In the lead-up to the 2004 presidential election, Oberlin students looked at maps and understood that the country was divided between two ideologies represented by Republican red and Democrat blue. In his convocation address, however, the much-lauded columnist Frank Rich gave a different interpretation. In his eyes, America is a divided country not exclusively between “red and blue, but between fiction and reality.”

In his talk, appropriately titled “Art, Culture and Politics,” Rich, a widely-read weekly op-ed writer for The New York Times whom President Nancy Dye praised as one of today’s “most trenchant and astute observers of popular culture and politics,” delivered the first speech of Oberlin’s 2005-2006 Convocation series this past Tuesday to a large and appreciative audience in Finney Chapel.

Rich’s speech was grounded in a critique of America’s news media industry and the government that has consistently used the media almost exclusively to plug its agenda. He described today’s cultural climate as being so saturated in illusions that it has started to resemble “Walt Disney’s dream come true.”

Rich identified the beginning of this trend in a 1977 television miniseries: the groundbreaking and extremely successful Roots, based on the book by Alex Haley. Roots traces the African-American experience in America through the experience of one family. What was so significant about this project — more of a soap opera than a serious drama — was that “it showed you could take history and make it fiction...[you could] give a sanitized version of slavery...[or] anything you wanted.”

This revelation, Rich said, has developed into a concept with far graver implications: “What if you took not just something in the past, but take what’s going on right now and make it into a kind of miniseries?”

According to Rich, this is exactly what happened in the first Gulf War of the early ’90s. CNN became the first network news channel to “package” a war with all the trappings of a narrative television epic: logo, theme song and “experts who weren’t really experts; a flooding cast of characters.” Rich added that the war “did for CNN what Roots did for ABC.”

This approach to television news reporting has since become a widespread phenomenon, Rich explained, and competition has increased with the rise of the Internet and other news sources. This has led to even more fervent fictitious narratives in news reporting. An example Rich gave was that of the death of John F. Kennedy, Jr., which was followed by panels of pretend experts wildly speculating as to what he was doing before his airplane crashed.

“They [made] up theories or plot lines” for his death, “none of which were true,” Rich said.

Transitioning into the present, Rich stated that “the brilliance of the Bush administration is that it has figured out what’s going on [and how] to exploit it, [that this is a] 24/7 media web we live in.”

The news media has stopped asking the “hard questions” altogether in favor of a story that can be easily “packaged.” President George W. Bush did not have to work hard to tell the fictions that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or that Hussein was involved in the Sept. 11th attacks and in league with Osama bin Laden.

News channels also did not ask questions when the administration arranged for a “sanitized” view of the war. Rich used the bombing blitz on Iraq during the first stages of the U.S. invasion as an example. “ ‘Shock and awe’ was a marketing term,” he said. “But, to this day, we still don’t know what was going on or how many Iraqis were killed.”

“ ‘America’s new war,’ kind of like ‘America’s new Coke,’ ” Rich mused bitterly.

Rich offered even further examples of the Bush administration’s narrative-conscious policies: a 48-hour ultimatum for Hussein which lent itself inevitably well to a “countdown clock” graphic; the staged “mission accomplished” speech aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln; and the deliberate romanticizing of football hero Pat Tillman’s death in combat so that it could be more compelling on the evening news.

“This is a news culture where everything is up for grabs,” he said. “Jon Stewart’s slogan [on The Daily Show], ‘the most trusted name in fake news,’ actually means something!”

He acknowledged the faults of even the most respected news sources such as The New York Times and The Washington Post for reporting the fictions put forth by the Bush administration, and said in a softer, sadder tone about the disaster in New Orleans, “We’ve realized in four years that the number one goal of the government is protecting homeland security, and now we know that that was a sham.

“You can play a big role in all this, particularly at a place like Oberlin,” Rich concluded on a more positive note, aimed especially at Oberlin students. “You’re going into this culture in a big way. It’s really up to you to join us and bring this culture back.”