TV Reviews / THE NEW SEASON : CNN Examines ‘Government,’ Not Itself

“A Government for the People,” the third in CNN’s “Democracy in America” series (at 7 p.m. Sunday), is a document in despair--even more despairing than the previous segments that essentially depicted an America in the global economic toilet.

Its message of a democracy in peril due to everything from apathy to lobbyists to money is as old as the Republic and old news to voters throwing out incumbents this year with glee. But Brooks Jackson’s report, centering on the prosperous resort town of Hot Springs, Ark. (and continuing the tired trend in election-year reports of casting towns as “Main Street, U.S.A.”), indicates that disposing of one rascal doesn’t mean that another one won’t take his place.

That is due to a myriad of reasons: the growth of competing Senate and House committees and subcommittees; GOP rule in the White House versus Democratic rule on Capitol Hill; the cost of running for office, which makes candidates beholden to fund-raising special interests, which then send lobbyists to pressure that same politician once he or she goes to Washington; and officials who turn elected office into lifetime posts, thanks to that money, those lobbyists and all the campaign handlers.

The finger here is pointed mostly at Congress. But what about the White House and its notorious “revolving door,” which allows officials to move in and out of the private-sector areas they’re regulating? The closest we get to this underreported problem is a lobbyist who also advises the White House: Deborah Steelman, counseling George Bush on health care while tubthumping for pharmaceutical and insurance companies and health care associations. Congress watchdog Michael Waldman calls this “shockingly corrupt.”

One has to wonder about CNN’s own culpability in all of this too. When the report goes after the media for devoting more time to campaign sleaze than substance, and excerpts a clip of Bush chiding CNN’s Mary Tillotson for asking him about a supposed “affair,” it deletes Bush’s pointed reference to CNN.

“A Government for the People” stresses that, because nearly everyone has a special interest, everyone has a responsibility to clean up the political house. Except, it seems, when it comes to CNN reporting on itself.