notes on a child nutrition hearing

In “Congressional Procedures and the Policy Process,” Walter Oleszek states that, “Hearings are perhaps the most orchestrated phase of policymaking” (96).  Congressional hearings are part of a larger political strategy to shape public opinion by shining light on an issue, grilling an official, or showcasing selected viewpoints.  While hearings are conducted to look somewhat spontaneous (witnesses do appear before a panel of Congress members in real time), testimonies are prepared, submitted, circulated, and sometimes even practiced in mock sessions long before the C-SPAN cameras turn on.  Often, the soft or piercing questions by Members come from scripts prepared beforehand.  Hearings are thus not-too-distant cousins of plays—albeit, pretty boring ones.

Last week I attended a hearing on child nutrition programs held by the House Committee on Education and Labor.  I wasn’t early for the hearing, which meant I didn’t score a seat and had to settle for the televised showing in an overflow room.  Unfortunately the volume on the television was broken, and the crowded room strained to hear the testimony.  Fortunately for me, hearings are pre-planned, and I had read the witnesses’ submitted testimony at a coffee shop over the weekend. 

One exchange between by Rep. Kline, ranking Republican on the Committee, and Dora Rivas, the representative from the School Nutrition Association, during the question and answer portion of the hearing was a particularly theatrical moment:

[Regarding Rivas’s recommendation to revise the ‘time and place’ rule so that the Sec. of Agriculture can regulate all food on campus]

Rep. Kline: “So you want to regulate the bake sale?”

Rivas: “We want to expand the time and place rule, so that nutrition rules are consistent for all food on campus.”  

(okay, I can’t find direct audio so that was paraphrased)

Kline was presumably trolling for a soundbite (the socialist Dems want to take away your banana bread!), a trap that Rivas purposefully evaded (though Rep. Kline would not be defeated; he concluded his questioning by stating, “So basically what I hear is that you want to regulate the bake sale”).

A few Members later, the topic of bake sales and banana bread came up again in Rep. Fudge’s questioning; only this time the foods were given a more impersonal, slightly menacing name: “competitive foods” – foods that battle with healthy foods in the struggle for children’s attention and taste buds.  Congresswoman Fudge’s questions were short and to the point.

Rep. Fudge: Do you want to regulate competitive foods?

Rivas: Yes.

Rep. Fudge then turned her attention to Lucy Gettmen of the National School Board Association, the minority’s witness.  Fudge attacked the underlying logic of Gettman’s testimony—that local decision makers are the best people to regulate school foods—by citing statistics that strongly suggest that local school boards are doing a miserable job in reducing junk food in schools.  Gettman offered a jumbled, confused, and inadequate response (Point – Fudge!).  Overall, the Q&A would have been scored a resounding victory for Rep. Fudge, except for the Pepsi can that was sitting on her desk – a shining silver symbol of contradiction anchoring the bottom-right corner of the camera frame. 

There was political jockeying, with Members drawing lines in the proverbial sandbox, and positioning themselves strategically; there were bland questions and passionate testimony; and of course, there were calls for more funding by practically every witness.  Hearings like this are supposed to cover the major issues of a topic, and in doing so they map out the boundaries of a particular political discourse.

What wasn’t discussed was perhaps just as strategic as what was.  There was no discussion about HFCS.  There was no discussion about the repercussions of an absent food culture.  There was no discussion about working with the Committee on Agriculture to tackle the thorny issue of agricultural subsidies and the practice of dumping unhealthy surplus calories into the USDA’s school commodity program.  There was no discussion about dismantling the powerful agroindustry monopolies that are the [genetically engineered?] seeds of America’s growing child nutrition problems.  The radius of dissent was instead reduced to relatively minute disputes – finding more funding, reducing paperwork, maybe adding a few more veggies and some non-dairy milk options – a conversation confined to issues of little threat to the agroindustrial status quo.

the Newseum

So DC has a new museum – the Newseum, an enterprise that is a physical feed of all the world’s news and a shrine to corporate media.  Located in a seven-story building that doubles as a glass box, the Newseum’s physical structure depicts the value that lies at the core of news: transparency – the unobstructed flow of information.  The Newseum also gives out discount coupons, which is why Christy and I went last Sunday.

Since the Newseum is a museum, it is a dignified form of propaganda, and the exhibits aggrandize news by highlighting the patriotic foundations of the First Amendment.  Visitors are encouraged to start their visit by watching the introductory film “What Is News?”, a video that frames the museum experience.  News, according to the film, is a variety of large, abstract, and oppositional nouns: news is war, peace, love, hate, liberty, and FREEDOM (the film ends with the word “freedom” sung opera-like to the tune of patriotic trumpets).  The take-home message from the film, and from the museum as a whole, is that truth has power, and as the conveyor of truth, news has the power to shape the course of history. 

Having stated its thesis to the tune of heavenly trumpets, the museum went to work with examples to support its argument.  Immediately upon exiting the theater, visitors encounter a section of the Berlin Wall and a three-story East German control tower, all part of an exhibit that explains how a free press helped liberate Eastern Europe from the oppressive yoke of communism.  The next major exhibit is the gallery of Pulitzer-Prize winning photographs, a dark space punctuated by striking images and small captions that contextualize the photos.

A few floors above the Berlin Wall is another piece of tangible history: a mangled news tower from the World Trade Center.  The 9-11 exhibition reminds visitors about the many dangers of the world and the heroism of the news industry in case such worries slipped visitors’ minds sometime between sobbing over the Pulitzer Photos and discovering the fourth floor.  Next to the tower is a two-story wall that lined with the front pages of newspapers devoted to 9-11 from around the world.  The headlines, not the details, catch the eye: “ACT OF EVIL”, “ATTACKED”, “INFAMY”.  The sensationalism of the exhibition climaxes with a video memorial to William Biggart, a photojournalist who died taking photos of the falling North Tower.  Biggart’s camera, equipment, and press ID were later recovered and are set inside a glass display case, which is featured in a larger exhibit of his final pictures.  If the Newseum did not plan for the 9-11 exhibition to be teeming with emotional triggers, the convenient placement of a tissue box near the exhibit’s entrance shows that the Newseum is at least aware that it is.

What is not news

Having taken the effort to define what is news, what is not included in the museum is presumably ‘not news’ by Newseum standards. 

While the museum drives home the point that news is an agent of change, it ignores the element of agency.  Understandably, any acknowledgment or discussion of corporate censorship of news has been censored out of the museum.  Also missing is any reflection on the trend away from objective reporters and towards blatantly partisan commentators, a discussion confined to a few sentences on a tiny panel in the History of Internet, TV, and Radio exhibit.  The absence of this discussion was made all the more glaring by one sentence in the same exhibit, whose sheer irony stopped me in my tracks: “In 2008, the public voted Jon Stewart of The Daily Show as the most trusted news source on TV.”  When a comedian who makes a living by highlighting the idiocy and bias of other news stations is considered the most trusted news reporter on TV, what does that say about news in America?

And then, the gigantic iPhone-like-thing

Enter the Ethics Center, a whizzing hub of interactive technology.  Along one wall visitors can play reporter and record their own news clips.  In one of many little kiosks, the camera-shy can play ethics games on a touch-screen and test their knowledge of the journalistic moral code.  The highlight of the room is a table with an infared surface that makes it like a giant iPhone screen, where visitors can grab little avatars holding ethics questions in manila folders to answer questions about proper journalistic practices.  The whir of technology in the Ethics Center is an experience akin to stepping into CNN’s Situation Room, a new channel that has embraced social media and spiffy IT equipment, ranging from giant touch-sensitive TV screens to Beam-Me-Up-Scotty holographic reporters (I kid you not). 

While Star Trek technology is eye catching and the interactive exhibits tickled the twelve year old in me, the prominent display of advanced technology gave me a feeling of information overload (not dissimilar to when I watch Wolf Blitzer).  The constant and multiple streams of information flowing through multiple technologies in real time can elicit feelings of helplessness (how to manage all this information??), which encourages dependence on news stations to use their super-technologies to decipher what is important from the jumble of noise.  And so we tune in to CNN.  $$$.

Overall, the museum is part news, part sensationalism, and part information overload, which is actually a quite accurate depiction of news.  In the end it was all worthwhile, because the Newseum had the Star-Bulletin (still alive for the moment!) on display.