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must have the most intellectually adroit, steadfastly Zionist, Atari-Democrat
mailman in America. At least that's what I assume from the fact
that my copy of The New Republic usually arrives about eight
days late. I figure he's so addicted to Yossi Klein Halevi's Israel
coverage and TNR's (Harvard) Crimson rage over the
Laffer Curve that he only delivers it once he's done with it.
I bring this
up because I only just now got around to reading Jonathan Chait's
cover
story on Bernard Goldberg's New York Times bestseller,
Bias. Chait's piece — as much as it pains me to say
it — is actually pretty good. I don't think he's altogether
fair to the book. But he takes it seriously and makes quite a few
good points.
More importantly,
he doesn't dismiss out of hand the basic reality of the media's
liberal bias. Instead, he concedes just enough reality so as to
not make his arguments dismissible. Don't get me wrong, I think
Chait is wrong about many things (in fact, I have to check, but
I think that might actually be in section 7, paragraph 6 of the
National Review editorial charter; "Jonathan Chait is
wrong about many things."). But he doesn't secrete the sort
of condescending or indignant denial you might find from Eric Alterman
or the zealots at FAIR.
Chait's most
interesting concession — and a point which has been made by
myself and many, many, others in the past — is that the media
isn't so much willfully biased as inclined to follow certain story
lines. Republicans are portrayed as mean or selfish. Democrats are
depicted as intellectually incompetent or soft. For example, Poppa
Bush was "shocked" by a supermarket scanner (he wasn't,
but the Times deceitfully said he was), while Michael Dukakis
released murderers and looked stupid in a tank (apparently designed
in a lab to be the worst presidential candidate in history, Dukakis
spoon-fed his opponents this storyline).
"This
sort of media bias is maddeningly insipid," concedes Chait,
"but in an equal-opportunity way."
"It is
the reason," he goes on, "we invariably see more stories
about poverty and environmental despoliation during Republican administrations,
and more stories about government bloat and military unpreparedness
during Democratic ones."
What's interesting
is that Chait seems to think this is "equal opportunity"
bias. It's only equal opportunity if this transgression manifests
itself in equal proportions and does equal damage. If you smack
me in the head with a tire iron ten times a day while I bop you
in the head with a NERF bat 10 times a day — or 100 —
that's hardly being equal opportunity.
In other words,
Chait assumes that being called heartless, cruel, and greedy is
somehow no more unfair or damaging than being described as too concerned
about the needy. The fact that conservative policies are so likely
to be described as stemming from selfish or nasty motives does a
lot more to discredit our arguments than the minor headaches liberals
have to endure for being described as overly humanitarian.
Indeed, the
moral of almost every biased media story — including the ones
Chait considers biased against liberals — make liberal goals
de facto moral obligations. If we could only afford to do what the
liberals want, says the conventional wisdom, we would do it. For
example, the typical story line is that liberals are determined
in their efforts to do "the right thing" on education
but are stymied by conservative penny-pinchers. Giving everybody
a free college education would be government policy in a "perfect
world." But the fact (or, at least, the conservative position)
is that it wouldn't be a good idea to give everybody a free college
education, a free home, a guaranteed job whatever, even if we
had the money to do it. If your father says, "Son, if we
could afford to buy you a Corvette we would," does that mean
if Dad could afford it, that suddenly it's a good idea for him to
by his nose-pierced layabout kid a hotrod? Of course not.
Alas, too many
conservative politicians argue from frugality instead of principle
in public debates, but that's in part because that's the only sort
of argument the allegedly "socially liberal but fiscally conservative"
media will treat with respect.
A
Conservative by Any Other Name
There
are plenty of other stolen bases in Chait's argument as well. He
dismisses the conservative complaint that the media uses phrases
like "hard right," "far right," "ultra
right," "extreme right," and "right-winger"
far more than it ever uses phrases like "left-winger,"
"far left," etc. His first explanation is that the country
has moved so far right that journalists are simply reporting objective
fact. "[T]he center of American politics has moved rightward
over the last 25 years," he says. "So from these broader
perspectives, it's entirely natural that reporters would label more
contemporary American politicians 'right-wing' than 'left-wing.'"
This sounds
reasonable, but in fact it's daft. First of all, this complaint
is far, far older than a quarter of a century. Recall the reporter
who, upon hearing a few minutes of Barry Goldwater's nomination
speech in 1964 declared, "My God he's going to run as Goldwater!"
Irving Kristol, for example, noted this bias in labeling more than
25 years ago. It was Spiro Agnew's complaints about the liberal
media that got William Safire a job as an ostensibly conservative
columnist. In fact, largely because of conservative complaints I
would say it happens less today than it did 25 years ago. But, it
still happens. A lot.
Second, we
are supposed to believe, according to Chait, that simply because
Democrats have moved to the right that hardcore lefties shouldn't
be described as "left-wingers." Pat Robertson is described
as an extreme right-winger — I would guess — 10,000 times
more frequently than Jesse Jackson is. Maxine Waters, Ralph Nader,
Sheila Jackson Lee, Paul Wellstone et al: These people are all rarely
described as "hard left" by the mainstream media.
I'm willing
to concede Chait's point that they are less relevant than, say,
Tom DeLay. But does irrelevance mean they shouldn't be accurately
described? By that standard, members of the Black Panthers and the
KKK should be described as community activists. And what about the
hordes of insanely left-wing academics and feminists (as Bias
points out) who are regularly cited as respected "experts"
by the press. Why are they immune from truth-in-labeling rules?
Chait does
note that some liberals are described as "unreconstructed liberals."
Indeed, he says "over the last decade, major newspapers have
used the pejorative phrase 'unreconstructed liberal' more than five
times as often as they've used 'unreconstructed conservative.'"
Therefore, he asks, "Why isn't this disparity evidence of anti-liberal
bias?"
One might answer,
simply, that they don't use "unreconstructed conservative"
because so many more pejorative phrases are available — "zealous,"
"inflexible," "ideological" etc.
This no-doubt
meticulously researched "five times as often" assertion
reminds me of an exchange between Kent Brockman and Homer Simpson
on Smartline.
Brockman:
Mr. Simpson, how do respond to the charges that petty vandalism
such as graffiti is down eighty percent, while heavy sack-beatings
are up a shocking nine hundred percent?
Homer:
Aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything,
Kent. Forty percent of all people know that.
Anyway, my
big problem with Chait's analysis in this essay — and in many
others by him — is that he's a dedicated economic liberal.
More to the point, he writes as if the defining difference between
liberals and conservatives is primarily an economic one. He begins
by saying that liberals represent the "economically weak"
while conservatives speak for the "economically powerful."
Obviously,
there's more than a little truth to this characterization. But,
it also reveals Chait's bad faith or his own biased thinking. Most
of the economic conservatives and libertarians I know honestly believe
their/our policies are better for poor people than liberal policies.
That's absolutely true of the school-voucher crowd led by the likes
of Clint Bolick. Those guys have to fight on two fronts: teachers'
unions and rich, white, suburban Republicans who want to keep the
riff-raff out of their schools.
Still, the
real change in the last 25 years hasn't so much been the move to
the right as the ever-growing importance of cultural, as opposed
to economic, divisions. Red States vs. Blue States isn't about capital-gains
tax cuts (indeed the chief beneficiaries of such tax cuts live in
blue states). Indeed, the story of American politics since Richard
Nixon is the growth in importance of social issues.
Chait's obsession
with economics makes him seem more than a bit otherworldly. He is
convinced, for example, that the concessions some network-news shows
make to their corporate owners is a sign of "conservative bias."
Maybe there is some doctrinaire economic conservatism involved in
that, though I hardly see it very often.
But the idea
that corporations are serious engines of conservatism, economic
or cultural, is a conviction clouded by nostalgia for the days when
Thomas Nast drew the captains of industry as fat pigs eating at
the trough of the trusts. Corporations are worse than useless when
it comes to fighting the culture war and only occasionally helpful
in fighting regulations. ABC's parent company, Disney, is a huge
champion of gay rights and a sparring partner of the Christian Right.
The former owner of CNN, Ted Turner, is the U.N.'s biggest booster
and fond of saying nasty things about America, the Pope, Christians,
etc. Corporations, as a rule, are ahead of the U.S. government on
affirmative action and give mightily to Planned Parenthood and PBS.
These "heartless" multinational corporations swallow all
sorts of regulations because they know they are barriers to entry
from would-be competitors and they can pass the costs of these mandates
to consumers.
Bill Gates
is not a Carnegie or Rockefeller — would that he were. Hell,
the Rockefellers aren't even Rockefellers anymore.
Rosie
Revulsion
I should
leave it there. In fact, I planned to just write about Chait's piece
today. But last night I saw the two-hour special on ABC's Primetime
Live on Rosie O'Donnell and her decision to come out of the
closet. This illustrates perfectly the myopia of Chait's analysis.
I cannot remember
the last time I was more outraged by a "news" program.
"Rosie O'Donnell: For the Sake of the Children" was a
sustained, manipulative piece of propaganda for the benefit of making
O'Donnell seem like a hero for being gay and to legitimize gay adoption.
But unlike a John Stossel special, this pretended to be a dispassionate
analysis of the facts. It was subtitled "For the Sake of the
Children" for Pete's sake! That sounds like a Simpsons's
parody.
Diane Sawyer spent two hours relentlessly implementing some memo
from O'Donnell's publicists. Rosie was cast as a reluctant hero
who was willing to make her own sexuality a public issue only because
some HIV-positive children might have to leave their gay foster
parents in Florida. If you're saying, "Huh!?" You'd be
amazed by how much sense it made to the producers. Apples, oranges,
pears, cinderblocks, and the square root of pi — to stretch
a metaphor to the snapping point — were mixed alongside each
other to make it seem like no rational person could have a problem
with gay adoption or Rosie O'Donnell.
This cacophony
of dishonest arguments and baffling non-sequiturs made the viewer
feel like a villain of Dickensian proportions for even questioning
O'Donnell's motives or the insinuation that the problems of foster
care could be solved through gay adoption. Every form of liberal
media bias was present — from framing a broad debate in terms
of one unique circumstance to constant smirking at, and selective
editing of, social conservatives. The only thing missing was any
discussion of tax breaks for corporations, which may be why Chait
can't see the bias in it.
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