Culture Vulture on the Wing
Feminism and media manipulation
Note: The following is a column I wrote (by-line Constance Gilbert-Neiss) which appeared in the News-Record of Maplewood and South Orange (NJ) on May 23, 1980. I covered the Board of Education beat, along with the column. It was coughed up (typed, Xeroxed, hard copy) during my latest joust with the beast of clutter, soon after the 300,000 person march against climate change in New York City which got no press at all down here. I was horrified to realize, in principle, the column is as timely now as it was then.
Well, the eastern establishment press has done it again. Most local people recall, if dimly, the massive July 9, 1978, March on Washington, D.C. which brought 100,000 Equal Rights Amendment supporters to demonstrate, successfully, for an extension of the original ratification deadline.
The July 9 March received network news coverage and a sizable portion on page one of The New York Times.
How many of you know, however, that a similar demonstration, possibly even larger and certainly, from a personal perspective, more impressive and enjoyable took place in Chicago on the Saturday of last Mother’s Day weekend?
This the Times granted a front page picture, according to my husband, and about seven inches of “perfunctory” coverage inside — but most of us never saw even that, because it was excluded totally from the edition of the paper distributed in New Jersey.
Later in the week, however, we were treated to a two-inch snippet of rumor-mongering that rivals the National Enquirer: Springfield, the Illinois capital, was abuzz with reports of bribery in the campaign for and against that state’s ratification of the ERA. Neither specific details nor direct attribution were included in the article, of course, leaving the reader to ponder, perhaps deliciously, whether Phyllis Schafly or the National Organization for Women were stupid enough, and affluent enough, to stoop to such a ploy.
Frankly, the whole thing is laughable — the funniest ERA story since our 3-year-old, who obligingly replied “I want to grow up equal” to all inquiries, ambushed us with this exchange: “How do you want to grow up, Scotty?” “Fast!” (The key to this, we found out, is our argument that children are not allowed to eat junk food, especially sweetened, artifically colored cereals, until they are grown up and on their own!)
Anyway, any amateur political analyst with a few basic facts can get to the bottom of the bribery rumor; the wonder is that the Times, with all that high-powered, high-paid talent, missed the boat.
The basic facts are these: A few weeks ago a columnist named Mile Royko, based in Chicago and syndicated in one of the major Philadelphia papers (and no doubt elsewhere), did a piece wringing his hands over the supposedly inefficient use of NOW’s reported $200,000 budget for the Illinois ratification effort. We could get immediate results at half the price, he urged, by resorting to bribery.
He was being funny — or trying to be funny. Of this I am convinced — though heaven knows it isn’t easy, these days, to separate the political commentators from the humorists, myself included.
But anyone who’s been near the front lines of the ERA battle all these years knows the lack of credibility of the bribery charges. NOW is neither that stupid nor that rich; Royko’s figures, I suspect, are seriously deflated. Some years ago I was personally offered Louisiana, fully ratified, for the bargain sum of $1,000,000. That native son who made the offer had impeccable social and political credentials, and maybe he was right. We’ll never know, thankfully.
The Schafly camp, counting their camp-followers the reactionary New Right, probably have the money to indulge in such an effort — but contrary to all their public utterances, they aren’t stupid, either. Their lies are carefully and, within their limitations, intelligently contrived, packaged and presented.
The funniest recent, flat-out lie was that the ERA supporters who came from every state in the United States to march in Chicago on May 10 — and the highest official estimate of attendance reached 125,000 — were each paid $10 to attend. That’s pretty silly, considering the NOW-NJ ERA train fare of $120, and the “Give Mom Equal Rights for Mothers Day” buttons Essex County NOW members sold to help defray their expenses.
It would all be hilarious — except that the ERA, and Constitutional equality within our lifetimes, is not a laughing matter.
For the immediate future, however, I’ll choose to get my laughs (and aggravation) from the Board of Education and stick to the News-Record (read Konk Life) for reality.
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