Media Framing - What is the SC Debate's Meaning?
The national media needs a container to describe the debate to be held tonight at traditionally African-American campus USC-Orangeburg. For many in the media the shorthand is the state of race relations in America. Candidates, especially poll leaders Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are advised on how to capture the African-American vote, characterized as half of potential SC primary Democratic voters. Beth Fouhy's AP lead speculates on Hillary's chameleon like dialects.
The New York senator added a Southern lilt to her voice last week when addressing a civil rights group headed by the Rev. Al Sharpton. On Monday, dealing with a microphone glitch at a fundraiser for young donors, she quoted former slave and underground railroad leader Harriet Tubman.
: South Carolina Debate, Race, Primary debate, Hillary Clinton, Media Framing
The
Los Angles Times contrasts the large homes of white residents in Orangeburg with abject poverty in minority neighborhoods.
In the city's poor black neighborhoods, the odd laundromat and ramshackle corner grocery are spread amid broken-down cars and beat-up furniture left stranded on the buckled sidewalks. A decrepit mobile home park and some clapboard homes -- windows gone, porches collapsed, boards missing -- seem scarcely fit for human habitation.
One might speculate they beat John Edwards to the poverty punchline, or, perhaps unknowningly, seek perpetuation of demeaning stereotypes of the South. Candidates, or so the inference goes, have to pander to a "backwards" part of the country.
In the 2003 version of the opening Democratic debate a subtext was the question if the party should write off the South altogether. Kerry was asked to explain his
remarks at Dartmouth College in January 2003,
"Everybody always makes the mistake of looking South. Al Gore proved he could have been president of the United States without winning one Southern state, including his own."
Most likely few in country are watching the debbate, other then the pundit class. The audience that matters may well be South Carolina itself. The candidates will pander less and celebrate more as they sermonize to the "new South" in rural South Carolina. In this case the candidates seem more open and generous than the media frame.
