MSM MANIA

Bloggers and MSMers alike are talking about Nicholas Lemann's poignantly candid piece in The New Yorker about how the MSM are stumped that anybody could challenge their fairness and reasonableness. Baffled as they are by the criticism, however, Lemann reports that the producers and editors of big media have rededicated themselves to being even more fair and reasonable in the future.

"Most mainstream-media organizations, worried at being culturally and politically out of synch with many Americans, are making an effort to reach out--I frequently heard a promise to cover religion more seriously and sympathetically."

But if anyone in the MSM wonders how it is that they could be still be accused of bias despite all their seriousness and sympathy, he or she should take a look at yesterday's Washington Post style section--an almost textbook example of the problem.

Now let me begin by stipulating that I think the Post a very fine newspaper. Its reach is less broad than that of the New York Times, but on the whole it does a much better job than the Times of keeping bias out of its core news coverage. I feel I am noticeably less likely to read a deceptive story in the Post than in the Times. The Post consistently seem to find it easier than the Times to remember that Republicans--even Tom DeLay!--have ideals and principles too.

All that said in its favor, now look at what happens when this comparatively even-handed paper ventures into the divisive issues of contemporary American culture.

Yesterday's Style section had a front-page story on Christian evangelicals active on Capitol Hill and another story right beside a recent public screening of the now-famous lesbian episode of the PBS children's series, "Postcards From Buster."

If you have time, it's interesting to read them both through and think for a moment about the cultural assumptions behind each.

The evangelical piece has clearly been assigned and written in the affirmative-action spirit described by Nicholas Lemann. The author, the famously acid-tongued Hanna Rosin, has decided (or been told) to keep the nasty remarks to an absolute minimum. And yet even so...the piece just drips with disdain, doesn't it? Its thesis is that evangelicals have grown up, and have learned to appear less absurd and repulsive than formerly--but that they are in constant danger of tripping up and revealing themselves just as absurd and repulsive as ever: "This is the old mood of the antiabortion movement, blunt and morose and uncompromising, a press conference held in a congressional meeting room by a group called Abortion Hurts Women.

"Rep. Mike Pence (D-Ind.) has promised to make a brief appearance at this antiabortion news conference. By the time he gets there it's mostly over, but the women holding it are eager to repeat their performance for him. [Actually Rep. Pence is a Republican.]

"Jackie Bullard jumps right in to explain that an abortion left her unable to have children, so she adopted Arabella, a 'child of rape whose birth mother is a drug addict,' she says. 'But she is highly intelligent and perfectly normal.' Five-year-old Arabella is there, listening to this story she's no doubt heard many times, fidgeting at her mother's waist.

"On a table at the back of the room someone has lined up dozens of pairs of tiny shoes to represent all the 'murdered' children. In the corner a group of teenagers chat excitedly; they've just returned from the Supreme Court, where they stood with red masking tape across their mouths to represent the 'silent screams of the unborn babies.' All that's missing here is the graphic fetus pictures ubiquitous in the
'90s.

"Although Pence is low-key, he stands out in this crowd; he is neat and compact, with silvery hair and a pleasant face wasted on radio, the medium that made him famous in Indiana. When someone in the crowd talks to him about abortion doctors preying on vulnerable women for financial gain, Pence translates that sentiment into modern feminist terms.

"'One of the fascinating things about the suffragette movement,' he begins brightly, then describes how Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others recognized that they would be subjugated to the whims of men unless they could vote, translating the message of the dour news conference into progressive feminist terms."

Note that there is not even a flicker of admiration for Jackie Bullard's adoption of a potentially drug-damaged child or of the conviction of the high-school protesters. Note the nose-holding with which the display of little shoes is discussed. Note finally the utterly unearned assumption that it is somehow insincere and manipulative of Rep. Pence to remind his audience that Stanton (and Susan B. Anthony it could have been added) passionately opposed abortion.

You finish the piece and think, "OK, the Style section is notoriously bitchy. Maybe that's just the way they write. Maybe they would be just as contemptuous if they were sent out to report on, oh, I don't know--gay activism?" So your eye heads over to David Montgomery's piece on Buster....and, well, read it yourself.

"Like forbidden dissenters in some intolerant land, a couple hundred families took refuge in a church basement in Washington yesterday for a morning of dangerous television. So controversial were the images that the Bush administration wants its underwriting money back. So subversive was its plot that the local public television station refused to air it.

"Drinks were served: juice boxes. And hors d'oeuvres: Goldfish crackers. Faces were painted, and balloons were twisted into ladybug hats.

"Did we mention that a plurality of this revolutionary audience was younger than 10?"

Unlike the evangelical piece, this paean to Buster and PBS is written from the inside, with a kind of wide-eyed credulity that would embarrass PBS's own contract publicists.

The message of this piece is even less unmistakeable than that of Rosin's, and it is: "Only a cranky bigot could possibly object to using taxpayer funds to propagandize small children in favor of same-sex marriage."

In this piece, everybody's actions are taken at absolute face value. Thus: "At a time when religion is often cited against homosexuality, the Rev. Jeff Krehbiel, the pastor, said congregations like his must embrace families of all types 'not despite our Christian convictions, but because of our Christian convictions." In an alternative universe, a Post reporter might have brought the same skepticism to this self-congratulatory statement that Hannah Rosin brought to Rep. Pence's.

Even when confronted with affirmative evidence that there is rather more to the Buster story, Montgomery contrived not to notice it. "Pieper [one of the women featured in the Buster Vermont episode] said the producers had been looking for two-mom families and settled on hers after another option fell through. They liked how Emma and her siblings and moms interacted." In other words, this is not a case of some over-active imagination over-interpreting Tinky Winky's handbag. Buster's producers consciously intended to use their position of trust as publicly funded broadcasters of children's programming to advance a highly controversial agenda of their own. For them to act shocked, shocked, shocked that anybody might object is highly disingenuous. And for a reporter to feign shock along with them is doubly disingenuous.

It's a free country, there's a First Amendment, and if the Washington Post Style section chooses to be anti-Christian and pro-gay, that's their right--and maybe even, given the demographics of the Washington area, a sound marketing decision. But since those are the paper's choices, is it really too much to ask that the paper and papers like it quit saying, "Who, us?" whenever anybody outside the paper points them out?

Objectivity doesn't sell. If the MSM hasn't long ago given up the charade it will simply be shown for what it is: a snooty, well-dressed whore. To their dismay the refreshing voice of conservative thought has grown through the likes of Limbaugh, FOX, FR, etc.

Well maybe 1984 was the crest of it -- the IBM PC was four years old, the Apple II five. Arpanet was transiting into the early internet, talk radio was catching on in the musical desert of FM top hits.

Indeed Mister Reagan, Liberator -- Tear Down That Wall! -- was President, yet that circustance may more mark the high-water of Big Brotherism. Under Ronaldus Maximus -- "This Far and NO FURTHER EVER".

Mister Reagan, Liberator -- Tear Down That Wall! -- was President, yet that circustance may more mark the high-water of Big Brotherism.

Note that Reagan was the one who decided to get the "Fairness Doctrine" out of the way of conservative talk radio. That sounds like a no-brainer now, but the entire propaganda tsunami of journalism hinges on telling us that what we need is "information from people who are objective." The trouble is that we were told that by "people who are objective" - IOW, the whole "objectivity" thing is self-serving propaganda.
What we need, what we must have, is access to the opinions of people who are candid about their own perspective. We need access to the opinions of conservatives who are candidly conservative and - to a lesser extent - we need access to the opinions of anticonservatives (aka "liberals") who are candid about their anticonservatism. We need far less of the latter, IMHO, because we get so very much sub rosa anticonservatism in the daily news assault.

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