Don't Answer the Question of the Day

Despite his conservative bent, lawyer and professional ethicist Jack Marshall authors what is consistently one of my favorite blogs, Ethics Alarms.  A recentpost of his attacked the “Question of the Day” posed by CNN’s Carol Costello on Thursday morning.  She asked her viewers to contact the show with their answer as to the rather nonsensical question “Do CEOs make good presidents?”  She went on to cite Donald Trump, Ross Perot, and Herman Cain as examples of CEOs.  Astute observers will notice that none of them were presidents, and they might also realize that no CEOs have ever been presidents.  But as long as Costello had to choose purely hypothetical examples, she certainly could have come up with a more balanced list.

Jack Marshall sees this as proof positive of liberal media bias, and an effort on the part of CNN to torpedo the Romney candidacy by any means necessary.  It’s honestly hard not to agree with him on that latter point, although I don’t for a moment believe in the myth of the liberal media.  The loaded question presented by Costello on Thursday morning was undoubtedly in Obama’s favor, but the overall bias of the media is not towards liberal viewpoints or personalities.  The overall bias is in favor of viewership and profitability, and outside of Fox News and MSNBC, where this is accomplished by a commitment to conservativism and liberalism, respectively, the result is a good deal of duplicity buttressed by base pandering and bad journalism.

Those are the things for which the media must be most vigorously criticized.  And what are more crucial than any particular bias are the elements of laziness and stupidity put on display by this and virtually any other CNN Question of the Day.  I’m not especially bothered by the fact that Carol Costello was trying to not-so-subtly impugn the qualifications of candidate Romney.  What aggravates me is the fact that she was asking her viewers to do it for her.

So we live in a representative democracy.  It’s wonderful; we’re all proud of that fact.  That doesn’t mean, however, that a seemingly democratic process is appropriate for every single social institution.  The fifth estate is supposed to be independent of the ebbs and flows of public opinion, as well as the influence of government.  Indeed, it’s crucial to a well-functioning democracy that the populous be informed by a media which deals in facts and expert dialogue rather than being an aggregator of private, uninformed opinion.

I’d be hard pressed to think of a more uninformed opinion than any response to the question “Do CEOs make good presidents?”  Whether you answer yes or no, your answer is as meaningless as if you had stated your opinion about the financial management skills of the tooth fairy.  There is no information on either topic, so to answer the question is to construct a purely speculative fantasy.  And even if there had been CEO presidents in the past – even if there was a tooth fairy – it wouldn’t make a poll of private opinions any more informative.  As politically engaged citizens, we’re supposed to be able to refer to the news media for information before we form our opinions.

If CNN believes that CEOs, in theory, would make terrible presidents, that’s fine; let them say so.  But let them say so by referring to historical facts and correlating business activities with the challenges that a person can be expected to face in political office.  Completely unbiased journalism is widely regarded as a fantasy, but there’s a clear distinction between responsible and irresponsible bias in reporting.  Framing one’s claim as the question of the day is decidedly irresponsible.  It just allows the network to hide its opinion behind unaffiliated responses to their hideously leading questions.  It parrots the common argumentative tactic of dodging criticism by insisting, “Hey, I’m just asking questions, here.”

Asking questions is indeed a crucial part of the media’s job.  But when it comes to political topics, many so-called journalists seem to have forgotten that other, equally crucial part: providing answers.  If you as a journalist think a question is essential to the public understanding, then it’s your responsibility to bring to bear facts and logic on that question to help the public to resolve it in a way that’s consistent with reality, not just with their preexisting points of view.  And if you find that the question you want to ask can’t be resolved in that way, say because there are no relevant historical data, then you’re probably asking the wrong question.

The modern news media is rife with examples of behaviors just like the CNN Question of the Day.  Instead of listening to the news and being informed, consumers are not encouraged to tweet at live broadcasts, to vote for their favorite stories, to sound off with their views in absence of substantive information that might clarify those views.  When did the media decide that its job is to provide a popular outlet for every individual’s point of view?  And perhaps more important, why does the public seemingly accept this as a good thing?

We all want to have our voices heard.  Of course we do.  But a responsible citizen also takes care to recognize when his voice is actually needed, and when, on the other hand, he needs to keep quiet and listen.  Collectively, we need to step outside of our presumptions from time to time, log off of our otherwise incessant Twitter feeds, and open ourselves up to the presentation of information that exists independent of our relished ability to talk back.  When we do, maybe we’ll take clearer notice of the fact that the people tasked with providing such information simply aren’t doing so, and maybe we’ll use our always-welcome voices to demand more.

The lessons learned from Thursdays Question of the Day almost make me want to believe that some rebel copywriter inserted it into the script in hopes that it would spur some tiny proportion of the audience to sit up and realize, “Hey, I can’t answer this question!  Why on Earth are they asking it?”  Far more likely, though, is that some researchers at CNN crafted that question so that they, and by extension their very network, wouldn’t have to do their job.

The Class Warfare Brand

One of the things that bother me most about American politics and the news media is that conservative forces always seem to be controlling the narrative. As bad as Republicans tend to be at policy, compassion, moderation, and common sense, you’ve got to admit that they’re great at branding. Terminology and concepts that should have equal weight on either side of an issue have a tendency to become tethered to purely conservative ideologies. The phrase “class warfare” is a terrific example of this, and it tends to come up every time policy debates turn toward exploration of the possibility of raising the marginal tax rate on the top one percent of income earners, or of eliminating tax breaks on things like corporate jets. Somehow, that same term doesn’t gain as much popular traction when certain politicians stonewall efforts to extend unemployment benefits, or when unions are stripped of their collective bargaining powers. “Class warfare,” we are evidently meant to conclude, can only be conducted by the poor against the rich, never the other way around.

Thus we have Rush Limbaugh responding to the president’s mention of those tax breaks on corporate jet owners by calling it “dangerous!” and “full-fledged demagoguery!” and claiming that Obama’s “aim is for one group of Americans to hate and despise another!”

How can the effort at narrowing the gap between rich and poor be class warfare if decades of efforts at widening that gap weren’t? What could the president possibly be doing here to make one group of Americans despise another? He’s not changing the landscape of class distinctions in America; he’s just bringing attention to some of its features. If Limbaugh’s concern is that hatred will arise from nothing other than more information, there’s probably something wrong with the reality that is being described. If anything is going to breed hatred and despisal by one group against another, it’s not going to be successful efforts to make the rich take up a fair share of the tax burden. Rather, what will breed hatred is being witness to rich people repelling those efforts and holding fast to the most inequitable elements of American society.

Warfare, you see, is something that happens between two different nations or groups of people. If anyone wants to breed hatred and promote class warfare, it’s people like Rush Limbaugh who seem hell-bent on making the differences between the two groups of people in the United States as stark as possible – one group owning everything, the other nothing. So it is outrageous that he is able to throw those pejorative terms entirely onto the other side of the issue and paint multi-millionaires as the sole victims of unprovoked class warfare.

How are Republicans able to get away with this at every mention of labor policy or class inequality when the claim is so patently absurd? Skillful branding and manipulation of language can go a long way towards making simple acts of conscience appear to be villainous and persecutory. Does the Democratic Party have no public relations people whatsoever, no one who can introduce vivid and effective language on the right side of a topic before it is co-opted by the political right? How awful they must be at PR by comparison when they can’t even use it to promote the truth or the action that better advances the public good, while their opponents can paint lead to look like gold and then sell it to a desperately impoverished metallurgist.

All right, so once again the conservative wing has established the narrative and decided the course of the conversation. This is where it’s time to become proactive and change what it is they’re saying, so they look like the manipulative misers they are, rather than noble martyrs. Glenn Beck has described the corporate jet tax conversation as “unprecedented class warfare!” I would like to see someone respond, “You’re goddamn right it is!” It’s a war we’re engaged in, and you know what? That has great potential to be a good thing in the mind of the public. My dictionary shows that “war” can be defined as “a sustained effort to deal with or end a particular unpleasant or undesirable situation or condition.” How about we put the bitter, self-serving complaints of the right in that context? That would be good branding, and then Beck and Limbaugh would be decrying an unprecedented effort to deal with the unpleasant condition of a broadening gulf between rich and poor, the undesirable situation whereby the rich are given every effort to deepen and extend their wealth, while the poor struggle fruitlessly to find work and keep in their homes.

Being more of the latter class myself, I am afraid I can’t bring myself to be so nuanced, though, in response to the rest of Glenn Beck’s comments about the president’s discussion of corporate jet tax breaks, so don’t read on if you’re offended by strong language. Beck has said that it shows Obama’s “sheer, unadulterated disgust for the wealthy, the successful and anyone who’s ever tried to do anything with their life here in America”

Fuck you, Glenn Beck! How dare you indict anyone else for not inhabiting the same deluded fantasy-land that you’ve built with your $65 million personal wealth? As someone who’s trying desperately to do something with my life here in America and finding that my constant, crushing poverty adds more than a few layers of difficulty to my struggle, I powerfully resent the implication that an effort to get the most obscenely rich members of our society to give back something substantial constitutes a punishment of the ambitious. Your greed and that of those like you is what punishes my ambition, and what’s more, it makes my own personal promotion of class warfare seem ever so justified. Fuck you, Glenn Beck, if you think your success is a testament purely to your hard work and that the poverty of 36 million Americans is underpinned by laziness, and if they all just stepped up their efforts, they could have an eventually-disgraced television show and earnings of up to $11 million a year. Fuck you and your brand of class warfare.

Bias in Favor of Bias

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship have an article at Salon today, in which they claim that when conservatives deride NPR as liberal, they mean something much different from the idea that NPR is equal and opposite to Fox News and conservative talk radio.

They mean it's not accountable to their worldview as conservatives and partisans. They mean it reflects too great a regard for evidence and is too open to reporting different points of views of the same event or idea or issue. Reporting that by its very fact-driven nature often fails to confirm their ideological underpinnings, their way of seeing things (which is why some liberals and Democrats also become irate with NPR).

My own opinion is that NPR is the most reliable source of good reporting left to the American public. And it's certainly far from perfect, but evidently not as far from it as most media consumers want it to be. I deeply appreciate that Moyers and Winship parenthetically note that liberal partisans as well as conservatives are given to criticism of the outlet when it doesn't serve their ends. I encounter entirely too many liberals who take their stand on each piece of news not because they arrived at the liberal view based on an internal coherence of their ideals, but because tribalism picks their side for them.

The best of us are concerned with truth over and above all else, and it is my firm belief that the truth upholds a more characteristically liberal viewpoint. But the best liberals will reevaluate their own views when that is not the case.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of contributors to the public discourse, representing all social and ideological camps, do not hold themselves to that standard. They look for the news that supports their presumptions, and surround themselves with the people who cheer lead the same, not the people who provide them with the most information.

At its best, NPR is of the latter class, but it is disregarded by most conservatives and by some liberals as not upholding their ideas about how the news should be filtered, focused, and distorted.

Moyers and Winship say further:

If "liberal" were the counterpoint to "conservative," NPR would be the mirror of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and James O’Keefe, including the use of their techniques as well as content. Clearly it isn’t. To charge otherwise is a phony gambit aimed at nothing less than quashing the public’s access to non-ideological journalism, narrowing viewpoints to all but one.

That's exactly right. But worse than the fact that that's what is happening is the fact that that seems to be exactly what we want. Or at the least, the ubiquity of ideological journalism has made overwhelming segments of the population blind to the fact that there even is an alternative. It is apparently reflexive for people, conservatives and liberals alike, to class every media outlet, story, and personality as being politically on one side or the other. The notion of unbiased journalism seems to be viewed as some sort of mythological creature that has no purpose for the reality in which we presently live. The powerful irony of that is that unbiased journalism is the only thing that can keep us living in reality.

Unbiased, or at least only lightly biased journalism is not a myth, but it does seem to be facing extinction, and practically every one of us is guilty of encroaching on its habitat and destroying the food source that comes, oddly enough, of us consuming it. We've slowly built to the broad acceptance as normal of media that takes a clear side. I see no reason to believe that the omnipresence of bias will fade by the same mechanism. We've got to realize collectively that we've been going down the wrong road, and indeed, we have to actively remind ourselves of the fact that there even is another road. It's going to take a breaking point in the collective action of media consumers to snap us back to the reality in which reality is still something worth reporting on.

Please help us get there. Turn off talk radio, and give your support only to the news reporters that give you more facts than opinions. Remind everyone you know that we don't have to be pointing at one side of the fence or the other in order to be pointing at something worthwhile.

Legitimation as Bias

I cleaned the bar my brother works at this morning, and the television there provided me a small amount of exposure to the cable news. I gathered that the tea bagger march in Washington has been garnering a lot of media attention. This would not so much piss me off in and of itself – I’m pleased to see anyone’s political engagement having an effect on the public discourse, even if that engagement is based on irrational fear and unjustifiable anger – but I’m viewing it from the perspective of having previously engaged in leftist political protests. That being the case, I believe the first words out of my mouth when I saw the live footage on CNN were “Why are they covering this shit?” My annoyance was compounded by some of the dialogue I heard in the background as I went about my business.

“It doesn’t look like there’s THAT many people behind you just yet.”

“No, not YET.”

On the plus side, this has reminded me of, and given me a decent context for, exposition of a new theory about the myth of the liberal media, which had occurred to me earlier in the course of this health care fiasco.

The notion that the media is liberally biased is, to be frank, insane horseshit. Anybody with genuinely liberal ideologies and an impulse to express those publicly knows that it is horseshit. If I had had any doubts that it was horseshit, they were dispelled in March of 2006. On the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, I took a bus to Washington D.C. to participate in a widely and elaborately organized demonstration against the war. Now, I am not good at estimating numbers of people even when they’re in small groups of dozens or hundreds, let alone when they are clustered on and around the national mall, stretching seemingly endlessly in every direction, and appearing as one expanse of solid texture in photographs from the top of the Washington Monument. But in identifying the numbers of people at the anti-war protest that I attended (one of several, in fact) I believe it is sufficient to use the vague, but still impressive phrase “hundreds of thousands.” Hundreds of thousands of left-leaning, politically active individuals came together from around the country, organized on political advocacy websites, and without promotion on CNN, MSNBC, or any other major outlet so frequently accused of being champions of liberal propaganda.

Now, I don’t remember all the details of this protest, or its itinerary. But I recall that we marched past the White House. We marched past Congress. We marched past the Supreme Court. We marched for miles and for hours, filling the streets where most of federal power resides. We chanted, we demonstrated, we danced. We expressed our anger, and we expressed our hope, and we expressed our conviction. We clashed with a handful of opponents on a couple of occasions. Along the course of the march, there was part of a particular block where a group of respectably committed, though to my mind misguided, counter-protesters chose to set themselves up to express their opposition to us, and perhaps give us something to contend with. They shouted at us as we walked past, and we walked past, shouting at them, save for a few who felt some pull towards loudly discussing the issue point-by-point. Physically, the counter-protest was barely a blip on one’s radar during the course of the route and the day. I did, however, consider it to be of particular interest, because it was at the meeting point of the two groups, however numerically imbalanced that they were, that the polarizing nature of the issues came to light. I enjoyed encountering them as a part of the larger experience of our demonstration. They provided an outlet for our anger, but the innumerable masses of people demonstrating against war were a focal point for my sense of hope and purpose.

Feeling proud of myself and my generation, I kept an eye on the news the next day, understanding that it was the attention we had brought to our cause that would show the value in our actions. I didn’t see it on the front page of any of the newspapers that I encountered in New York that day. I don’t remember what the typical front-page story was – but it must have been important. So I figured the coverage would begin on page two, or page three. No. Page four? No. Okay, it wasn’t in there. Newspapers were already starting to die at that time, anyway. The internet – that’s the place to look for the real news! Well, it wasn’t on Yahoo, or AOL, or any of the other first-look sources of news people generally encounter when they log on. Well, that was kind of weird, but I know: how about the bastions of liberalism that are the news networks, like CNN, which I’ve heard doggedly referred to as the “Communist News Network”? Or MSNBC, home of the rabid ideologue, Keith Olbermann? Nothing. There was no coverage whatsoever in any source, or any medium, of any demonstrations in Washington D.C. the prior day.

Actually, that’s not true. I did manage to find one article that fit that description. The headline read: “Hundreds come out in D.C. to rally in support of the troops.” Beneath that, a closely framed photograph of the conservative counter-demonstrators, conveniently angled away from our protest route. Whoever the jackass reporter that stumbled through D.C. that afternoon was, he turned his back on a hundred thousand people to focus his camera on the bearers of a voice that was, by comparison, insignificant. And he took it to his liberally biased editors, and they printed it without a word of context indicating that they were there specifically counter to the movement of which I was a part.

That is how the liberal movement was treated in the media, to greater and lesser extent, throughout the Bush presidency. And yet even then I heard people describing the media as being dominated by liberalism. I honestly do not grasp what that was based on, if not that that media had the audacity to eventually and occasionally point out mistakes and errors of fact coming out of the Bush White House. You hear this refrain about bias even more loudly now that conservatives are the ones who have prominent policies to protest. And the rationalization of this claim, often transparently suggestive of a martyrdom complex, has come to be very much curved around a frustrated expectation of equivalence. About the health care town halls I have noticed several conservative commentators excusing irresponsibly hyperbolic, aggressive, and stupid behavior by saying that there were plenty of people acting similarly during the Bush administration. I saw Fox News air a photo montage of posters that applied imagery as provocative and Hitler mustaches and Nazi arm bands to President Bush when he was the object of the ire of liberals. This they set against similar depictions of President Obama in recent months, toward the end of pointing out that Conservatives seem to be taking flak for the overreaching imagery of their protest, whereas the news hardly showed such things coming from the other side of the aisle during the last administration.

I heartily agree with that superficial assessment. It is interesting, however, that I derive a conclusion from that observation that is diametrically opposed to the conclusion Fox expects its viewers to take for granted. They believe that any failure to criticize equivalent activities coming from distinct groups is automatically indicative of a strong bias in favor of the group not being criticized. But that ignores very pertinent information about why stupid participants weren’t highlights of coverage of liberal protests. There was no coverage of liberal protests. On the other hand, there was no delay in not only covering conservative protests against attempts to increase health care, but also making it the focal point of the discussion.

I think the media is biased in favor of conservativism. I fervently believe that I base this on an assessment of the available evidence, and not on a commitment to a martyrdom complex. I also think that when stretched beyond one sentence, my claim of conservative media bias is rather restrained, and non-dogmatic. I don’t think the media is conservative because I think that most members of it are conservative. That may well not be the case. Put simply, because it is not the topic of this entry, I think that corporate interests tend more often to be in line with conservative policy issues, and that the media serves corporate interests, and consequently favors conservativism as a matter of course. I would also put forth, though, as something that is more in line with the topic I am seeking to discuss, that it may simply be the case that the media, whether conceived as an amorphous entity or a collection of individuals, sees the United States on the whole as more conservative than liberal. That seems plausible, and it also seems like it could be an important claim because it doesn’t require dogmatic conviction that the media is slanted in one direction or another. It allows the media to be effectively neutral, while believing that coverage of political issues needs to be geared towards one side of the spectrum in order to gain the attention of the largest portion of the viewing audience.

That is essentially, if simplistically, what I think the last several years of news coverage has suggested. With a bit of analysis, it also demonstrates a potential reason why conservatives believe that the media is biased against them, when in actuality it is more likely biased in favor of them. The nature of that bias is not a statement of agreement or disagreement on matters of opinion. The news should not and, to its credit, rarely does make such uncompromising pronouncements. What it does do is legitimate one set of views over another. In their minds, liberals don’t deserve news coverage, because no matter how many people turn out to demonstrate against the war, they are in the minority. The conservatives who were cheerleading the war, even though not many of them came out to do so visibly – they are the ones who represent the more mainstream American viewpoints.

Now, under a Democratic president, and in the midst of the health care debate, there is a different modus operandi when it comes to addressing protests. That is, they are addressed. And not only that, every protesting view is considered legitimate, no matter how outlandish and vitriolic. Sarah Palin claimed that Obama would create death panels to judge whether people should live or die, and it remains a topic of discussion even to this day. Some conservative politicians are still trying to exploit it for their ends, and everybody else feels as though they have to keep bringing it up and then saying “But it’s not really true.” Then why do we have to keep talking about it? Why was attention being given so long to the “birther movement”? And for the sake of equivalence, why don’t the liberals who follow Alex Jones get the same kind of attention? I suppose that it’s because left-wing conspiracy theories are considered to be absurdly far outside of the mainstream, whereas right-wing conspiracy theories are just fringe movements that raise real concerns relevant to the mainstream political discourse.

But it’s quite easy to understand how this perception leads to the belief that the media hates conservatives. If you have wildly nutty ideas, people with access to the facts will seem to be making fun of you when they undercut your political prejudices with genuine information. But take it as a compliment that you’re not being ignored. There is, apparently, value in your nuttiness. On the other hand, if nobody’s talking about you, nobody’s making fun of you. But don’t lose sight of the fact that nobody’s talking about you – it probably means they don’t consider you important. That, I believe, is the important distinction to make when it comes to assessing the bias of the media. If a news outlet fails to cover the craziness on one side of the aisle, and that coincides with ignoring the moderate views standing beside it, that does not mean the outlet agrees with that camp, and indeed, it may mean the opposite.