In politics, you’re either on-message or you’re losing. Let’s get to it.
Welcome to On Message, a weekly look at where the battle lines are drawn and who is winning the war of words.
This week… The subtext of self-interest.
You don’t have to look far these days to find someone posturing and pontificating on one issue or another. Opinions have become our nation’s most manufactured and least valuable products.
Controversial issues are a lot like black holes: they suck in everything and everyone around them.
Take for example the controversial Georgia voting laws we discussed last week. Republicans voted along party lines to either close loopholes in election laws or re-establish Jim Crowe (depending on who you listen to) and the political world is in an uproar.
And shortly after the initial wave of rabble was roused… businesses found themselves compelled to enter the fray.
Delta Air Lines (which has a hub in Atlanta) and Coca-Cola (which is based in Georgia) both made public statements expressing their opposition to the legislation with Delta CEO Ed Bastion saying, “This bill was based on a lie.”
Not to be outdone, Major League Baseball announced it was moving this year’s All-Star game from Atlanta to Denver.
That move prompted Utah Senator Mike Lee to take his turn at bat to threaten Baseball’s antitrust exemption. That exemption has been in place since 1922, essentially ruling that baseball is not engaged in interstate commerce. It essentially makes it impossible for small market teams to pickup and move to bigger cities offering better stadium deals.
Everyone is making a lot of noise about the issue of the moment and I think it’s important to be a savvy consumer of news.
So, what’s the lesson?
Everyone I just listed is acting in what they believe is their own best interest. I’ll stop short of saying they don’t care at all about the Georgia voting laws, but they are certainly positioning themselves and speaking to audiences they care about.
Let’s go one by one:
Coke and Delta (along with other Georgia-based businesses) didn’t ask for this controversy. It was forced upon them and it is, fundamentally, a distraction from what they really want to do.
Delta wants to sell airplane travel.
Coke wants to sell sugar water.
Baseball wants to sell tickets, broadcast rights, and sponsorships.
And their public positions on this (setting aside the personal opinions of their leadership teams) are based primarily on what will help or do the least amount of damage to their profits. Period.
Major League Baseball also likely knew full well that, by taking the public stance it did, it would potentially hear some chest-thumping about antitrust from Capitol Hill. They knew it would come from a party out of power and they knew that a league with a dodgy history on race needed to be proactive on this one.
And far be it from me to suggest Senator Lee doesn’t care about baseball’s antitrust exemption… though I don’t recall ever hearing him mention it before now.
He is, however, speaking out on an issue about which Fox News has been kind enough to rile up his donor base. And with whisperings of potential challengers, now would be an awful time to waste the opportunity to hold a press conference and cash some checks.
And all of that is ok.
But media consumers – you and me – shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that everyone acts in his or her best interest.
As a consumer of news, it’s important to develop the ability to not just accept what is being said, but the motives behind the message.
That’s it for this week.
More On Message in the next issue of the Utah Political Underground. Don’t forget to like this video and subscribe to our new YouTube channel.
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