Academic Rigor

Today’s Morning Edition broadcast featured an interview with Professor Richard Arum of NYU, who has recently done a study ostensibly demonstrating that a “lack of academic rigor leaves students adrift.” When asked about my alma mater in particular, Professor Arum pointedly skirted the issue, instead making the general statement that expensive private universities are slightly more demanding, and elicit slightly more conviction from their students. While that may be true, he left no doubt that the problem is faced across the board by American institutions of higher learning: their students are demonstrating very little improvement in writing and critical thinking skills. I’m very certain that that is a problem among NYU students, as well, but my agreement with Professor Arum does not extend very far beyond the basic recognition of the problem. Much to the contrary of his thesis, I am quite willing to lay the blame for failure to acquire intellectual skills squarely on the students thus failing. Of course, to my mind, the real issue is that they would not fail at that were they not unfairly expected to demonstrate that improvement in the first place. Whereas Professor Arum seems to expect that heightened academic standards and stronger curricula can bring growing numbers of students up to appreciable levels of improvement, I seek to emphasize that so long as enrollment grows, such standards will be increasingly difficult to meet.

No academic standards and no reasonable educational philosophy can improve writing and critical thinking skills among young people who have no interest in acquiring them in the first place. I am growing enormously impatient for the public dialogue about college education to reach a breaking point whereby someone acknowledges that it’s unsustainable and indeed damaging to continue on with the familiar trend of impelling every high school student to go to an institution of higher learning. Some students simply have no interest in college. Why is this a dirty secret that no one sees fit to acknowledge? What’s more, some students are no doubt better off not attending, both for their own sake and for the sake of society at large. Some people can be happy as line cooks and car mechanics, and they can do a damn good job of filling social roles that still need to be filled. And yet we go on emphasizing the crucial importance of a college education, somehow oblivious to the fact that at a certain point, we are going to end up with large segments of society academically trained and doing decidedly non-academic jobs. Like myself, right now, for instance. But you see, in my case, I had a tremendous amount of interest in applying my education to a highly intellectual career path. Others do not have that impulse, and yet they follow the same path, not only wasting their own time needlessly, but bringing down the overall academic standards of the institutions into which they flood.

Professor Arum directly acknowledges that there has been a fifty percent drop in the average number of hours spent in study by students over the course of the past few decades, but apparently he expects us to conclude from that that the demands placed on college students have inexplicably diminished during that time. Is it not more likely that the average level of commitment from students has declined as more and more of them are pushed, against their own inclinations, into academic pursuits? There’s got to come a time when a person like Professor Arum looks at this data and breaks away from the indoctrinated view that more formal education is always good for everybody. There must be.

Super Bowl Ads

I’m the sort of person who likes to watch the Super Bowl for the commercials. However, my enjoyment of advertising is not limited to that occasion, on which it has acquired a reputation for tremendous entertainment value. I find advertising terribly interesting, and I derive a lot of enjoyment from analyzing it – what I think works and what I think doesn’t, and moreover what I think the persons responsible for the advertisement are saying about their target audience and society at large.

I didn’t watch the Super Bowl last night, as I don’t have television, and haven’t for quite some time. I did, however, take a look at a handful of the commercials online today. Of those that I viewed, I found the spots for Groupon and Living Social to be the best, both on point of humor and evident effectiveness. That was remarkable to me, because these are the newest companies represented, and indeed the newest kinds of companies in the current market. Concordantly, it seemed to me that they both produced commercials very specifically geared to a new generation of consumer.

Whereas the other spots that I sampled seemed fairly ordinary and non-adventurous with their content, the Groupon and Living Social ads seemed to be taking chances that might have alienated certain viewers, but likely not those that could be expected to utilize their services. The Groupon ads both made use of the same premise, masquerading as public service announcements for several seconds before effectively disregarding the plight of the whales and the Tibetan people in order to laud a deal related to each of them that the spokesperson had acquired through Groupon. The campaign runs the risk of being accused of insensitivity, but I think it adeptly walks that line without crossing it. The gamble at play here is, I think, an understanding about the social character of highly modern consumers, and I think the Groupon ads do a good job of identifying their target audience as the sort that would be likely to take an interest in social and environmental issues, but not in a humorless way. I take the makers of these spots to be assuming that the persons they are seeking to reach do not take themselves too seriously, and can laugh over their own causes, that they will both give those causes their attention and set them aside when it’s not an immediate concern, in order to take a nice whale-watching trip, or have a Tibetan meal. It may in fact be a jaded perspective, or it may be a livable and realistic one, but in any event, I agree with the implicit claim that it’s characteristic of the current generation.

Living Social goes another route, and puts itself at risk of being accused not of a deficiency of sensitivity, but of an excess of it. They present a burly, reclusive man at the start of the thirty second spot, and show him discovering Living Social and being exposed to a wealth of new activities and products, which change his appearance until, in the final reveal, he approaches a classy bar dressed as a woman. I imagine that there must be some amount of tenuousness when the idea has been presented to portray transvestitism positively during the nation’s most-watched sporting event. But anything with such a large audience is likely to have a diverse set of viewers, and Living Social did a fine job of zeroing in on those of them that would be likely to use their service, namely young, urban, open-minded consumers. The ad strikes me as a skillful act of selective alienation, with the makers of it recognizing at the outset that they were not going to reach everybody, and so making an ad that would be appealing only to the emergent market that their similarly nascent business is trying to tap. It is probably the case that only people who are okay with alternative lifestyles are likely to utilize Living Social.

I think it is interesting that the youngest companies have done some of the best jobs at trying to appeal to the youngest consumers. They do not have entrenched models for their advertising, and they may well have hired young firms to craft the commercials for them. It makes good sense that what is new in the marketplace of goods and services would mesh best with what is new in the marketplace of social ideas.

Film Analysis: Daybreakers

I stumbled upon the trailer for Daybreakers online quite some time ago, and immediately added it to my Netflix queue. I’ve finally gotten around to watching it, having found myself in the mood for a film rooted in horror. The reason I was so eager to see this one in the first place, though, was that the trailer made it quite apparent that the screenplay used the vampire phenomenon as a metaphor for modern dependence on scarce resources, particularly foreign oil. Watching the film, I found that that metaphor was presented in such obvious terms as to not call for any real comment.

It is not until the resolution to the plot that the film comes to say much more than “We can’t live without this, it’s killing people, and we’re running out.” I would point out, then, that as with any film analyses I do, this makes no effort to conceal plot points for anyone who has not seen the movie.

The basic background of the story is that by the year 2019, the world has become overrun with vampires, such that they are now the dominant society, with human beings either farmed for their blood or in hiding somewhere out in the countryside. The central protagonist is a vampire hematologist hard at work on the production of a synthetic substitute for human blood, which is distributed as is any consumer good in ordinary human society, and which it is painfully obvious is rapidly running out. We learn in time that the doctor is driven not only by concerns over the survival of his species, but by a moral imperative to protect the victims of systematic blood harvesting. In a plot point that I was pleased to discover closely parallels my own current position as a vegetarian sausage maker, the main character, who even shares my first name, is said to be employed by a company that makes its money through the capture and killing of human beings while personally abstaining completely from the drinking of human blood, relying instead on that of less nourishing animals.

The situation of increasing scarcity and the imperative search for an alternate source of the same basic good blatantly mimics the familiar energy crisis and the increasing emphasis on solar power, wind turbines, nuclear plants, and the like. Scatterings of dialogue throughout the film present the notion that a replacement for human blood will never truly solve the vampires’ problem, which is, ultimately, that they (read: we) are all vampires. The implicit thesis thus seems to be that green technology can be nothing more than a short term fix, with the underlying problem being society’s insatiable demand for energy. In the film, it is taken for granted that there is simply no alternative to vampirism until Ed, played by Ethan Hawke, comes in contact with a man who goes by the name of Elvis, played by Willem Dafoe, who had been a vampire until a non-lethal dose of sunlight brought him back to life and mortality. At this point, Ed takes up with a group of human hold-outs and endeavors to recreate the cure.

Also at this point, the major setting changes, and we find ourselves transported from a sprawling metropolis filled from top to bottom with fluorescent light to a bucolic, starlit vineyard supporting a small community of friendly, driven people. This is the first distinct thematic push beyond the very basic metaphor, and the filmmakers seem to begin to advocate returning to a largely rural way of life as a means of reducing energy demand and strengthening community ties. This may seem simple and naïve at first blush, but as the film goes on, it becomes easier to conclude that the alternative being hinted at is a bit more nuanced than the notion of everyone just dropping everything and taking off for the hills and planting a family garden. Ed manages to make himself human again, but it requires risk, sacrifice, experimentation, multiple trials, and enormous pain.

But it is with the eventual conclusion that it becomes clear that the future envisioned for us is not to be expected to be easy, straightforward, or pleasant. Ed discovers that the cure for vampirism can be spread through the blood of a former vampire, and subsequently tricks his unscrupulous employer into biting him and unwittingly turning himself human again. The thematic statement that I take from that scene is that once someone in a position of power learns the alternative to our old ways of living and spreads that thinking elsewhere in the upper class, vested interests cannot reject it. The idea is too powerful, too necessary to not take hold against any efforts to suppress it.

And yet the transition threatens to make the entire world briefly much worse, as the lingering reliance on scarce resources yields a terrible upsurge in bloodshed before the new humanity can take hold. Once human blood courses through the veins of a few former vampires, they are ravenously attacked by the others, who are still in desperate need of it. The cure passes from one to another, and all continue to fall upon one another until only a handful of men are left in the room, surrounded by the ravaged bodies of those who had simply purged themselves of their need earlier, and shaken by what they have done. The suggestion is evidently that even once some of us have solved our energy and food crises, wars will go on escalating and the strong will continue to exploit the weak.

It is not a rosy picture, but ultimately it may be a realistic one. And when the final shots show our heroes greeting the sunrise over the carnage left by the old world and later speeding away from the vampiric city and back to their modest, self-reliant, and decidedly human rural setting, we are meant to think that it is the picture of a lovely future that makes the awful suffering that will come first worthwhile.

Buffalo Winters

After hearing for weeks about severe winter weather throughout much of the east coast, Buffalo has finally been struck with the first snowfall that my high standards will accept as extraordinary for the region. It was about seven-thirty when my friend left my apartment tonight. A few minutes later, she called me to apologetically ask that I come help her get her car out from where it had been plowed in a street away from me.

After I put on my coat and traction-less work boots, and ran to the scene with my laughably small snow shovel, she would not stop either thanking me or apologizing. But she’s my friend. The idea that such a simple, obvious, and necessary favor would in any sense a burden or inconvenience is just absurd. I had to remind her that it is truly my pleasure to help a friend in need. In fact, if she had been a complete stranger, and I’d just happened to be passing by while carrying a spatula, I would have been undeniably eager to leap to her aid. That’s the way we all are in this town, isn’t it? I spent every winter of my childhood hearing the reinforced narrative that the winter weather in Buffalo does wonders to bring to the fore the friendliness and compassion of the local population. When the going gets tough, we all pitch in and help one another.

Bullshit. When I finished digging out my friend, she put the car back into park for a moment and climbed out, saying, “I have to give you a kiss now.” As she came close, I looked over her shoulder and then turned to her to whisper before she drew back, “You know, they say Buffalo is the City of Good Neighbors?” She laughed and pointed out that she had been thinking exactly the same thing. While she had kept shifting gears and easing on the accelerator, I had scraped at the snow in a way reminiscent of scooping ice cream with a thimble, occasionally stopping to try to dig my piss-poor footwear into ice to singlehandedly push the car by its fender. All the while, she and I had both repeatedly taken note of the five or six people standing within twenty-five feet of us, evidently all together, some of them working with two colossal snow shovels, others just standing nearby or seated in a car across the street.

Another set of hands or a better tool, and we could have had my friend’s car out of its trap in thirty seconds flat. I didn’t mind undertaking the task alone, but it just seemed to me that there was something almost aggressive about the neglect of someone so near at hand with such an easily fixable problem. No one else even needed the least bit of assistance, my friend being the only one on the street who had not taken advantage of the local church to park in its lot. Is this the famous Buffalo neighborliness? Do I just happen to repeatedly run into the rare exceptions to the rule, or is that self-image that the city repeats like a mantra just not hold up to scrutiny.

I springboard from here into pages upon pages about the empty-headed optimism that locals have about this area, and perhaps I will in fact go on about it in the near future. But for now, suffice it to say that on point of economics, cultural progress, and certainly the moral character of the population, proud Buffalonians often follow the same trend of convincing themselves that it is a terrific place by focusing exclusively on the positive. Frequently, it seems, people with such a doting perspective think the town’s virtues stack up nicely against those of other American cities for an equally ridiculous reason: they’ve never lived anywhere else.

I have. I’m not a well-traveled man, but I’ve lived in New York City and in Boise, Idaho, and I’ve spent sufficient time in Washington D.C., Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Seattle to have gotten a fair sense of the character of those places and their locals, and in many years since leaving Buffalo and slinking back, I have never for a moment come under the impression that the residents of this city are somehow kinder, more generous, more outgoing, or otherwise better neighbors than in even one of the other places I’ve experienced. Not even of Manhattan would I say that it is less neighborly than Buffalo, and Manhattan has a reputation for being full to the brim with rude bastards.

The stereotypes reported for both sides of the state are equally unreliably, and probably for interestingly contrasting reasons: Buffalo’s designation as City of Good Neighbors was evidently a creation of local residents striving to build up the place in their own minds and in those of potential visitors. New York City’s reputation for being brusque and unfriendly is no doubt traceable to the reports of tourists who do not know how to integrate into the pace and local culture of metropolis. I would hazard to guess that stereotypes describing virtually any city are deeply flawed, and for the same simple reasons. People have a habit of making the best of the situations that are familiar to them, and in some cases inescapable. We structure our sense of value around the place and the circumstances in which we were raised, and if we are not sufficiently socially adaptable, being confronted with the unfamiliar is functionally no different from being confronted with the immoral. Speed and directness can seem aggressive is you’ve always been familiar with a slower pace. And where we have our own sense of value, but also find ourselves tied to a particular place, we might be inclined to find examples of those values in our local circumstances, and conclude thereby that it is representative of the place where we live.

That tendency is a great coping mechanism, but it is not a great representative of reality. It is, instead, an endemic problem of self-delusion, which is present everywhere, but for which I see particularly poignant examples in the way people who love Buffalo talk about Buffalo. In that specific case, I eagerly wish for that breaking point wherein some lifelong Buffalonian sees one of his good neighbors look over at him as he struggles with something and say “Nah, fuck that guy, he can take care of himself.” But in broader terms, this topic speaks to the social breaking point that I will spend my life looking toward and trying to provoke at every turn. We must, all of us, stop accentuating the positive, stop looking on the bright side and convincing ourselves that, heck, things are really pretty great around here. I want to write a cynic’s manifesto to convince people to look into the shadows, acknowledge every flaw in the social fabric around you, and then begin agitating for change. There must come a breaking point at which we decide that we can no longer swallow any more saccharine, that we’re too dizzy from constantly turning away. For the simple fact is that there is no solving any of our problems when coping with them means forgetting they exist.

Rejecting the Cause After Its Effect

Peter J. Boyer, in a New Yorker article on the effects of Roger Ailes’ acquisition of the local newspaper for the Hudson town of Philipstown, makes one comment toward the end of the piece that strikes me as especially insightful.

“Ailes plainly wished to provide for his family a particular vision of small-town America, one shaped by nostalgic vision, which is not without irony. He regrets the sway of the local environmentalists, but it was their influence that made the area a sort of place where Roger Ailes would wish to live. Without them, the view from the Aileses’ Hudson aerie would include a Con Edison hydroelectric plant.”

To my mind, this observation, though not stressed anywhere else in the article in which it appeared, speaks to a broadly relevant issue of the well-meaning hypocrisy often underlying people’s worldviews, particularly conservative ones. It is something that I’ve recently noted with such aggressive disdain that my mind runs immediately to other examples of the same trend, which go on pricking at my brain and need to be acknowledged for the consistent logical failings that they are.

Some people, often very vocal ones, have a tendency to laud certain virtues of society, environment, economy, etc., while almost simultaneously attacking the trends or institutions that can be credited with creating those circumstances. I recall a clip of Glenn Beck deriding a new food safety bill by pointing out that the United States has the safest food in the world. For Beck, that fact evidently serves as proof that the bill is effectively redundant, and it never seems to cross his mind that bills of that sort are the very things that create and maintain the safety of American food. I think also of the anti-vaccine movement, which sometimes reasons that there is no cause for widespread vaccination because serious infections are not widespread in American society. In fact, that basic mode of thinking is something that I can find lurking in a wide variety of conspiracy theory. There is confusion about or neglect of the cause for an imposed effect, so the paranoiac concludes that there must be some sinister alternative rationale for a social program or act of legislation, or what have you.

I acknowledge that it is an easy error to make. That is, it is an easy error to make if you don’t reflect on it much. We are used to causality being very easy to observe, especially in its base forms. “I hit you, you fall down.” But there is suddenly a higher demand for analysis when the cause has already happened and the effect lingers. It requires understanding not only what is occurring, but what has occurred, and may even call for deduction to work out the particulars. “You are on the ground; something must have hit you; I wonder what it was.”

I don’t for a moment think this is a fallacy peculiar to conservatives or conspiracy theorists. It is the trapping of any social or political myopia, wherein we draw conclusions based on what is observed presently and believed constantly, rather than on a farther-reaching analysis. It may well be only because of my own liberal leanings, which make it natural for me to scrutinize the flawed reasoning of the opposition, but it does seem to me as if this sort of misunderstanding of causality is, in socio-political contexts, most common among certain columns of conservativism, namely those who harshly criticize social programs, environmental campaigns, and the like primarily for the reason that their worth to society is not immediately obvious, because their effects are subtle, occasional, and best understood only in retrospect.

So this is a breaking point that I’m hoping for now: When people take a long look at their own values and begin to reevaluate their ideologies if they should find that their criticism of something like environmental activism stands in contradiction to their admiration for something else, like the unspoiled beauty surrounding one’s own $6.2 million property. It is vitally important that we understand as best we can the full circumstances surrounding the situations that we observe, but for far too many people, all need for inquiry breaks apart in the face of ideology.

Film Analysis: Hot Fuzz

This will be the first in what I hopefully will make a long series of – let’s call them analytical film reviews. I’m beginning in a strange place. It would probably be a stronger opening if the first review I offered was either something that could be called classic or something current, whether now playing or just released on disc. But I intend to do these for just whatever I happen to be watching, and I am, for better or worse, starting the project now, rather than, say, after watching for the first time Fritz Lang’s “M” a couple of months ago. I can’t afford a ticket to a movie theater, either, so we’re stuck with the last film I returned to Netflix, which was the Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg action-comedy “Hot Fuzz.” Of course, as evidenced by the earlier “Shaun of the Dead,” the people responsible for this film take their comedy seriously, so it is by no means without content upon which to comment. Nor is it without personal significance to me as a starting point for this aspect of my blog.

A definite part of the reason why I’m starting this now, in spite of having meant to for numerous weeks prior, is that my cohabiting relationship has just ended, and my now ex-girlfriend has left me with much time and space to use to think, and write, and entertain myself, and perhaps do all of these together. I am determined to be personally productive now that my environment has been abruptly rattled. But this relationship is an upsetting loss, having been unusual, transformative, and of quite a long duration. The sort of odd significance of “Hot Fuzz” being the subject of my first analysis is twofold: Firstly, the major reason I’d chosen to watch it was that I knew my girlfriend was under serious stress, and the mood of the household in the last week or two before she left was dour, so I thought we were in need of a dose of comedy. Secondly, the film was released in the spring of 2007, just before she and I met and fell in love, hence it being in the Netflix queue that she and I had been sharing. There’s this weird sense of serendipity, then, in the fact that it is the first movie I’ve watched on my own since the very time it was released. Perhaps I’m making too much of it, but then I make too much of most things; that’s why I find it would be a worthwhile project to analyze films like this.

Even if I had watched “Hot Fuzz” while alone, heartsick, and overly reflective, it may not have exactly been the thing to lighten the local mood. I found it to be quite different from what I had expected, in that it by and large worked better where it presented itself as a thriller than where it was a comedy. It is a rather darker movie than I anticipated, a fact which I noticed straightaway. The atmosphere is too heavy for boisterous laughter. That is not to say that it isn’t funny, but most of the humor is subtle, and had me nodding inwardly rather than laughing out loud. The rest seems like comic relief, meant to stand in contrast to a plot that is driven by death and mystery.

While so much of the humor is subtle, much of the thematic content is not. As with “Shaun of the Dead,” which utilized common, almost cliché elements of the zombie horror sub-genre, and actually made them more explicit, “Hot Fuzz” draws on another cliché in horror: the idyllic small town with dark, deeply hidden secrets. However, by the end, after the plot makes a series of sharp turns towards increasing absurdity, there is nothing that is not in the open. While that probably sounds like criticism, the absurdity is clearly both intentional and useful, allowing the action-packed climax of the film to be perhaps the only segment that really is uproariously funny. In that sense, the film is quite well structured, though on the other hand, the variety of false-leads and subplots that lead the audience to the satisfaction of witnessing a shootout between two cops and a dozen sexagenarians can make the whole thing feel a little cluttered.

Along the way, it is probably easy to lose sight of some of the less direct thematic statements that the story makes. As I said, though, much of it is perfectly obvious. By the time the Neighborhood Watch Alliance is revealed as a cabal of secretive, black-cloaked manipulators of local events, there is no mistaking the criticism of suburban and rural lifestyles in all their potential to commit a person to the acceptance or active pursuit of an illusion. But the film overall is just a bit more cynical, or else more even-handed, than all that. If one keeps the entirety of the story in mind, he can see the way the criticism extends to urban life, as well. Two things are of clear significance in leading one to that conclusion. First, the story begins with Pegg’s character, officer Angel, being forced out of London by the entirety of the police force because they don’t want his excellence as an officer making the rest of them look bad. Then, in the end, the same officers request that he return, having discovered that his departure did not preserve the status quo, but rather interrupted it, in that the crime rate increased without him, but Angel determines to stay, saying that he likes it in Sandford. This is not what one would expect, given his evident boredom during his time there. To my thinking, after his victorious battle with the town elders, Angel decides that the small town is well worth staying in, after all, likely because its cultural landscape is more changeable than that of the big city. There is no greater reason to return to London, because the powerful residents of both places are given to the same human impulses toward manipulation in favor of a perverted concept of the common good. What differs is only the method. In a small town, the locals remain entrenched in fear of what harm a thing might do, whereas in the city, the good of a thing might be recognized, but it may still be rejected, whether because of shame or for the sake of political efficacy. That is, the problem with the city is built into its fabric, but the problem of the small town is a problem of perspective, which is more easily rectified.

If the thematic conflict of the story is not the conflict of city versus suburb, then the climactic battle is all that much more significant in crystallizing the overall theme, which is focused instead on generational conflict. It then makes surprisingly much sense that the relatively young main characters do battle with an army of villains who are significantly older. The conflict of the story represents the potential for a more educated, tolerant generation to supplant the entrenched, often wrong-headed ideologies of the one that preceded them. The final resolution of the gunfight, after the chase scene, taking place in a scale model of the town, squarely places the characters of Pegg and Timothy Dalton – the latter practically being an emissary of older action films – as two giants, representing opposite ideologies, the progressive and the regressive, fighting over the very soul of the town. And as if to make it more clear that the future is determined by the outcome, the film places a solitary child in the middle of that struggle, with the potential to be made a victim or a thing to be protected. But because the conflict is generational, the child is not merely a prop. He participates briefly in the fight, and it may even be a plaything of his that ultimately fells the regressive force.

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.