CRESCENT People: Tucker Eskew (Part 3)
DURING THE WAR
It was the early days of the war in Afghanistan, fast forwarding now a month or two after 9/11. America was getting attacked heavily by our opponents, terrorists, radical jihadists, and their allies in the global media. A lot of this was happening in the region, and some of it was happening in, what was then, a world media center including the Arab and Muslim press, in London. I drew the short straw and went to London instead of Islamabad, but I took my wife and the then one child and lived in London close to six months and worked with a great leader in Tony Blair.
I got to witness a media culture there which sadly I feel is kind of drifting west. It was, without a doubt, the most corrosive cynical media climate that I’d ever been exposed to. Here I was, the son of a journalist who’d been through some very tough battles, including with reporters and their bosses, and yet we could retain the fairness of the American public debate. This was a culture where newspapers would put illustrations of George Bush with blood dripping off his hands on the front page or our vice president with fangs that dripped blood and painted as a warlord. These were papers who sold copies in the millions. It was a very (news)paper-driven culture, and I think it is to this day, as opposed to the television which is the driving force in political campaigns here.
I remember the first day I got there, I told people that the way I operated was, I just like to immerse myself in the press. I want to read everything I can. I want to see how it’s playing on TV. I want to live it and breathe it. The day before I went home, they threw a little luncheon for me, and I told them immersed myself like I said, but that I just wanted to go home and take a bath. It was that ugly a climate, and yet, Tony Blair is a model for our current president after this election the change in parties from the left back toward the center.
Where are we now? We’ve lost confidence. We’ve “lost trust,” to borrow a phrase from South Carolina. We’ve lost trust in the institutions all up and down the line.
Gallup did one of its periodic surveys of how the public views various institutions. You’ll find the military as the most trusted institution in our society, and you’ll see our Congress ranked at the very very bottom. The media takes it on the chin pretty tough, and it’s dropping – dropping a little faster than other institutions.
That center, that civic space that holds everything together, is crumbling. I think it’s incumbent on all of us to look for ways, small ways in our daily lives, to try to keep that center, regardless of ideology, that we keep that civic space where we work to get things done for the country.
Stay Tuned for the Final Part of the Feature Next Week. Read Part 1 HERE and Part 2 HERE.
