part of its 13^th season. Including Bono in the cast caused a “virtual firestorm” of controversy, according to ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos.

No less an authority on morals than One Million Moms, a “project” of the ultraconservative – and ultra narrow-minded – American Family Association, called for a national boycott of the show until Bono was removed from the cast. The project’s director, Monica Cole, told ABC News that seeing Bono and her partner on television would undoubtedly be “very confusing for children” who apparently we don’t trust to know love when they see it.

The criticism energized Bono; it “made me realize I’m really glad I’m doing this because America needs to see this,” he told an interviewer last year.

I support and agreed with Bono – America did need to see him, get over it, and accept him, but perhaps more important, the flap highlighted how a few bigoted people with an ability to manufacture miniscule pockets of outrage can capture the attention of a news media always on the outlook for the next conflict, ersatz or otherwise.

It also clues us in about how the media portray the public in matters controversial – like the group of kids at the end of A Charlie Brown Christmas who wave their arms and magically move the Christmas decorations from Snoopy’s doghouse to the fragile, drooping tree selected by Charlie Brown, with Linus’ acquiescence, for the Christmas play. We flip out at the drop of a hat, mount a boycott, and then move on to the next supposed attempt to wash the minds of America’s kids down the moral sewer.

Remember Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction” a few years back during a Super Bowl halftime show performance with Justin Timberlake? Journalists and commentators quickly and loudly created the impression that every parent in the nation was covering their kids’ eyes with one hand while burning their Jackson and Timberlake CD’s with the other, and with their toes typing out nasty letters to the Federal Communications Commission. In actuality, most of the missives received by the FCC emanated from an aggrieved tiny minority of conservatives who found so offensive the exposure of Jackson’s still partially covered breast.  Yet to read a newspaper or watch a newscast in the months after the halftime show – or today, for that matter – the event is reported as if we all were seething with outrage and that we haven’t yet gotten past it.

The Dixie Chicks earned the wrath of the manufactured majority when lead singer Natalie Maines told a London audience she was “ashamed” that then President George W. Bush was born in Texas, as she had been. To affirm the national ire about her comments, the news media repeatedly showed clips of what amounted to a handful of angry people steamrolling copies of Chicks’ CD’s in radio station parking lots.

Yet when the media have the chance to depict outrage about complex, truly important issues – poverty, for example – they punt. Antiwar protestors are depicted as destructive, obstinate, puppet-happy hippies, for example. Attempts to help the poor are trivialized through personalization. Maybe it’s because there’s something to the claim that the last thing a journalist wants to have happen is being labeled a “liberal” by a group that will soon flood that journalist’s email inbox with invective, or maybe it’s because, for example, the debacle that is the federal government’s No Child Left Behind education policy doesn’t lend itself to simplistic “hero v. villain,” preordained, pre-packaged treatment. Instead, it’s enough to report that every homeless person is a drug addict, every couple that obtained a onerous mortgage from an avaricious lender is irresponsible, every college football player is trying to sell his jersey for a free tattoo, every teacher’s union is bringing down its state’s economy, and we all blindly support America’s war effort.

But plenty of folks are angry that we are still wasting the lives of brave young Americans and spending buckets of money on the war in Afghanistan, even now that our troops are out of Iraq and Libya is moving haltingly toward democracy.  Plenty of folks are angry that accountability-happy officials lionized by the news media are systematically driving our public schools out of existence. Plenty of folks are angry that the NCAA and major universities rake in so much money while letting the student-athletes they so publicly venerate take the heat when a few try to earn spending money, accept a ride home from an assistant coach, or miss a few classes because of an arduous travel schedule.

Plenty of folks are angry that the number of American families living in poverty continues to climb. And plenty of folks are angry that the unprecedented health care bill signed into law by President Obama last year doesn’t include a public option. But because these points of view are unpopular, and its adherents didn’t rush to their nearest town hall meeting to harangue their member of Congress, like members of the Tea Party did in 2009 on buses and with funding supplied by organized and well-heeled (not “grass roots” by any stretch) conservative interest groups, they weren’t covered.

So they must not have been outraged.

Instead, all those folks must have been lining Florida’s streets and highways, prepared to vent our collective spleen at Casey Anthony being acquitted last July by a jury of all but a minor charge.

No, wait: only a relative few did that. It only seemed like there were thousands.

Maybe the folks who want an end to the war or dedicate their lives to improving public schools are earnest and dedicated, and maybe overzealous and loud at times. But you’d never know it because we rarely see or read about them.