Check out Sgt. Stryker on the bubble that some right-wingers are making for themselves regarding bad news from Iraq (via Gary Farber). He sees this as a mirror image of a left-wing bubble that has existed since September 11th.
Stryker is a likable, moderate right-winger, whom I greatly respect. I have no doubt that he’s calling it like he sees it. Here’s my attempt to call it like I see it:
I don’t think that it’s the same thing. Left-wingers spend a lot of time just talking to each other. That’s one kind of bubble. And, there’s no doubt that movement left-wingers and movement right-wingers have a tendency to trumpet news that’s congruent with their political attitudes, and a tendency to scrutinize contrary news more carefully. And, I have no doubt that, for all of us, the other side’s tendency is much, much more frustrating than our own. This leads to the totally, totally awesome posts wherein someone discovers that those treacherous Elses haven’t made enough noise about X, proving that their alleged belief in equality/liberty/ lies in tattered rags.* But it’s inevitable.
What isn’t
Finally, if you haven’t heard the Sgt. Stryker’s piece about the bubble that some right-wingers are making for themselves regarding bad news from Iraq (via Gary Farber). He sees this as a mirror image of a bubble that the left has been in.
Stryker is a likable, pro-war moderate right-winger, and I have no doubt that he’s calling it like he sees it. Here’s me calling it like I see it, in brief:
I don’t think that it’s the same thing. There’s no doubt that movement left-wingers and movement right-wingers have a tendency to embrace news that’scongruent with their political attitudes, and a tendency to scrutinize contrary evidence more carefully. This opens us all up for totally, totally awesome posts wherein someone discovers that those treacherous Elses haven’t paid enough attention to our favorite story, proving that they hate America/freedom/minorities/whatever. But, it’s probably inevitable.
However. Left-wingers haven’t put the loathing and rejection of the mainstream media close to the center of their intellectual movement.
I can have an intelligent discussion with someone who argues that (say) the biases of reporters lead them to unconsciously slant the news toward liberal points of view. I generally don’t, because I’m sick of it, but sometimes they’ve got some reasonable points.
What I’ve seen recently is different. I’m seeing a number of conservatives who seem to think that the media is deliberately doing what it can to lose the war in Iraq in order to discredit Bush. Matthew Yglesias puts it well:
Flip over to, say, Instapundit and you’ll see that Baudrillard simply spoke of the wrong Gulf War when he said it didn’t really happen. Over there, it appears, the second Gulf War is just a social construction of the virulently anti-Bush US news media. Nevermind that the foreign news media paints a distinctly bleaker picture. Nevermind that some of the voices of bleakness (Bill Kristol, George Will, etc.) can hardly be said to be virulently anti-Bush or liberal. Just nevermind. Bad news can be dismissed because the media is biased, and you can tell the media is biased because they keep reporting so much bad news!
Here’s Roger Simon: “In a world where people’s heads are being lopped off and others are being castrated live these sleazy careerists (the media) are hellbent on winning an election over all.” He simply refuses to believe any negative story from Seymour Hersh. Instapundit sees pictures of vandalized New York Times newboxes and asks for more. One of his readers emails “I’ve tuned out the MSM (mainstream media) and rely on the ‘Net — bloggers, Lucianne.com, etc. — to keep me informed, which it does quite well. That way I get all the info but don’t have to endure Dan, Tom and Peter, Wolf, etc. I miss nothing that’s happening but I gain all the stories that the mainstream media simply ignore.” Lucianne.com, for Christ’s sake. Ralph Peters writes about “journalists sympathetic to terrorists and murderers” and says that in Falujah, “The media weren’t reporting. They were taking sides. With our enemies. And our enemies won. Because, under media assault, we lost our will to fight on.” (The pen is that much mightier that the sword, apparently.) The President himself “to see his news reading largely, if not entirely, as an exercise in detecting liberal media bias,” in Josh Marshall’s words, and prides himself on avoiding opposing viewpoints. Mort Kondracke writes that “The American establishment, led by the media and politicians, is in danger of talking the United States into defeat in Iraq.” (It’s funny; Republicans control all three branches of the federal government, have a loud, loyal media megaphone, and control a political machine that would make Lyndon Johnson weep with envy. And yet, many still see themselves as being under the boot of “the establishment”, and think that they can pawn off responsibility for their failures on a handful of critics. It reminds me of one of my favorite Digby posts. Anyway…)
I’m coming to believe that the incredible popularity of the “blame the liberal media first” mindset is going to be pretty bad for the country.
(ALSO: http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_05_21.shtml#1085433164)