The Culture of Obesity

David Sirota had a piece in Salon yesterday addressing the obviously demanding issue that is the obesity crisis.  The article consists of five recommendations for how to begin practically addressing the problem.  The appeal of them is intuitive enough, though I would put much more emphasis on Sirota’s number two recommendation, restructuring subsidies, than on his number one, taxing junk food.

I believe that consumers do tend to act in a rational manner, so far as their understanding of the facts allows.  It seems to me that a principle cause of obesity is the malnutrition of the poor, helped along by the fact that high fructose corn syrup and general junk food are less expensive per calorie than healthful food.  Taxing junk food without first dramatically altering the grocery market wouldn’t fix the element of the problem that’s caused by poverty.  Making all food more expensive won’t make people any more likely to acquire adequate nutrition from the food that was expensive before the fact.

There is perhaps a breaking point to be had here, in the same sense that there is with any instance of blaming the victim.  It is unfortunately tempting to assume that obesity and similar ill health is purely the result of poor choices, without regard for the possibility that some people’s actual range of choices is constrained.  For my own part, I often find myself thinking that I know exactly what I need to do in order to be healthier; and more than that, I know that I would roundly prefer the healthier dietary and lifestyle options that are theoretically available to me.  And yet I know that I simply cannot make many of those choices, because they are out of my price range.

This is not to say that education (Sirota’s fifth point) isn’t essential to reversing negative trends in food consumption, but by emphasizing ideas that effectively punish people for their constrained choices, we practically absolve ourselves of the responsibility to make other people’s most healthy choice into the choice that is also most rational.

The trouble is that things like extending the boundaries of rational choice are tediously difficult solutions that must rely on collective social action and firm government initiatives.  This goes for a solution grounded in education, and it goes double for ending junk food subsidies.  It’s also the essence of the third item in the Salon article, banning junk food in schools.  Again, though, I would adjust the language to “replacing” junk food.  It’s more accurate, considering that what we’re talking about is junk food that schools had been supplying in the first place, and it’s also just better PR.  The word “ban” might convey the idea that this issue really is about limiting people’s choices, rather than changing the rational calculations that go into making them.

In any event, all of these potentially effective anti-obesity measures can only be gradually and incrementally implemented.  None of them come with associated breaking points.  The last of Sirota’s recommendations, though, is a matter of impelling a breaking point for a relatively small number of people.  It’s also maybe a solution that wouldn’t spring to many people’s minds, being as it is hidden in plain sight.  But concordantly, it’ll be in plain sight so it might generate more rapid results.

The recommendation is “stop glorifying unhealthy eating habits,” and Sirota’s example of such glorification is the photo-ops that appear throughout presidential campaigns of candidates consuming corn dogs and cheesesteaks.  For some reason, this is seen as an essential way of connecting with voters, either because such terrible food is considered uniquely American or because it helps to make the politician seem like what everyone assumes Americans stupidly want their leader to be: a regular guy.  I hope there will never been a better example of this trend than at the last Iowa straw poll when the treat to be photographed consuming was a deep-fried stick of butter.

But the glorification of unhealthy eating habits extends far beyond that.  For instance, I have always been both perplexed and disgusted by the fact that an activity known as competitive eating exists.  And until it ceases to exist, it remains indicative of a culture that has strongly duplicitous attitudes towards healthy living and the causes of obesity.  And competitive eating truly must cease to exist, along with every other impulse to present food consumption as a source of amusement or personal image, as opposed to what it is and should be: a source of nutrition.

All the more complex initiatives to address the obesity crisis must precipitate from a change of culture, which clarifies valuation of healthy lifestyles.  Until that is achieved, efforts to change policy and improve education are doomed to a degree of frustration.  They will not be accepted by a population that is still pulled in two directions.  They will not be backed up by uniform political will.  Every collective change starts at the level of the individual, and yet the individual’s attitudes often have their foundation in media.

That’s why this is a matter of reaching a breaking point.  The most crucial first steps must be taken by those few people who are in a position to say, no, we won’t broadcast the hot dog eating contest this year, or no, we won’t run the picture of Mitt Romney jamming a chicken fried steak into his face on the front page, or no, we won’t make the fat guy the comic foil in this sitcom.  People in charge of decisions like this are disproportionately capable of changing culture, but I fear they often don’t realize it.

I am always hopeful that something will both jog their awareness and prompt them to take the corresponding responsibility seriously.  And I hope it takes something less than their ceasing to profit off of American obesity, because if I’m right that other initiatives won’t reverse the crisis without a cultural change, then that may never happen.

Movies for Escaping a Desert Island

I’m a little bit late with this topic, but I was offline for several days, so why don’t you give me a break?

It seems that Friday was Matt Zoller Seitz’s last column for Salon.com before he became television critic for New York Magazine. As a finale slideshow, Seitz chose the topic “movies for a desert island,” and detailed his list of ten films, one short, and one series of television that he would keep as entertainment if he was stranded on a desert island with “an indestructible DVD player with a solar-recharging power source.”

Seitz prompted his readers to come up with their own lists, and I clicked into the comments section to see some of them. “Part of the fun of this exercise,” Seitz wrote, “is figuring out what you think you can watch over and over, and what you can live without.”

For me, though, the main part of the fun, and perhaps the frustration, of watching other people undertake the exercise was rediscovering how differently my mind approaches entertainment, as compared with most of the people around me. I can’t say that I took the time to dream up my list of twelve pieces of visual media, but I’m sure that mine wouldn’t have looked a thing like the others.

It may well be that I’m missing the entire point of the exercise, and applying a kind of logic to it that has no place in such purely academic challenges. But I can’t get past the fact that for me, the phrases “desert island films” and “current favorite films” do not mean the same thing. And that’s all that I seemed to be seeing in the author’s and the commenters’ lists. They were lists of a dozen items that each person thought he or she would find endlessly entertaining; a dozen things that would distract the person from the monotony and desperation of his surroundings. I simply can’t help extrapolating from the hypothetical and concluding that each person who participated in the exercise took it for granted that he was resigned to the fate of being trapped on a desert island for an indeterminate length of time, and possibly forever.

“Best to make the most of it, and see that I have some of my favorite entertainment on hand, so I can be as happy as possible while I’m here.”

Even in an utterly unrealistic hypothetical, I can’t take that attitude. It doesn’t reflect the way that I engage with media. I love film, but I hate escapism. I can’t think of a thing that I’ve watched on my own accord that I didn’t watch with an eye towards relating it to my own life and circumstances, or learning more about the world through it, and generally using it as a surface for reflection.

It would be no different on a desert island. So if I had access to a visual media there, I would damn well want it to be media that reminded me of my surroundings and circumstances, rather than distracting me from them, and that motivated me towards the goal of either getting the hell off of a desert island or building an idealized society on one. That’s not to say that the films I choose would have to have identical settings, but they would have to all possess themes that seemed personally significant, whether about freedom, or emotional fortitude, or encroaching insanity.

The closest thing that I saw to that line of thinking was that several commenters included The Matrix in their lists. I could see watching that in any circumstances wherein my freedom was constrained (i.e. the only circumstances I have known), because it’s explicitly about getting free by being in touch with reality when forces around you are compelling you to flee from it. But as far as Seitz’s challenge was concerned, I think that based on the content of the rest of their lists, those commenters chose The Matrix because it was an entertaining sci-fi action/adventure film that they had thoroughly enjoyed when they were younger.

Am I making unfair assumptions about the motivations of the respondents to the exercise? They could each find the content of their chosen films so personally poignant that they give them hope when things seem most hopeless. They might choose comedy and pure entertainment because they know they will function better towards some greater end if they can laugh and feel good amidst everything else. I don’t think that’s it, at least not on the whole. In response to one person placing Groundhog Day on his list, another commenter questioned the selection. “Don’t you think that would hit a little too close to home on a desert island?” he asked.

It’s still hard for me to accept, but apparently hitting close to home is not something that other people want in film and television. I, however, want little else. It sounds narcissistic, but if something isn’t in some sense about me, it isn’t worth watching.

I’m not sure what would qualify if I was on a desert island, though. I’ve never been there, so I don’t know what would speak to me. I’ll stick with The Matrix unless I come up with a better ten. I’d probably include some sort of nature documentary, likely Winged Migration, to put me more in touch with what beauty I would still have access to on my island. Perhaps I’d include Powaqqatsi as a way to remind myself both of the beauty that’s possible in the habitation of natural settings and of the beauty that I’d left behind in the rest of the world. Cast Away might make the list because even though it’s far from being one of my favorite films, it very well might become that when I’m in practically the exact same situation.

The only thing I can say with fair certainty, though, is what my television series would be. With its theme of resisting the circumstances in which one feels trapped, no matter how overwhelming they are, I think The Prisoner would be as poignant for me on an actual island as it is on the metaphorical island on which I now live.

Now, would you like to rethink the question for yourself? What films would you want with you if you were stranded on a desert island, could watch movies, but still cared about the fact that you were stranded on a desert island?

The Lesser Value of Fiction

Laura Miller recently wrote a piece in response to the author Phillip Roth stating that he has stopped reading fiction. Miller points out that other authors have said the same in previous years, among them William Gibson, Cormac McCarthy, and Will Self. She offers an interesting assessment of the motivations that might lay behind this, albeit an incomplete one. To my mind, the most significant observation was this comparison of nonfiction and fiction, and of how the reader interacts with them:

“As champions of nonfiction often point out, whatever the literary shortcomings of any given work of nonfiction, at the very least you come away from it having learned something about the world. Fiction, however, doesn't offer instruction or information; it offers an experience. And for that experience to occur, the reader has to deliver him- or herself up to the book.”

Not being a literary critic myself, I can’t write competently about what might be people’s general motivations for reading one thing as opposed to another, or about the observed merits of various genres and different types of authors. I can only speak to my personal assessment of the value of different kinds of writing, a perspective that comes less from my observations of what I read than from my observations of what I write.

As my financial situation has gotten increasingly dire, and my job prospects have proven themselves to be nil, my ambition to write has never waned very much. However, it swiftly became apparent to me that if I intended to make any money off of my passion, I would probably have to focus more on writing fiction than I had before. Indeed, it seemed to me that if I wanted to keep my passion alive at all, I’d need to focus on fiction, because a hopeless outlook on my own life sapped me of the motivation to do otherwise.

This reorganization of my priorities was a definite problem, though, because I began trying to write fiction knowing that my heart wasn’t in it. Although it’s more accurate to say that my heart’s not in the writing of realistic fiction. I do, however, have a special interest in speculative fiction, and I can write it with conviction and aplomb much the same way that I can write editorial content and, when I have the inspiration for it, creative non-fiction. But I have never really seen enough value in literary realism to pour my creativity into it. My feeling is that if I am going to write something that’s grounded in my imagination, it ought to be something that is beyond the limits of ordinary experience – something that allows people to understand their world and themselves by bringing their mundane understanding to bear on fantastic worlds and experiences unlike our own. And if I’m going to write something realistic, why not write something that is actually real?

When Miller writes that fiction offers an experience rather than information or instruction, she makes a meaningful point, but she implies that non-fiction, by contrast, doesn’t offer experience. And that is not strictly true. Creative nonfiction can very poignantly present both elements to the reader, providing clear, confirmable information, but putting it into the context of vividly described experiences that surround that base of knowledge. One of the most trite pieces of advice given to aspiring writers, often by people who do not write, is “write what you know.” Trite though it may be, that advice does strike me as sound and perhaps obvious. If you don’t know what you’re writing about, you’re just making things up and risking information. As an adolescent, my aspirations to become a better writer entailed not rigorously exercising my imagination, but increasing the range of things that I knew. In what might be an ironic testament to my lack of imagination, my life since then has been much more isolated and monotonous than I ever thought possible, and I am tragically unwilling to write about China or Iowa because I have never been to either, or about logging or yachting because I have neither done nor witnessed those things. It may be hideously limiting and self-defeating, but as far as I’m concerned, I have no business writing about things that I haven’t seen first-hand but theoretically could.

I make no judgments about what other people write, but my personal standards do extend into what I read and how I appreciate the things that I read. I have encountered some moving, powerful fictional stories, but I often come away from them with a certain conflicted feeling that I do not have when I read speculative fiction, creative nonfiction, or straightforward nonfiction. I read a splendidly written story in a recent New Yorker about a woman’s experience of becoming homeless. It was a good story, it spoke to me, and it seemed distinctly plausible. But that last point distracted me at some point as I was reading it. There is something about reading a story that seems real but isn’t that can be somewhat disturbing to me. Here I was vicariously experiencing somebody’s misfortune and misery, striving to empathize with it and learn from it, and it wasn’t real. Yet at the same time, thousands of real people were experiencing the same basic experiences, and the opportunity was there for the author to write about something real with the same vividness and narrative strength, through which to present even more meaningful themes – more meaningful because they would have been real.

I think the same impulse explains my tendency to remain disinterested in contemporary novels, always focusing instead on brushing up on the classics. Such books might be fabrications of perfectly ordinary events, but at least they describe a time and place that I cannot experience for myself. But when the stories come from my world, from early twenty-first century America, I am not much driven to read them. I would much rather go out into that world and bear witness to the true stories being crafted within it, with all their literary quality. And if I can ever get out of the circumstance of just barely eking out a living in Buffalo, NY, those are the stories that I, as a writer, want to tell.

Educational Recession

David Sirota had a piece on Salon yesterday, in which he claimed that two distinct camps seem to be emerging in the debate over future education policy. And Sirota firmly sides with one of these camps. The side that he privileges and takes to be uniquely supported by research data claims, in his words,

"that larger social ills such as poverty, joblessness, economic despair and lack of health coverage negatively affect educational achievement, and that until those problems are addressed, schools will never be able to produce the results we want."

Those on the other side, Sirota says, "want to radically change (read: charterize and/or privatize) public education under the premise that the primary problems are bad/lazy teachers and 'unaccountable' school administrators."

Getting Off

In one of the lighter pieces posted over the weekend at Salon, Matt Zoller Seitz writes about bad films, and describes Sex and the City 2 as "wealth porn." I think that could prove to be a very valuable phrase, if used widely, and I am frankly upset that I hadn't thought of it on my own yet.

I have long described many modern so-called horror films as being better identified as part of the "torture porn" genre, and I am hopeful that a tasteful viewing audience will start to catch onto the distinction and recognize that horror doesn't need to driven solely by gore and shock value. As a horror fan myself, I think it does a disservice to the genre to let the likes of the Saw sequels and Hostel, which are much more prominent, but have a very particular appeal, define horror. I like the term "torture porn" because it makes clear what the focus of the film is, whereas horror, on my conception, might not aim for disgust in its presentation, but rather atmosphere, and may possess a story that strive to shock, to startle, to amplify an audience's fears by logically presenting the threat of a subject, or to instill the subtle, creeping atmosphere of dread or nightmare.

I also like the term "torture porn" because it's disdainful to the specific sub-category of horror that I think of as pandering to the lowest common denominator. Despite changing attitudes, "porn" is still a pejorative word, and attaching it to anything serves to suggest an exploitative impulse, and an utter lack of nuance. Individual instances of torture porn may have other merits to them, but in general, I think people watch such films as ways of indulging their most base impulses without reflection, whether that means putting themselves in the role of the victim, or imagining themselves experiencing a pain they could never really experience, or just participating in anything that's seen as pushing the envelope and abutting with polite society. Giving it a more specific name than "horror" helps to bring all of this out into the open, and hopefully prompts a bit of the reflection that is otherwise conspicuously lacking.

"Wealth porn" is a phrase that can aspire to the same effect on a different class of media, and one that is vastly more commonplace these days. Between Sex and the City, celebrity gossip, and the plethora of reality shows that focus their lenses on the obscenely rich, there is a almost ubiquitous impulse among consumers of American media to watch other people enjoying, taking for granted, and wasting the benefits of a privileged existence. It is absolutely right to call it wealth porn, because it shares so much of its appeal with actual pornography, in that it is an escapist fantasy in which other real people are surrogates for your own would-be participation. You can't have wild anonymous sex with the buxom, blonde co-ed who stops by to help you study for your exam, and you can't spend four hundred dollars on dinner for two and then spend the next day hanging out in all the most posh martini bars. So you watch someone else doing it, and you satisfy yourself by forgetting for a little while that you're overweight and lonely, and your gas bill is past due.

Branding is enormously effective in generating breaking points. By terming something - correctly - as porn, we can potentially prompt a handful of people who would tend to have a bit of shame about participating in actual voyeurism to look with a more critical eye on what gives them satisfaction and realize, as they should have realized long ago, that it is an empty sort of satisfaction, completely reliant upon the glorified presentation of something that simply shouldn't be. So let's call everyone who films a "real housewife" or their ilk a wealth pornographer, and understand that by being asked to swallow it as if it's just any other form of entertainment, we're being screwed in a way we ought not accept.

A Sense of Place

There was a nice slideshow on Salon yesterday, naming some of the most beautiful and distinctive bookstores in the world, which, the author said, would “make you rethink your Kindle.”

I don’t think the average Kindle owner thought about it in the first place. I get the impression that the e-book reader phenomenon is driven primarily by an unmitigated and all but universal fervor for technology. If it’s identified as new and innovative, it seems as though people will stand in line to get one, even if they never considered whether they wanted it or needed it.

But the higher tech option is not always the best option, and I wish I could push American society to the breaking point of realizing that fact once and for all. Sometimes the traditional alternative provides an appeal that is different from the appeal of modernity, but one that is still distinct and meaningful. The Salon piece suggests one such appeal that should be obvious, but that I think is often overlooked even by the defenders of analog: the beauty of actually buying something from a physical space.

I’m not at all a shopper, but when I do wish to acquire something, nothing pleases me more than holding it in my hands before it is really mine to possess. I love to flip through copious stacks of records and find the ones that most appeal to me, and I love to leaf through physically real books, to be able to pick things up at random and hold them side-by-side.

If there’s one thing that technology cannot satisfyingly replace, I would say that thing may be the thrill of discovery. I honestly can't understand why this doesn’t occur to other people. Convenience is not always an improvement. There is a point at which convenience steals away the features that made an activity what it was. And in the case of books, tactile sensation and dog-earing pages and marginalia all aside, part of the experience of literature – indeed, of virtually anything – is its physicality, the sense that there is a place where the literate gather, a shared visual representation of the enormity of what the intellectually curious are vainly striving to grasp.

Sometimes, as the Salon slideshow points out to us, that physical space may be a repurposed cathedral or theater, a site standing as a lovely monument in some distant place, or hidden somewhere inside the daily experiences of our landscape. Sometimes, bookstores are really beautiful. And to my mind, losing bookstores, or record stores, or any of the other places that lend a sense of community, sacrifice, and engagement to our acts of acquisition is bad enough if those places are banal. It is worse when the experience that’s lost is not only meaningful and affective, but powerfully unique.

Fact-Free Ideology

There was some highly recommended reading from Steve Kornacki at Salon today:
When Rush bet $2 million that Clinton would ruin the economy.

Put very simply, it refers to recent conservative remarks that taxing the wealthy in times of economic difficultly makes recover virtually impossible, and sets those claims against identical commentary from the early nineties, when the Clinton administration was making just such a tax increase. Kornacki quotes Rush Limbaugh in 1993 as saying: “Tax rate increases slow down economic activity. It is not a theory. It's not an opinion. It is fact. It is true.” Limbaugh went on to predict that if any tax increase went forward, the economy would worsen, with a higher deficit, lower employment, and higher inflation. Well, the Clinton plan did go forward, and none of Limbaugh’s predictions came true, as anyone who lived through the Clinton administration should remember.

Yet, amazingly, Limbaugh and the entire conservative establishment continues to repeat the same talking point to this day: that tax increases of any kind hurt the economy. Taxing the wealthiest two percent is now “the Obama way,” and according to Limbaugh, “The Obama way has been tried… But it doesn’t work.”

This is the nature of entrenched ideology. It does not bend to reality. I find it hard to believe that these kinds of people actually believe the things that they identify as indisputable facts. If they do, it is an heroic kind of personal delusion, to be able to say something, watch your claims be conclusively proved false, and then say those things again, over and over for years.

No matter what the issue, and no matter what the ideology, this kind of rhetoric should never appear in serious public discourse. If you don’t want to give up your personal wealth, fine, stand up and say that that’s your position. But can’t we all have enough self-respect to not invent facts to support false claims that help us get our way?

Then again, it’s pretty hard to get your way if you have to say to ninety-eight percent of the population: “Yes, my money could help you to get through these difficult times, but I just don’t wanna part with any of it.” Acknowledging that taxing the wealthy actually is effective, but arguing against it anyway would probably prove rather self-defeating, so those who stand to lose a measure of what they can afford to lose must instead resort to lies and willful ignorance of the clear lessons of history. The truth just doesn’t support their interests, and that’s all there is to it.

So I’m looking for either of two breaking points: for conservatives to stand up for their greed and actively resist giving up their fair share, or for the rest of us to stand up for truth and make it plainly and commonly known when they are lying.

Always Black and White?

There was a remarkable lead story at Salon today detailing the ten most segregated urban areas in the country, according to the newly released census data. When I got the third item on the list, each of which were accompanied by impressive maps of the demographics, I was strongly reminded of a breaking point for which I’ve been waiting a long time, and am likely to go on waiting.

That third place on the list was Cincinnati, its map showing small enclaves of red depicting areas of black majority surrounded completely by a light, faded blue, indicating areas of slight white majority, with a far more vibrant blue extending out from there in every direction. The moment I looked at it, I had the clear sense that I was looking at a perfect visual representation of the social class distribution in a modern urban area.

I could go on for pages and pages, and respond to several of the academic quotations given in the article, and I may do so if, for instance, nothing else catches my attention tomorrow as this has today. But my main point is simple enough. I think we need to stop talking about segregation and related issues as issues pertaining to white and black. It’s more appropriate and more useful to describe it as a problem of rich and poor.

To talk about this topic in terms of actions and attitudes of black people and white people just reinforces the idea of some separateness of the two groups that applies across the board on the basis of nothing other than skin color. That idea is precisely the underpinning of racism, and even if it’s well intentioned, even if the purpose of speaking in those terms is to criticize the white majority, it gives the impression that race itself is the problem. But if race is the problem, it can’t be fixed. If poverty is the problem, there’s work that can be done.

Even if one hundred percent of the white population in a given region is virulently racist, not all of them contribute to the ongoing segregation of that area. Some of them are just too poor to move, as much as they might want to get away from the blacks that have become their neighbors. And while that racism would have to be addressed on its own terms, there are poor whites who live amongst black majorities, and so cannot be said to be culpable for the segregation of their region. But the discussion of the topic always seems to refer to black ingress and “white flight.”

I strongly disapprove of that term. How did it ever come about that we saw the underpinning of segregation as “white flight” and not “rich flight”? It’s not really racism that causes segregation, so much as it is the divergence of social classes that lays the groundwork for both racism and segregation as collateral effects. Poverty is the problem, and segregation is a symptom. To talk about segregation in terms of black and white only serves to pit the two sides against each other in places where they are actually coexisting, despite segregation. We can beat racism and yet not have the slightest effect on segregation if only all those who are poor now are kept poor, with blacks comprising the majority of the impoverished, incapable, along with their poor, white neighbors, of moving to places of affluence. But we can beat racism, at least among the lower classes if we understand that we’re in this together, that it’s not black against white, but poor against a system that makes poverty practically inescapable.

Buffalo happened to come in at number six on the list, which further makes it clear to me that I have just the right opinion of this place. There is so much racism here, coming from all sides. And I think that realistically the segregation that puts us in this ignoble top ten upholds all the racism more than the other way around. What is needed is for whites to understand that their neighborhood isn’t poor because of all the blacks who live there, but rather all the blacks live there because their neighborhood is poor. And the blacks need to better understand that if any identifiable person is holding them down, the white cashier or plumber isn’t him. If there must be an enemy his color is not white or black, but gold or silver.

It seems that racists and academics must reach roughly the same breaking point, and understand that we’ve been fighting the wrong enemy. We need to properly identify our social class first, and stop thinking of black and white as somehow more different than rich and poor. Much of the academic commentary in the Salon article suggested to me that scholars on the topic have a harmful preconception of segregation as a problem related only to color and not to class, but none more so than this line from Colin Gordon of the University of Iowa, talking about St. Louis: “What we conventionally think of as white flight is now black flight as well. The city itself is just emptying out and the predominant area of African-American settlement is in St. Louis County."

No doubt for Gordon and for most people considering this topic, it’s always black and white, and so it’s just natural to talk about the two groups as separate entities, and it doesn’t occur to them that if there’s black flight and white flight, maybe they’re both following the same impulse, not demonstrating two different behaviors determined by their colors.

If there was no racism, there could still be segregation. If there was no segregation, there could still be segregation. The poor and the rich will always live apart, and people are kept unequal. If we’re going to start addressing that, we need to stop drawing false lines of demarcation among ourselves, which blur the line that should be clearest and most important. I pray for that breaking point.

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.