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worth repeating |
The winter Charter Lecture was delivered by Lawrence M. Friedman, Kirkwood Professor of Law at Stanford University. Some excerpts: “The media have created a new class of people—intimate strangers. . . . The celebrities become so familiar to us they’re probably more familiar than the people who live down the street. They’re so familiar we often call them by their first names—Oprah, Bill, Hillary, Tony or whatnot. But honestly—they don’t know us. We are looking at them, seeing them, through a one-way mirror. . . . “Now it’s uncomfortable in some ways to be a celebrity, to be on the other side of the mirror.… And it’s very odd and unsettling that people think they know you, that they recognize you, that you can’t walk down the street or go to a restaurant or shop. . . . Celebrities are willing to put up with this, I suppose, because that’s where their money, power and fame come from. “But that’s equally true of political figures. There’s no longer any room in political life for people who are shy, who would find the one-way mirror intrusive—only those who thrive on it can survive. So the world of the one-way mirror has transformed politics. Ideology has been at least partly replaced by image. In fact, politics is a much more extreme case than sports. “A baseball star is a celebrity but he has to be a good baseball player. His image, his personal life, his way of walking and talking, that’s secondary. If he plays badly, consistently, he’s going to lose his job and his celebrity status. But in politics image is almost all there is. A successful politician is one who cultivates the right image and makes the best use of the media.” |
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| —Beth Roberts |