Unless your friends are the open-minded, cool-headed sort, it’s probably
a good idea to avoid any kind of discussion about politics if you still
want invites to their backyard barbecues and all-night keggers.
Political divisiveness being what it is, voicing support for a candidate
or policy is a good way to get paperweights chucked at your head. Civil
discourse has become the jousting event on American Gladiators.
Fortunately, a guy like me has friends who can discuss opposing
viewpoints without bare-knuckle fisticuffs. That’s a nice luxury for a
man to enjoy.
Less enjoyable is that, if talking to a conservative or
libertarian, I can never gain traction in these discussions – because I
belong to the “liberal media.” The ultimate trump card, “liberal media”
is a phrase that effectively ends all conversation, because it re-casts
everything I’ve said as biased and invalid. Never mind that it’s a myth
as fanciful as the gods of Olympus, or a thought-provoking Pauley Shore
movie. It’s a cheat code, an end-run around any serious examination of a
person’s own logic.
When relating stories involving personal acquaintances, I like to change
their names for two reasons: To protect their identities, and because
naming things is fun. So allow me to share an anecdote about my good
buddy “Skeletor.”
One thing I should make clear is that Skeletor’s an awesome dude in just
about every way. He’s gregarious, generous, thoughtful, and has that
rare ability to grow a lumberjack beard overnight, indicating
testosterone levels that could mutate a small animal. But he’s a
believer in an inherently liberal media, a vast machine that is somehow
controlled by a sinister puppeteer with a donkey emblem on his chest and
a cape made of food stamps.
About a year ago, I sat with him in his computer room while we discussed
the issue, and while the conversation was civil and free of acrimony,
at some point in the evening he did something telling: He turned to his
computer screen and opened up the Drudge Report, an unabashedly
right-leaning news site with blatantly leading headlines such as “Bill
allows criminal illegals safe harbor,” and “Obama: Anti-Christ, or just a
big fat doodie-head?”
Oh, Skeletor.
While he doesn’t share many of their more distasteful
characteristics, he does unfortunately belong to that group of people
who blast the mainstream media for liberal bias – and then in the next
breath, praise conservatively biased news outlets for telling the
“truth.” That there exists a choice of legitimately neutral news
organizations is a thought that never occurs to this group. It’s not
controversial enough. It’s more exciting – and more gratifying to one’s
ego – to believe that there’s a small, savvy elite who have figured out
how to get their news from “real” news sources that “tell it like it
is.” (As an aside, putting words in quote marks is “fun.”)
Do some news outlets have an indisputably liberal bent? Of course. When
reports surfaced that the IRS had targeted conservative political groups
for special scrutiny, and that the Obama administration may have known
about it, anchors at MSNBC set land speed records racing to their desks
to defend the president – with pundits like Lawrence O’Donnell stopping
just short of painting a watercolor of the chief executive wearing fig
leaves and a Roman toga.
And, as any yin must have its yang, MSNBC has Fox News, that paean to
tunnel-vision Republicanism. Windbags like Sean Hannity were perplexed
when the George W. Bush administration wasn’t immediately followed by
the rapture, so convinced were they that he was the second coming of the
messiah.
So yes, biases of every political stripe exist in media. That’s been the
case since the 18th century, when state’s rights newspapers accused
President Washington of promoting a strong federal government so he
could subvert the burgeoning republic with a monarchy.
But it’s been the nonpartisan faction of the mainstream media – led by
honest, objective journalists – that has broken some of history’s most
important stories, and held governments and politicians accountable.
Watergate, the atrocities of Vietnam, abuses at Guantanamo Bay; these
were all stories broken by the media. Not some guy in a basement
blogging his conspiracy theories about Martians brainwashing Americans
through subliminal messages in Clorox commercials; the media. The people who break their backs,
and in some cases risk their lives, to deliver impartial information.
Look, it’s a way more complex media landscape than it was 40, 50 years
ago. That’s obvious. We’ve come a long way from the days of good ol’
reliable Walter Cronkite. It’s harder to know which media outlets are
objective, and which are trying to advance a partisan agenda. But it’s
not impossible. The further one gets from the broad center of media, the more likely it is to encounter
bias, not less. That’s what’s sad about the post-millennial electorate:
Because shunning something mainstream is attractive to people, everyone
retreats to their respective corners, fomenting dissent from the
fringes, where true bias is born. In seeking the truth, they actively
avoid it.
Restoring the public’s trust in real journalism is key to ensuring that
the fringe outlets don’t become mainstream themselves. How do we do
this? By convincing Skeletor to delete the Drudge Report from his
Internet bookmarks.
I hope he doesn’t bristle at the suggestion. ‘Cause honestly, I don’t
want to stop being invited to his cookouts. His potato salad is to die
for.
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