Justin Webb's America

Does anyone "run" the country?

• Justin Webb
• 29 Feb 08, 05:37 PM GMT

The oddest thing about this video - which Barack Obama has already described as an attempt to "scare up votes" - is that the person answering the phone is fully clothed and appears to be sitting at a desk.

Meanwhile this from Sam Davis in Maryland, USA:

Justin,

When you have a few, surf over to this BBC story:

The story repeats a line that occurs all too frequently in news stories, namely that the president (in this case, the Nigerian president) "runs" the country. I've seen this line in many stories, not just from the BBC but many others, about many presidents and prime ministers.

It's a distortion, if not an outright falsehood, used without thinking. In no sense do presidents or prime ministers of democratic nations "run" their countries.

Truth be told, they have a difficult time just running their governments, especially with bureaucracies and parliaments and congresses with their own differing agendas also in the mix, not to mention political rivals and special interest groups.

I sent a comment to the BBC website, as I sometimes do, but expect nothing but the normal autoreply.

To me this is a very serious issue, because it's one more example of how the media, unthinkingly, perpetuates ideology and become propagandists. After reading or hearing that line about presidents "running the country" over the decades, in my opinion it propagates the notion among the public at large a president or a PM "should" run the country.

And that, I believe, lays the subliminal groundwork for acceptance of greater and greater government intervention in the economy and individual lives.

Naturally, I asked whoever reads those website-generated missives to "stop it" and cited the same things you see above, but I doubt they'll throw up their hands at the BBC and say, "Oh, no, now old Davis stateside over in Annapolis is onto this and we have to mend our ways."

However, it might well be a starting point for a more general discussion - perhaps on your blog? - about how subtle use of language by media folk, especially the constant repetition of something that might seem innocuous at first blush, can actually have profound effect on public perception, or the "memes" that are accepted as "truth," as Eric Drexler noted in "Engines of Creation" some 20 years back.

This strikes me as a particularly important discussion in this U.S. presidential year, when the major candidates are making all sorts of policy proposals and the media are reporting and commenting on them in all sorts of ways.

Even slight skewing now, such as that "run the country" business, results in much wider skewing later, just as the variance of even a degree off course in the initial flight of an airplane results in overshooting the destination by hundreds of miles.

"Gosh, we started off to have a constitutional republic. How did we end up with this Napoleon fellow?"

Is he right?

We certainly have a horrible over-emphasis on the Imperial Presidency - I doubt most people in the UK know or care that Congress is likely to remain Democrat controlled this year (with huge potential ramifications for whoever becomes president) and too often the US is characterised by the sitting president (BUSH ! Warmongers CLINTON ! philanderers, etc) but on the other hand presidents do matter. Don't they?

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