The managements of large
corporations attempt and, I submit, often succeed at keeping the most
financially threatening alternatives in public policy off the public’s radar by
pressuring media and using public relations campaigns. As U.S. president Obama’s
health-insurance proposal was being debated in Congress, health insurance
companies deftly either kept the single-payer proposal off the media’s
discussion or relegated the policy as radical. This term, if stuck to a
proposed policy, is the kiss of death in a society of incremental change. Such
change, if the only game in town, can unfortunately come to be viewed as
constituting major change. The gun-control debate in February, 2018 after the shooting
of 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida is a case in point.
In step with the National Rifle
Association, U.S. president Trump supported “efforts to strengthen the federal background-check system for firearms.”[1]
He also supported a ban on “bump stocks,” which enable a gun to shoot hundreds
of rounds per minute. Congress had considered such a ban, but could not in
the end resist pressure from the NRA. So in terms of political viability, going
beyond tightening background checks and banning bump stocks to ban the assault
weapons themselves could easily be perceived as radical and thus a waste of
time to include in the debate. Yet such a course ignores the possibility that the
debate could render the infeasible, feasible. Moreover, restricting debate to
the politically feasible gives the impression that at least some of the alternatives
being considered are major rather than tertiary in nature. Banning bump stocks
and tightening checks could seem like solutions rather than things that should
have been done long before the shooting in Florida.
Putting the alternatives being
considered as part of the debate in the media into perspective can be
accomplished by including the stance of Al Hoffman, a prominent Republican
donor. In the wake of the shooting, he had had enough. He demanded that
the Republican Party, which at the time controlled the governments of Florida
and the U.S., “pass legislation to restrict access to guns.” He “vowed not to
contribute to any candidates or electioneering groups that did not support a
ban on the sale of military-style firearms to civilians. ”[2]
He was saying that his monetary support would go behind a ban on assault
weapons.
With the debate restricted to
background checks and bump stocks, Hoffman could be perceived as advocating
something radical and politically infeasible. The artificially restricted
debate ensured the continuance of such infeasibility as well as the perception
of the ban being radical in nature rather than reasonable. It is no accident
that the NRA’s management declared that a ban on assault weapons was not
debatable. For the organization to have been able to keep such an option off
the table and perceived societally as radical and infeasible suggests that the
news media was not operating in the public interest. So too, I submit, does the
media restrict or contort reporting and discussing matters of public policy
relevant to corporations. Like the NRA, large companies can effectively steer
public discourse on to less threatening alternatives as if they are central rather than secondary in importance.
[1]
July Bykowicz and Srobhan Hughes, “Trump Open to Tighter Gun Checks,” The Wall Street Journal, February 20,
2018.
[2]
Alexander Burns, “”GOP Donor’s Ultimatum: Guns or Money,” The New York Times, February 18, 2018.
