How To Watch Cable News (If You Have To) Matt Harrison
A quick trip to David Horowitz's FrontPage Magazine yielded the following quote. Lowell Ponte, in his article, "The Fraud 'From Flint'", asked rhetorically:
"So who is Michael Moore, this multi-millionaire filmmaker and author of several books, who has been called "the Left's only well-known shock jock," compared by Christopher Hitchens to socialist Adolf Hitler's film propagandist Leni Riefenstahl?"
A few observations on the matter:
1) Why would a conservative cite liberal Christopher Hitchens, who presumably would make a similar Nazi connection to Ariel Sharon?
2) Why would a Nazi comparison be cited as any justification, even as conservatives decry every Nazi comparison that is made against President George W. Bush?
3) Why waste so much energy discrediting a man whose opera presents plenty of fodder for rebuttal without resorting to ad hominem hyperbole?
Yes, the absence of reason is pervasive, and not just on the web.
It is tiring to hear partisans tendentiously screech about how they feel their rights are being trampled by a phantom emasculating force: media bias against their candidates.
They scream, Fox/NPR,NYT,CBS are so right/left biased! They are the reason Bush/Clinton was re-elected! The American people are blinded to the truth!
The authentic truth, anathema to the partisans, is that certain institutions are biased left and certain are biased right. Yet in the end, it has nugatory effect over a mostly apathetic and uninformed hoi polloi.
Who are the people who are getting fooled by "media bias"? People who don't know about politics and don't care. Guess what, if they're not smart enough to see through media bias, they are just waiting to mirror the politics of someone else. It might be their boss, their friends, or their pastor. Smart, ideological people don't buy into biased reporting. Apathetic and uninformed people do.
More than that, the only people who are bothered by liberal bias are conservatives. Liberals don't notice the "bias" because it's truth, as far as they're concerned. And thus, much of news will retain this contentious feature - not everything in politics is an ideologically-blind, universal truth. Partisans should be free to receive their news with the spin/embellishment they feel appropriate.
For what it's worth, the biggest source of successful political bias is from one's parents. In fact, it is the most reliable predictor of party preference known to public opinion researchers. So should we ban politically biased comments from parent to child? Require that a child register in the opposite party as his parents for at least one six (6) month period?
From the left, the prescription for the imagined disease of media bias is to apply some suavely populist Gleichschaltung to American media. Then, by extension, we are to be satisfied with the prospect of a state-run media monopoly spouting little but monotonous bureaucratic drivel. Yes. In the mind of the liberal, a government that controls who and what may be aired preserves more freedom than marginally-biased news stations that give people what they want, ignorant as it may be.
It seems many forget that there exists no Constitutional right to force your neighbor to think like you.
But they persist, clamoring for government intervention. It'll be awesome, man, just like in Europe where the proverbial hemp curtain is pulled over the eyes of the citizenry as the government-controlled, owned, and operated media churns out anti-American propaganda by the barrel!
Of course, European homogeneity makes the process of indoctrination easier (as World War II proved), yet we Americans should still cast a wary eye toward proposed state takeovers of our flawed, yet indispensable, information distilleries.
Even if media bias were a problem, the only palatable and reasonable solution to the issue would be the exact same as the current solution to other media flaws: deregulation.
The extreme amount of FCC and other government regulations create barriers to entry and limit the pool of theoretical competitors for the Big Media conglomerates. Were the equipment the sole requirement to be aired on television/radio, the sheer diversity of content would naturally erode the market shares of the establishment stations.
Technology, we hope, is the eventual equalizer. Any information one chooses to find is available on the internet. This website, itself, functions as an online watchdog for independent thinkers. On this website, you can read reasoned responses to the aforementioned lacunae on the major cable shows.
Where the intelligence needed to combat media bias won't be found
Cable news certainly does not represent the solution, a reality to which Jon Stewart would attest.
There, Bill O'Reilly is the most conspicuous example of contempt toward classical debate. Any individual interested in examples of his sophistries is welcome to watch The O'Reilly Factor. It is an exercise in masochism, I confess, that rarely tempts me.
However, I will share one personal story (not to be confused with the Personal Story Segment, all you BillO'Reilly.com Premium Members out there) regarding the Factor.
A while back, Mr. O'Reilly decided the best allocation of his Media Superhero resources would be to dedicate an episode of his show to Chevy Chase and his infamous (then recent) remark that President Bush was a "dumbfuck".
The conclusion, according to Mr. O'Reilly, was that the Left, and only the Left, applies profane degradation as its modus operandi toward its political opposition.
(Mr. O'Reilly, as an artifact of his linguistic limitations, of course did not use the term profane degradation. However, for the linguistic integrity of this piece, I shall translate for him.)
Mr. O'Reilly challenged his viewers and guests to cite an example of a prominent Republican using profanity in an attack on a Democratic individual. Be warned, Mr. O'Reilly sternly informed us, The Factor has exhausted all sources and discovered that no such event ever occurred.
Certain guests attempted to cite prominent Republicans who criticized President Clinton pejoratively, but Mr. Reilly admonished them that profanity was the sine qua non of the radical and mean-spirited (a word he did actually use, also a favorite of Sean Hannity) tactics of the Left.
Anyway, flash forward to the next night. The viewer mail poured in, and a viewer shrewdly recalled Vice President Cheney's "go fuck yourself" remark to Senator Patrick Leahy. That's profane degradation, right?
No, said O'Reilly. The object was to find examples of disrespect toward the Presidential office, the subject our fearless host clearly considered immaterial the night before.
So this is an atrocious example of the disappearance of erudite commentary. What does it mean?
The answer to the rhetorical question ending the last paragraph
If you are on the American Left, it means that Fox News as an institution is involved with the systematic indoctrination of citizens with pro-Bush propaganda.
To that end, the "documentary" OutFoxed spent ninety paralogistic minutes "proving" the bias of Fox News.
Its main feature was obviously objective (sarcasm alert) commentary from Al Franken, et al., regarding the clear political agenda of the station. What Mr. Franken's "expertise" has to do with Fox is beyond everyone, except perhaps the filmmakers and Mr. Franken.
It also "proved" its point with clips of Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly employing their typically opinionated bloviation. The examples were relevant and probative only if any person with an IQ above the absolute value of room temperature thought those two were supposed to be objective journalists.
The film also accused Fox of "creating a cultural divide" by, get this, actually reporting on same-sex marriage news. One is left to suppose that a conscious bowdlerization of all current events from news stories would create national unity. One also now understands why Middle Eastern countries are so unified - against America.
Fox was further indicted of reporting, believe it or not, Good News in Iraq. While Americans are dying, we are supposed to presume, there are no bits of Good News to be discovered anywhere within the country. Well, forgive me, but I'd rather know about something positive going on there than cry myself to sleep listening to Cindy Sheehan. I'm not a current events masochist.
The "documentary" closed with hortatory monologues from the aforementioned leftist leaders (mostly Mr. Franken) regarding the necessity of anger, Speaking Out!, balance, revolution, objectivity, socialist viewpoints, Democracy in Action, subsidized network news, and Air America radio, inter alia, to Fight Back and/or Take Action against the Corporate/Conservative Conspiracy.
Certainly we could listen to Mr. Franken, who has stepped up to the plate and delivered the equanimous political reasoning Fox lacks in his best-selling book, Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot. Or, we could pick up the title of his archrival, Ann Coulter, who penned the similarly engaging How To Talk To A Liberal (If You Have To).
Those are our choices. It's about time for something fresh, wouldn't you say?
The above work is the opinion of the author,
and not necessarily that of the Prometheus Institute.
