Media Fairness As Justice

I’ve been holding off posting about memogate out of respect for the worm’s rotational speed. Where we stop, nobody knows. Here I go.

First, a bit of prophecy. No, prophecy’s a fool’s game. On to philosophy (ba-dum, crash, thanks for coming out tonight.)

Some months ago Colby Cosh quoted an amusing law: “A public figure is often condemned for an action that is taken unfairly out of context but nevertheless reflects, in a compelling and encapsulated manner, an underlying truth about that person.” Dan Rather is a perfect case in point. No, not for memogate. For that he is to burn, and rightly so. I’m thinking about the other thing. Today in Slate:

And don’t forget the 1986 “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” attack, in which Rather was accosted by street toughs on Park Avenue in New York. You can hardly blame Rather for that one, but Boyer [author of Who Killed CBS?] notes that such things rarely seem to happen to Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings. It’s as if Rather attracts half the madness in the universe, and the other half comes out of his mouth.

Dan “Courage” Rather: his long and public career littered with not inconsiderable evidence he is a bit nuts (if not, as our author entertainingly exaggerates, “barking mad”); yet our author cannot refrain from hanging it all – praeteritio – from the catchy hook of the ONE mad thing that happened to him NOT as a result of his own madness.

A confirming instance, then. The law, however, would be wiser if it read ‘perceived underlying truth’. It governs a common species of characterological confirmation bias, facetiously glossed as microcosmic-macrocosmic insight (‘all the madness of the universe in a single anchor’), sprinkled with grated scapegoat and a dollop of poetic justice as fairness. (Unreasonable people deserve to be unreasonably condemned.) Garnish with reserved preconceptions. Serve. Feeds many. In fact, feeds back. (You have a view of someone’s character. You seize on the slenderest confirming ‘evidence’ as dispositive proof. This ‘evidence’ becomes an emblem, intensifying the initial view. So you are more inclined to seize more ‘evidence’. So it goes.)

I trust no one thinks reasoning in this bats-are-bugs way is respectable. In the realm of politics, in particular, potentially decent folks get seriously tarred with this sort of horsefeathers. (It isn’t just that it’s not what you say about the issues, it’s what the issues say about you; sadly, it’s what the non-issues say about you.)

Memogate is indeed a case in point, although not with respect to Rather. The victim here may turn out to be Kerry. Here is Hugh Hewitt on the memo Meta-Meme: The Forgery is John Kerry and John Kerry is the Forgery:

John Kerry ought not to have been hurt by the Rathergate scandal. [Hewitt ought to be made captain of Bush’s Praeteritiorian Guard for this brilliant disavowal-before-the-avowal.] There is thus far no firm evidence that any Kerry operative arranged for the forgeries to surface or helped persuade Rather et al to run with the doctored docs. [And with this bait of truth we may catch the carp of falsehood.]

But the scandal has indeed hurt him, badly, and not just as some talking heads suggested by denying him even the possibility of traction with the electorate at a moment when his campaign is foundering.

The forged docs have hurt Rather and CBS because he and it ought to have seen through them. They shouldn’t have been fooled because the docs were so obviously inauthentic.

Which brings us to John Kerry, the candidate who is defined by his inauthenticity.

Kerry is one of the most liberal members of the United States Senate – the most liberal member if you believe The National Journal – but Kerry has tried to portray himself as a centrist.

Since the docs are inauthentic, Rather was fooled, Rather is liberal, the media is liberal, the media is fooled, the medias is biased, liberals are inauthentic, Kerry is liberal, Kerry is inauthentic, Kerry is the same as the memos, the forged memos are an emblem of a deep truth about Kerry’s character. QED. BFA (by free association).

(And never mind the big bug scourge of the skies ‘most liberal’ charge.)

It is harder to get the media (a.k.a. the Mainstream Media, a.k.a. Old Media) off the memogate hook.This is a delicate point, but I think however the flames blow, it’s not the partisan heat but the stupidity.

It is truly very surprising that expert – even amateur – document authentication at CBS was functionally absent. (In the early days of memogate, there was much intelligent and vigorous amateur apologetics on behalf of the memos by outsiders. But CBS itself was a no-show.)

To what extent is it reasonable to generalize from this case – Rather’s case – the the mainstream media as a whole? One-off flukey breakdown or systemic defect? You’ve got to ask yourself like any sane person: what’s the frequency, Kenneth?

Instapundit links approvingly to the Slate article quoted above, which argues Rather is stark raving; also that his uniquely privileged position allowed him to continue in this lively vein for decades where others would have been fired. Whether this is true or not, Reynolds is happy to buy, but it hardly seems a model for mainstream/old media as a whole. How is Rather the exception that proves the rule, rather than the exception that just is the exception? I realize he’s powerful, but there are other people in the media. How does the way he is prove the way the others are?

I much enjoyed the recent, lively roundtable discussion of ‘moral relativism’ – initiated by Vokokh, taken up by Yglesias, Weatherson, Drum, and others. Let us consider ‘liberal media bias’. As with ‘moral relativism’, the very meaning of the charge – never mind its truth – is elusive. This makes proof by means of anecdotal evidence doubly dubious. The non-question-begging form of the question is ‘what is media bias?’ Liberals say there is conservative bias. Everyone grants that there are, at least potentially, non-partisan forms of bias, e.g. bias in favor of sensationalism, bias in favor of stories that can be told like exciting stories. But what does it really mean to say ‘the media is biased in favor of x’, where x is some ethico-political perspective, value or party? The charge may look simple but is almost certainly compound. This consideration gets short shrift even in rather lengthy discussions of the subject I have read. Let’s just google up a set of possible definitions for ‘bias’. WordNet gets top hits and will do:

1) a partiality that prevents objective consideration of an issue or situation

2) a line or cut across a fabric that is not at right angles to a side of the fabric

3) influence in an unfair way; “you are biasing my choice by telling me yours”

4) cause to be biased

So bias may be: an intellectual failing (procedural irrationality), a moral failing (procedural injustice), diagonality or obliquity (a.k.a. somehow not playing it straight for tactical reasons), or being the cause in others of any or all of the aforementioned.

I think the charge of ‘media bias’ is usually an unspecified mix of all four. (If you doubt that fabric has much to do with alleged media fabrications, think of Polonius’ little disquisition on push-polling: “And thus do we of wisdom and of reach/ With windlasses and with assays of bias/ By indirections find directions out.” Well, not quite push-polling, but it’s Rovean in its deceitfulness.)

Four related senses might not seem too intoxicating a semantic mix. But then again it might be better to decide once and for all whether what you are saying is that everyone in the mainstream media is insane, or evil, or insane and evil, or neither insane and/or evil yet systemically the cause of insanity and/or evil in others, or just sneaky. Or what.

You might think it is self-evident journalistic duty to weigh evidence fairly; ethics and objectivity then cannot fail to line up. Well, you wouldn’t be wrong, but it’s hard to say what ‘fairly’ means in a way that will forestall dispute. Worse, people do not bother to charge media bias unless they mean to indict ‘the system’. But to allege general media bias would seem to require fairly comprehensive evidence concerning the whole media ecology. Above all, we also need a normative background of ‘media fairness as justice’, to coin a phrase. The idea is surely supposed to be that partisan journalists can (or ideally should) be brought to see, not that their specific partisan allegiance is mistaken, but that their over-aggressive deployments of it on some or all occasions should be voluntarily restrained in the service of higher principles of fairness (or something). Maybe we should work out what general agreements about distribution of informational goods would be ideally agreeable to reasonable parties (say, from behind a veil of ignorance preventing all parties from knowing what parties they belong to, and what media organs they control.)

We needn’t get so infernally Rawlsian right off the bat, it will be objected. (It would annoy conservatives to have to become John Rawls in order to defeat liberalism, which is why I am enjoying writing this post.) Just a Free Market of Ideas, not a Welfare State of Ideas, please. The truth will out. Some Hayekian order of things.

This is a possible view. But I don’t think it’s what most complainers about media bias are asking for. Let me suggest why. Suppose it were suggested that a Free Market of Ideas is guaranteed sufficiently by free speech guarantees. Well, obviously this isn’t enough for most conservative complainers about media bias, who know they’ve already got the First Amendment. (I’m setting aside screwballs who think Kerry wants to take away Bibles.) What conservatives think they should get is equal representation on the evening news and the editorial page. (Never mind for the moment whether they are unreasonable not to notice they’ve already got it.) But why should Republicans be represented, let alone equally? Isn’t a demand to have one’s voice not just not muzzled but broadcast an unconscionable prejudgment of the operation of the invisible hand of the free market? If it turns out that 89% of journalists are Democrats (I think I saw that figure, which was not accompanied by any statistic about how many CEO’s of media corporations are Republicans) – if most journalists are Democrats, why should this be regarded as proof of Democratic bias, rather than proof that truth itself is biased against Republicans, since the market rejects them? Obviously the response will run: this market isn’t fair. Which may be fair enough. But there’s that word again, ‘fair’. If a market should be not just free but ‘fair’, what sense of justice helps us understand what ‘fair’ means? Economically, we understand that a free market is supposed to be optimal for the production of wealth and acceptable for its distrubition. But what is a free market in ideas – a Media Market of Ideas – supposed to optimize: truth? The trouble with saying the market of ideas is supposed to optimize truth, and then complaining about partisanship as an obstacle, is that you must decide whether one partisan perspective is ‘truer’ than the other. If yes, then partisanship is actually what the market should aim at, not avoid. If not, then partisanship is not obviously a hindrance to truth. (Think about it. No really, this isn’t sophistry.)

It is plausible what people really think should be optimized is not the production of truths but the expression of belief (and not because this mix conduces to truth but as an end in itself). A range of beliefs. A suitable, representative range of beliefs. The thought is that everyone has a right not just to get the truth from the media but to have their ‘truth’ (i.e. belief) heard by others. The media ought to ‘sound like’ America. But unless this thought is accompanied by a relativistic belief that all beliefs are equally valid, we are now heading away from a free market, not towards it. The idea that everyone is entitled to equal representation in the media is akin to the economic proposition that everyone should be guaranteed about the same amount of money, which is not notably Hayekian. The sense of ‘fairness’ in play here is at least Rawlsian, if not positively communistic. Its doxastic affirmative action. You make sure no one is left behind, is silenced, unheard, excluded. Proper distribution of the media pie is more important, maybe, than ‘growing’ the pie.

A third possibility, aside from maximizing truth or starting a doxastic welfare state, is to suggest that media fairness truly does entail cultivating some lofty class of Watcher-like observers who indeed do nothing that could possibly express partisanship, let alone influence politics to the advantage of one side or the other. This strikes me as not just unrealistic but pretty clearly incoherent, but someone might try to make out how it is possible.

A fourth possibility is that media fairness just means coming up with the least uncivilized forum you can in which people who can’t agree to agree can disagree without hurting each other. Media as scream therapy Let everyone get their doxastic aggressions out with respect to everyone else, and – to make this possible – make the fight maximally open to all whose blood is angried up by the news. On this model the point is more to relieve stress than to arrive at truth (which may be deemed counter-intuitive, though it is certainly true that people enjoy politics the way they enjoy sports, as entertainment for spectators, and as good mental exercise for amateur participants.) This is media-as-those-padded-bats – you know, the ones in in Dr. Marvin Monroe’s family therapy center? Fairness just means: effective aggression therapy. (Any takers for this theory of media fairness?)

A fifth possibility is that major media figures, like Rather, should be regarded as political appointees – like Supreme Court justices (especially in light of average retirement age.) But there are awkwardnesses whose relevation I leave to the reader’s imagination.

A sixth possibility is that somehow it is mystically or pragmatically necessary to have a balance of partisanship in the media – just as there needs to be vigorous prosecution and defense in a trial. No one person can think both like a prosecutor and a defense attorney, and no one person can be left and right, but you need both, so the tasks need to be split, with a jury to vote. Why this sort of institutionally-induced schizophrenia is a precondition for civic mental health is obscure but perhaps there is something to it.

Looking over my notes I have fourteen points to go. That will never do. Quickly now, one of the big problems with wading into media bias with vague notions is that there are too many things that could potentially answer to ‘bias’. This creates what we might call a ‘grievance hazard’ (analogous to a moral hazard). The narcissism of small diffidences, giving people the pleasure of feeling abused by ‘the system’.

1) Just to get it out of the way, there is what we may call the null sense of ‘bias’. Charges of liberal media bias are often insincere. In What Liberal Media? Eric Alterman quotes former Republican chair Rich Bond about how crying ‘liberal bias’ is often just a matter of ‘working the ref’ in the hopes he’ll cut extra slack next time. (So charging ‘media bias’ is sometimes actually an indulgence in it, if ‘bias’ is understood to cover ‘attempts to make others biased’.) Alterman also quotes Grover Norquist: “The conservative press is self-consciously conservative and self-consciously part of the team. The liberal press is much larger, but at the same time it sees itself as the establishment press. So it’s conflicted. Sometimes it thinks it needs to be critical of both sides.” Norquist hereby acknowledges the existence of what Yglesias aptly terms the ‘hack gap‘, which considerably hobbles the left. Well, I’m obviously a liberal talking here. But conservatives can at least agree that there is such a thing as working the ref. Probably they think liberals do it too.

2. Related to the null sense of ‘media bias’ is an analytic or redundant sense. Let’s use ‘liberal bias’ as our example. Liberal media = liberal media bias. Since liberalism is known (to all decent God-fearing folk) to be just plain wrong and not in any sense an even minimally valid point of view, any liberal reporter or reportage or media organ must be biased. Any story – even a true story – that would tend to incline viewers towards liberalism is biased (since a thing that causes bias is itself, by definition, biased.) Any flagrantly wrong result, systematically arrived at through multiple trials, must be the result of some systemic defect – a bias, if you will – in the mechanism.

Making ‘liberal media bias’ into a pleonastic way of saying ‘liberal media’ is obviously not terribly interesting, unless we want to change the subject and debate the permissibility of profound intolerance for alternative points of view in a democratic system. (Is it immoral to think the other side is intolerably evil and wrong?) Arguing about media bias, in a spirit of justice, is only interesting if you are trying to articulate an overarching framework of fairness that it is reasonable to expect all parties to grant is a fair framework. The assumption that liberalism is wrong will not be granted by liberals, ergo this proposal is a non-starter. (And of course the same is true in reverse about conservatism.) Nevertheless this redundancy sense of bias is important, I think, because it is the source of many frivolous accusations of bias, which are not so much insincere (as per 1) but too fanatically sincere for their own good.

I think senses 1) and 2) generate a lot of noise that one should strive to hear past. They explain how a lot of people come to feel aggrieved, i.e. by inhabiting their academy award-winning poor-poor-pitiful-me performances with a bit too much Method Acting sincerity, or else by mistaking their own intolerance of other points of view for other points of views’ intolerance of them. (I think this page is pretty clearly 95% noise, due to 1 and 2. And this is one of the more prominent conservative media watchdogs (I think). It is a very bad sign that liberal media bias is explained as partly due to the fact that, since “journalism school graduates have not been properly educated about the importance of telling the truth, there is a constant influx of new journalists who start out on the wrong foot.” Assuming that liberals know they are lying – since everyone knows liberalism is false, but not everyone knows lying is wrong – is paranoid.)

3) There’s the ‘I am the center of the universe‘ sense of bias. This is a slight broadening of 2). Degree of media bias is a straightforward function of degree of divergence from my own views, which are (naturally) sober and considered and unbiased. There is a sense in which we all inevitably feel this way, even though it’s silly. This is actually a interesting psychological datum. It has to do with partisan alignment (values generally) being, at bottom, a rather murky business – a temperament, but how does one arrive at it? A temperament is not an intellectual conclusion or even a choice. It is tempting, then, to flirt with the notion that all partisanship just IS a sort of bias, i.e. a systemic tendency to arrive at some set of irrational results. (It’s not rational because at bottom it has no transparent explanation.) Of course this lesson is never applied home. And it isn’t really clear that it is usefully applied abroad. It trivializes the notion of bias by universalizing it (with one minute but egotistically important exception.)

Obviously this is useless as a basis for formulating any shared sense of media fairness. (“I’m the center of the universe.” “No, I’m the center of the universe.” “I’m the center of the universe and so’s my wife!”) But here again I think we probably have the source of much useless noise, as per 1) and 2).

4) Alternatively you could more democratically declare that bias is a function of degree of deviation from some inherently moderate mean or average of all the positions, weighted for popularity. I think there is a sense in which this is what people are probably saying they are looking for from their news anchors when they say they should be ‘unbiased’ (even though if they got it they’d probably be bored). But it doesn’t make a lot of sense. It turns any strong but unpopular or extreme view into a bias, by definition. But people who have unusual views are often far more reflective about them than people who don’t. Turning the point around, this approach makes being bland and wishy-washy and unreflective (just going with the flow) into being fair, by definition. There might be an argument for insisting that news anchors be bland, in this average-of-all-positions way, as a sort of crude proxy of Watcher-like lofty uninvolvement. But it wouldn’t make much sense to go on and call this ‘fair and balanced’. It’s more a diplomatic solution than an intellectual one. So it shouldn’t be argued for by arguing against ‘bias’.

5) What 3) and 4) try to do is turn (almost) any sort of licit partisanship into bias, by definition. This isn’t really satisfactory, so you might try making ‘bias’ a function of illicit partisanship. You say you are ‘fair and balanced’, or you say your media organ presents both sides, but it really pushes one side. This amounts to working the ref (as per 1) but from the inside, as it were. (It is also a ‘not playing it straight’ kind of case. You present yourself as one thing, when in fact you are something else.) There is a bit of oddity here in that it does not necessarily follow that the person pretending to be what they are not – e.g. neutral – is actually biased. They might be highly reflective about their views and aware of the arguments on both sides. Nevertheless they try to get other people to accept the views they think are right in sneaky ways. Let me subdivide these cases further:

5a) You pretend to be utterly objective and non-partisan, in a Watcher-like way, but really you have some (possibly very slight) partisan bent, and you perfectly well know it.

5b) You say you are utterly objective and non-partisan, in a Watcher-like way, but really you have some (possibly very slight) partisan bent, only you don’t know it. (You are always unconsciously picking loaded terms to describe disputes – describing those you like as activists, those you don’t as special interests; some folks are freedom fighters, others are terrorists, so forth. Your colors show.)

5c) Underreported partisanship. You frankly admit to being partisan, but you intentionally fail to disclose the degree of your partisanship. (You say you are a moderate Republican when actually you are way out on the right wingtip, say.) This can seem less dishonest (biased) than a) or b), because at least you aren’t pretending to be neutral. So it’s only one lie, not two. But if the degree of disconnect between your self-positioning and your actual position is extreme it is arguable that you are more biased (in the sense of sneaky and causing bias in others) than a) or b).

There is a temptation (especially on the right) to assume that no opinion journalism can be accused of media bias (talk radio is defended this way) because it doesn’t pretend to be what it is not, i.e. neutral (whereas supposedly network news does cultivate this lofty air). But this doesn’t obviously make sense since there are things besides ‘neutrality’ that you can pretend to. The potential for deceit (causing bias in others) is huge once you have decided you can express whatever opinion you please, however irrational, false or misleading.

5d) Like 5c but a case of severe false-consciousness, rather than conscious concealment. It is quite likely that, due to 1)-3) many people who are not moderates, in any clear sense, sincerrely believe that they are. This is likely to lead to them being biased in a number of obvious ways.

6) Rhetorical bias. A nice quote:

Spoken by a good actor – and every great preacher, every successful advocate and politician is, among other things, a consummate actor – words can exercise an almost magical power over their hearers. Because of the essential irrationality of this power, even the best-intentioned of public speakers probably do more harm than good. When an orator, by the mere magic of words and a golden voice, persuades his audience of the rightness of a bad cause, we are very properly shocked. We ought to feel the same dismay whenever we find the same irrelevant tricks being used to persuade people of the rightness of a good cause. The belief engendered may be desirable, but the grounds for it are intrinsically wrong, and those who use the devices of oratory for instilling even right beliefs are guilty of pandering to the least creditable elements in human nature. By exercising their disastrous gift of the gab, they deepen the quasi-hypnotic trance in which most human beings live and from which it is the aim and purpose of all true philosophy, all genuinely spiritual religion to deliver them. – Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun

By the logic of this admirably high-minded passage, any media person, process or product that avails itself of the tools of rhetoric, for good or ill, is biased: intellectually and morally discreditable, and the cause of bias in others. The trouble is that this is obviously too high a standard for practical purposes. The fact that Huxley writes almost magically well almost makes us overlook the fact that what he proposes makes no sense. We are all completely guilty of using some rhetoric, so there’s no point trying to maintain our own innocence if this is the standard. Here again we have a sort of grievance hazard. I think many accusations of bias do boil down to a feeling of indignation at the other side’s rhetoric, and a feeling that one’s own is not only decorative but functional.

Still, it does seem that one has to distinguish between degrees. There are sound arguments, rhetorically armored and streamlined for maximum penetration of thick enemy skulls. And there is just plain nonsense all the way down. And a lot in between. The former pole is less clearly ‘biased’ than the latter.

And there is no question that the liveliness of the general issue of ‘media bias’ depends on this sense – shared by Huxley – that we are all half-hypnotized and, dammit, something ought to be done to mitigate our sorry state.

Rhetoric needs something like ‘just war’ theory. Some set of rules that acknowledges that violence, deceit and nastiness are inevitable, but perhaps some of the worst excesses can be legislated away for the greater good of all. (Advocating rhetoric-free argumentation is like advocating pacificism. Noble but sadly not fit for this world of ours, unless you are incredibly lucky enough to be dealing with some University educated British folks in a moment of great self-doubt – like Ghandi.)

I don’t think many people who condemn their opponents’ use of rhetoric as ‘bias’ have a suitable ‘just war’ theory of argument, as it were.

I guess I’m just sayin that, between the rock of not really having a good ecological theory of the media as a whole, and the hard place of not having really worked out exactly what sort of bias is bothering them, I suspect certain bloggy media critics could slow down before trying to leverage Dan Rather’s pain into a world-historical moment.

I have several more points but that’s enough. I’m going to watch “Hellboy”. Do think Tom Waits ever wonders whether if he went to the gym he could look like Ron Perlman?