“Conventional, fact-based reporting is a liberal activity, just as teaching, academic research, social work, public defense, and public broadcasting are liberal activities. Can we just accept that once and for all and move on?” ~ DougJ attempting to dash my hopes for a better conservative journalism.
I must humbly disagree with this broad generalization. Journalism is merely the act of gathering and disseminating news and information – and good journalism is simply this effort minus any bias or attempts at propaganda. I don’t think that at its core it is either liberal or conservative in any modern, American sense of those words, or any other ideology for that matter. So then, what do I mean by better conservative journalism?
I suppose what I was talking about was better conservative analysis and opinion, rooted firmly in facts and evidence. In this country, conservative television and radio almost always panders to the lowest common denominator, and do so by blithely ignoring facts and research. This helps conservative politicians in the polls, and helps fuel the culture wars, but it does very little to promote conservative causes beyond the very short term. I view the current conservative movement as something of a supernova: it keeps burning hotter and hotter and expanding in its bitter rush to implosion and eventual self-destruction. FOX is an enabler of this astronomical atrophy.
But it’s just silly to say that fact-based reporting (or teaching or research, etc.) are inherently liberal activities. First of all – I’m still not entirely sure what people mean when they say the word liberal. Like most broad political leanings, it can actually have quite a lot of meanings, and there is indeed a great deal of disagreement amongst liberals over policies, over first principles, etc. Furthermore, how liberal should reporting be? If it’s an inherently liberal activity, shouldn’t we just push the whole fact-based thing off to the side and really drive home the liberal message? If not, then maybe journalism isn’t actually liberal in nature. Maybe it’s that third box down: neither A nor B.
In fact, I’d say there’s something of the small “c” conservatism present in all good journalism (and in very little journalism today). I’ve argued before (can’t find the link, however) that I thought NPR was in fact more conservative than FOX News, and I still think that. NPR is fanatical with its fact-checking, and extremely cautious with opinion-making on its airwaves (or even with risking opinion-forming events like the Stewart/Colbert rallies for its off-duty reporters). NPR maintains a dignified, measured tone and approach to its reporting; the same cannot be said for FOX, which is far more radical in just about every category. One could argue this is merely the difference between highbrow and lowbrow, but I think it goes deeper than that.
What would a conservative doppelganger to NPR look like? I imagine it would actually be very similar – for it to remain as neutral an entity as possible it could afford very little wiggle room to make itself more slanted to the right. At best, I could see NPR ditching obviously partisan programs such as Democracy Now! (which is which really has no business on NPR airwaves to begin with). I think this would be a better move than say, adding a Glenn Beck or a Mark Levin to create a counter balance.
Billy
Democracy Now is a Pacifica show, not NPR. Maybe it runs on some NPR affiliates, but has nothing to do with NPR per se.
James Gary
OK, sure.
Just to provide some concreteness to the discussion, E.D., can you name me one person or organization (living or dead, past or present) who you feel exemplifies the kind of “conservative journalism” you’re talking about? Because all you’ve done so far is make some vague generalizations and claim that “Democracy Now” is too partisan.
JGabriel
E.D. Kain:
Perhaps the problem is that conservative opinions are unsustainable in the face of honestly analyzed facts and evidence?
.
me
This is pretty orthogonal to “standing athwart history yelling stop”.
ed
Facts have a liberal bias. This has been known for quite some time.
Noonan
When it comes to reporting it means this:
lib·er·al: open-minded or tolerant, esp. free of or not bound by traditional or conventional ideas, values, etc.
You’re confusing liberal political ideology and the natural liberal curiosity that good journalism depends on.
Mr Furious
Under today’s operating definition of “conservative”, Doug’s statement rings pretty true to me.
Reality and facts aren’t the exclusive domain of liberals, but today’s conservative—journalist, pol, pundit or otherwise choose not to subscribe.
Bret
What I think Doug means, ED, is that liberals are more prone to get into a journalistic line of work, as they would teaching, etc.
matoko_chan
the question is not if journalism is inherently liberal….the question is if this instantiation of conservatism is utterly compromised.
Do you remember what i told you about my Grandfather and Jack Kemp and WFB? There was good conservative journalism once upon a time.
its like i tole sully and conor– give up on your sillie dream of “divided government”.
Conservatism must die to live again.
Hunter Gathers
The modern conservative movement has no use for facts. It thrives on lies, damned lies, and motherfucking lies. And when it’s not lying, it debates the writings of dead philosophers. It also finds spare time to demonize blacks, hispanics, gays, and single mothers. And it is quite pleased with it’s own behavior. Wishing for a more balanced, even handed brand of conservative journalism is folly. There’s no money in that. Which would draw more eyeballs? A civil discussion on tax policy, or Glenn Beck figuring out new and interesting ways of screaming ‘nigger, nigger’? Gee, I wonder.
The election of a AA POTUS has driven the conservative movement off the cliff. They welcomed the Neo-Confederates with open arms, go out of their way to welcome Christianists, and are the sole home of the bloodthirsty neo-cons. Conservative journalism based on reason and facts is something you are just not going get anytime in the near future. They’ve gone batshit fucking crazy, and will remain so for some time. Some people will just never get over the 20th century.
Mr Furious
@Noonan:
This.
Even without today’s rigid ideology blinding them, I think a conservative outlook hampers effective, objective investigation if the journalist is close-minded or starting with a set of facts he wants the story to fit.
Alex S.
This politicization of journalism is stupid on both sides. You used the word where it didn’t belong, or as you say, you weren’t precise enough in your definition of journalism. Later, you claim that fact-checking and non-opionated reporting is small-c conservative – but it’s not conservative, it’s just what journalism is meant to be. Fox News isn’t some different, “radical” kind of journalism, it’s just propaganda. And DougJ called fact-checking political because he didn’t recognize that you began your analysis on a fundamental level, the meaning of journalism itself, but instead, he immediately loaded this discussion with political weight, because only then does calling fact-checking “liberal” make sense. You were talking past each other.
David Fud
I would argue that Democracy Now is actually as conservative with the facts as any. I haven’t seen Amy Goodman pontificating about the meaning of the facts she gathers very often.
I would also argue that DN is often anti-corporate rather than liberal. Those may often coincide these days, but it wasn’t always the case throughout American history.
So, if you think that Amy Goodman = Glenn Beck, it makes me wonder about how grounded you are in the facts rather than taking someone else’s word for it about Democracy Now!
Ever watched it? Cause I’m kind of curious how grounded you think you are on this one.
Midnight Marauder
This is really quite naive, and it would be adorable if it were not so utterly clueless. You keep talking about “better conservative analysis and opinion” without ever taking the time to note the galringly obvious to anyone who has paid attention to politics in this country for more than 24 hours: There is no demand from conservatives for “better analysis and opinion.” They have the exact “journalistic” structure they’ve always desired in place, and they’ll have you know they worked a long time to make that happen, thank you very much.
This is all really just a pointless exercise if you don’t recognize that the people you are discussing have explicitly demonstrated that they fundamentally reject the ideas you are promoting here.
Do you think it’s a mistake that James O’Keefe is still celebrated as a heroic conservative “journalist”?
Protip: It is not.
BGinCHI
E.D., it’s an interesting response to Doug’s line from yesterday, but it’s telling that you manage to avoid the word “ideology” in your whole post.
“If it’s an inherently liberal activity, shouldn’t we just push the whole fact-based thing off to the side and really drive home the liberal message?”
This assumes that “fact-based” is free of any ideological interpretation, but of course that’s not possible. The point is to keep the bias on the surface, to admit that you make assumptions and not hide from this. What ideology does, and what Fox specializes in, is occluding its assumptions and its methods; it’s bending of facts is entirely in the service of its endgame.
What a more liberal media would mean is that it would be more self-aware; I’m afraid that what a more conservative media would mean is less self-scrutiny. But of course you’re free to argue that the conservatives who dominate that category aren’t really conservatives. And I might agree: radicals and reactionaries.
Mr Furious
@Bret: And yes, this seemed pretty clear to me at the time I read it last night. Obviously there are plenty of exceptions to the rule, but I think this is probably a common thread among the people Doug referred to. Even if in practice the teacher, firefighter or reporter is a conservative, it might take a liberal mindset, motive or outlook to drive them?
Mark
If you mean NPR is conservative in the sense that it can be bullied into letting more Republicans on air and is unwilling to do more than paint false equivalences between their opinions and those coming from Democrats, well I agree.
And ED, you should steer clear of the word “partisan”, even to describe Amy Goodman. It’s a smear, and it reflects a real analytical laziness on your part. If you mean that she’s a fervent supporter of something, well, then you’re incredibly partisan. And if you mean that she’s a committed member of a party or faction, I defy you to identify it. I may not agree with her, but she doesn’t fall into some lazy unspecific category.
James Gary
Do you remember what i told you about my Grandfather and Jack Kemp and WFB? There was good conservative journalism once upon a time.
Again, I ask: What exactly was this “good conservative journalism?” Who produced it? Please advise.
JGabriel
Mr Furious:
When your political platform consists of such planks as anti-evolutionism, anti-climate science, and anti-Keynesianism, then facts, evidence, and reality are not your friends. You pretty much must rely on lies to support your views.
So, while reality and facts are not the exclusive domain of liberals (and who ever said they were?), reality and facts are largely excluded from the domain of conservatism, by the conservatives themselves.
.
Modulo Myself
NPR is fanatical with its fact-checking, and extremely cautious with opinion-making on its airwaves (or even with risking opinion-forming events like the Stewart/Colbert rallies for its off-duty reporters).
That’s not conservative–it’s taking pride and care in one’s work.
I think it would be more fruitful if liberals replaced the anti-intellectual brand with anti-work. It would be far more accurate.
cleek
i can’t imagine a conservative version of NPR because i can’t see any liberal bias in the current NPR.
NPR is biased towards cautious moderation – don’t offend anyone, balance all stories which make one party look bad, don’t challenge mainstream liberal or conservative viewpoints, always balance liberal pundits with conservatives (though not always the reverse), stick to DC establishment narratives, get a third party to do fact-checking and make sure they present a balanced number of offenses, etc.. there’s nothing really leftist about them. maybe it would look like the WSJ’s straight reporting?
maybe they’d have fewer left-of-center panel members on the quiz shows ?
Malraux
Well, I think that pretty accurately describes journalism as inherently progressive. Or at the least makes good journalism, as well as other modes of inquiry into the world, a lynchpin of progressive ideas. And there are a lot of reasons why progressive ideas are inherently not conservative.
some other guy
Is it theoretically possible for an intellectually honest conservative news organization exist? Sure. Is it likely to exist? No, because so much of the conservative orthodoxy these days is based on factually incorrect information.
Take, for example, global warming. It is a scientific FACT that the earth, on average, is getting warmer. But to conservatives, simply printing this fact automatically makes the reporter a liberal.
How could an intellectually honest conservative news organization succeed in a world where conservatives, by and large, reject the simple reporting of facts as a liberal plot to deceive them?
TooManyJens
I’m thinking of a journalistic mindset broadly, almost scientifically, as one that is eager to learn more information, able to synthesize that information, and open to going where that information leads, even if it means changing one’s mind.
A conservative mindset, broadly and in the less political sense of the term, is wary of change and gives heavy weight to tradition and authority when trying to find the truth.
These two mindsets are unlikely to be found in the same person, but anything’s possible — there are almost 7 billion people in the world, after all.
Aet
All I heard was ‘Truth is liberal’. Then something about class warfare. It’s unusual for a conservative to be this honest about their concept of integrity; that they consider honesty and compassion to be values of their political nemesis.
“What would a conservative doppelganger to NPR look like?”
I think it might look a lot like some of the Armed Forces Radio stations (I forget their exact names). I’d expect a heavy focus on foreign affairs coverage, since Us Vs Them is the classic theme. I’d exect everything local would use the “Two sides to every story” approach that allows journalists to transfer their responsibility to tell the truth to people without that kind of ethic.
mikefromArlington
“This helps conservative politicians in the polls, and helps fuel the culture wars, but it does very little to promote conservative causes beyond the very short term.”
Umm…controlling of the House for a substantial amount of time the last 20 years after not having controlled it for so long does seem like its working just fine for the right wingers.
And please, the right wingers of today grabbing the conservative brand is ridiculous. They aren’t conservative. They are just a bunch of power hungry whores selling out to the highest bidder and a substantial amount of right wing religious zealots intent on imposing their religious beliefs on America.
Or has the definition of conservative now shifted to power hungry whores and religious zealots?
Malraux
@cleek:
The problem there is that humor is a liberal quality.
DougJ
@Bret:
That is mostly what I mean, yes, because it’s quantifiable. I also think there is an airy-fair philosophy-world version of this statement that is also true, but I’m not versed enough in that stuff to argue for that very clearly.
Three-nineteen
I read that as DougJ saying that these are liberal activities NOW. These things are not inherently liberal, it’s just that modern conservatives either don’t think they are important or don’t think they are an effective means of achieving their goals, so they do other things and leave these activities to others (“liberals”). The past 10 or so years seem to bear that out.
Ginger Yellow
As a (liberal) journalist, I’d say that journalism is, broadly speaking inherently liberal. A philosopher would probably dispute my use of the word “inherently”, but here’s what I mean. In order to be a good reporter, you need to have a knowledge of your beat that is as good, or very nearly as good, as the people whose activities you are covering. And yet in nearly every case, the people you are covering are better paid and have higher social status than you do. Good journalists are invited to cross the aisle constantly, and some do. So news journalism (as opposed to punditry, which is very well paid) is full of people who care less about money and status than they do about writing and/or spreading information far and wide. That doesn’t absolutely have to mean liberals, but nine times out of ten it does.
Brighton
Journalism is perceived as liberal because the media plays a critical role in an open society, and fascists desire a closed, compliant society.The forces lined up against a free press at the moment are overwhelmingly conservative in their political orientation. Some would argue this is a norm.
I enjoyed DougJ’s post and agree that these days, the media does not see liberal issues as adult-enough to include in reporting. Their attitude is that mature people understand that fascism is necessary in a violent, competitive world.
My two cents on the liberal image problem here.
Mike G
Like many authoritarian control-obsessed ideologies, Repigs and teatards want to bully reality into conforming with their ideology. Hence their contempt for science and intellect.
Since their ideology is so out of whack with reality and getting further away, it requires massive and contant efforts to shore it up and defend it against encroachment from reality. Reality is threatening and must be controlled.
Like in the Soviet Union, science, art and journalism aren’t expressions of creativity or knowledge but tools to serve the ideology and are evaluated in terms of how well they further the predominant narrative.
kth
Democracy Now is not only unaffiliated with NPR, but receives no government money, CPB or otherwise. Moreover it’s a safe assertion that Goodman & Co. wouldn’t feel free to be as strident as they are if they were dependent upon government funds
(not sure what E.D. was suggesting about them, but the fact is, despite the lapses into radical chic defeatism, the periodic interviews with the likes of Mumia Abu-Jamal, etc., Democracy Now produces crucial journalism and our republic would be a markedly lousier place if it ever went away.)
The salient feature of a conservative version of NPR is that zero conservatives would listen to it. There are plenty of conservatives open-minded enough not to have their worldview constantly reinforced and any contrary information or perspectives suppressed. Those conservatives are NPR listeners.
Jim Pharo
“Conservative.” You keep using that word but I don’t think it means what you think it means.
The dogged pursuit of facts and information without overt or intentional bias is a liberal activity because there is no longer any meaning of “conservative” that would countenance such non-faith based activity. And for actual conservatives, if it isn’t something sanctioned by Rush, it is, by definition, liberal.
Q.
E.
D.
I’m kidding a bit, but the point is that the kind of so-called “little c” conservatism that ED imagines is no more real than magic ponies or unicorns. I agree it would be nice and beneficial to our society to have sane conservatives, but that’s mere wishful thinking, nothing more. Ask Olympia Snowe.
robert green
the fact that you conflate pacifica (which has a clear and stated agenda which they proclaim with pride) and NPR tells me more than enough. you are another person from the right who thinks that pontificating on stuff is more important that actually being an expert in the thing upon which you are pontificating.
oh, and about pacifica–see, unlike its conservative counterpart, it actually is proud of who and what it is. none of this horseshit “fair and balanced” stuff. the level of embarrassment that occurs in the universe on a daily basis because FNC can’t sack up and own who and what it is still manages to shock and awe.
conservatives support war. conservatives support winning over principles. conservatives support the destruction of the earth. conservatives support recidivist religious beliefs. conservatives support death squads around the world. conservatives support terrorism by helping it grow. conservatives support racism and hatred of the “other” most especially if the “other” has brown or black skin.
all of these statements are backed by a VAST preponderance of evidence. the usual rejoinders ALWAYS speak of some mythical beast–burkean, buckley-ite, hayekian etc. it doesn’t exist HERE on the ACTUAL planet that i am forced to share with you assholes.
scarshapedstar
I think this notion of the ‘passive journalist’ is a farce and a demonstrated disaster.
For example: on any given day, the GOP can issue a press release full of lies.
The modern construction of “unbiased” journalism is that this is, in itself, a story. The GOP said something, and it is to be repeated in its entirety. You can’t say if the GOP is lying or not, because that would be biased. You must report only what they say and “let the public decide” even though the public probably can’t make heads or tails of it.
I don’t think parroting unfiltered lies is the role of a journalist. I think their role should be, rather, to say “GOP said this, and it’s a lie, and here’s why” and cite facts. Or, shit, maybe the GOP is actually telling the truth, but it’s important to actually verify that.
And, yes, this often requires a personal agenda, but adults have viewpoints and pretending otherwise does not make for better journalism. But, by god, let’s keep up the farce!
morzer
I’d say some of Radley Balko’s work on prisons might be considered conservative journalism, as might some of Weigel’s work on politics, when he isn’t trying to prove his right-wing bona fides. Other than that, you mostly get the sloppy seconds “journalism” of people like David Brooks, or obvious opinion mongering from various politicians on the make. In all honesty, given how far the last two categories diverge from any attempt to produce and use facts discovered by research in an argument or analysis, I would have trouble calling them journalism, much less taking their claims seriously. Far too much “conservative journalism” is nothing more than the tired parading of old bogeymen with a generous amount of insult, innuendo and unjustified personal accusation or subtly deployed racial animus. Nothing inherently stops conservatives from investigating, using facts, making a real case – but they mostly decline to do so in my experience. They seem to have lost the “correct” part of “conserve and correct” – and I suspect it was when they began to demonize government, and so gave up on one of the most potent instruments of correction known to humanity. There is no reason why a conservative should not, for example, investigate the abuses that are rampant in the meat-processing industry, and call for corrective measures and better public hygiene. Instead, we get the usual vicious waffle about the free market, even as Americans get sick because the industry is using poor-quality meat, is unable to trace the point of origin of ground meat products, and often operates in conditions which are not sufficiently sanitary. What stops a conservative from taking on these problems? An ideology that “nothing must be done that might interfere with business” – even when business has shown it does not deserve that trust and will not clean up its own house.
abo gato
Well, I’m old I guess, because I always thought that people who went into journalism usually had a good educational background. And, it used to be that people who had a good education tended to be liberal. All that reading and study of history and facts and stuff.
With the nuts in charge of the Texas school board and their active pursuit of christianism and its inclusion in education, plus all the nuts piously crying about taking prayer out of school, they have managed to fuck up the schools everywhere so that NO one gets an education anymore.
We are living with the results and that means that entities like Fox can call themselves journalists. No one knows what a journalist is supposed to really do anymore. The press is no longer free, it is bought and paid for by Murdoch and Koch.
Oh, and to top it all off? I heard a local ad today that knocked me off my feet. This goof ball is running for a write in vote for Texas governor. In his radio ad, he actually said “there was a man 2000 years ago who created the best form of government and I want to bring what he did to Texas. I want to govern just like Jesus Christ did. I am a christian and I believe the government should have christ in it.” I had to look him up, here’s his website:
http://www.andybarronforgovernor.com/
The logo with the star with a cross in it really, really pisses me off. Thank the FSM he has no chance, but the fact that they all feel so empowered to (as they love to say) ram this down our throats so much, worries me to no end.
socratic_me
@Noonan: Again, This.
This is also why (good) teaching tends to be a liberal activity. Conservative teaching tends to be all about “Accept these facts as true because I am an authority and I told you they are true.” It is based on a respect for tradition and hierarchy as well as a willingness to conform to preset social patterns. These are all conservative traits. Liberal teaching tends to be about exploration, challenging ourselves to find new insights and question standard interpretations. It also tends to reward those who “think outside the box”. These are all liberal traits.
Very few parents actually want conservative teachers (as defined by the above traits) for their children, as they tend to be significantly less effective. They just don’t encourage inquiry or critical thought. As such, they are a quickly disappearing people.
LGRooney
I started to write a long lawyerly spiel about defining terms and then realized… aw, fuck it, old-style conservatives are now called liberals, too, and new-style conservatives are nothing more than the hypocritical bootlickers of power & wealth ready to follow whatever the current whim of their chosen master class is. As such, there can be no conservative press that is also honest. By and large, liberal press = truth seeking; conservative press = propaganda. We have more than abundant evidence that liberals will eat their own (call out liberal propaganda and marginalize it) when they step away from foundations of evidence whereas conservatives merely circle the wagons to defend their beliefs regardless of what the truth is.
BGinCHI
@socratic_me: Plus 1. If conserving culture means draining it of its vitality, then it ain’t culture, and it ain’t education.
Hell, these idiots can’t even read the bible. They think it’s like Ikea instructions.
JGabriel
@mikefromArlington:
I’m sorry, I turned 15 in 1980, so most of my political awareness was formed post-Reagan, which leads to my question: what do you mean by shift? Was there ever a time when conservative did not imply power hungry whores and religious zealots?
.
cleek
the reason FOX News exists is because “conservatives” have been working for 50 years to make “conservatives” believe they are downtrodden victims of repression by liberal coastal elites, by minorities, by foreigners. generations of “conservatives” have been raised thinking the world is keeping them down, to distrust the mainstream, to feel persecuted and forced underground, and that they aren’t being heard (Nixon’s “Silent majority”). and, along comes FOX News and says “I Will Speak For You”, and they flock to it because it tickles their victimhood buttons.
there is nothing at all like that on the left. sure, there are conspiracy theorists and rageaholics and the easily-panicked; but liberals by and large don’t seem to feel that liberalism itself is being kept down by a coordinated cabal of conservatives. so they don’t need a network that reinforces that feeling.
or maybe i should eat some lunch…
Bill Section 147
Show me a list of conservatives who dreams of being underpaid to work hard for someone else. Cross out military, police, charity work, community service or religious jobs. Of the names remaining I might be convinced that one of them could be a Conservative Journalist.
some other guy
@abo gato:
“I want to govern just like Jesus Christ did.”
Why do I get the feeling he doesn’t mean he wants to heal the sick, feed the hungry, turn the other cheek to violence, and remove the money changers from the temple of government?
Tractarian
@Billy:
This.
E.D., are you trying to turn this place into a McArdle-esque Den of Mendacity? And, um, why no correction yet? That’s a pretty big error. And it puts the lie to your implication that there can be a “conservative doppelganger” to NPR.
The “conservative doppelganger” to NPR would look exactly like NPR. Because, as you seem to understand, the difference between NPR and Fox is not political valence, so to speak; it’s that Fox is political and NPR is not.
Sentient Puddle
@DougJ: As I understand it, the philosophical version goes something like this:
Broadly speaking, a conservative is someone who is resistant to change, generally believing that the way things are right now is quite alright. This means they’re not particularly interested in going out and finding facts, either because they’re fine with something just plain working, or they’re not really seeing something wrong and asking themselves why it’s wrong.
And if a journalist is supposed to be one who goes out and finds facts, then the person described above clearly isn’t going to be predisposed towards journalism. QED
This, of course, might be overly simplistic. Or wrong.
Joe Buck
Democracy Now is not an NPR program. It’s carried by a number of public radio stations that also carry NPR programs. There is no such thing as “NPR airwaves”.
Also, the program takes a leftist point of view but isn’t particularly partisan (they are very rough on Democrats); Amy Goodman is responsible for some of the toughest interviews Bill Clinton or Howard Dean ever had.
Some of the best journalism around has a strong point of view, and there isn’t any such thing as “unbiased”. Choosing which stories to report and which stories not to report requires the editor to express an opinion. However, an opinionated reporter can report a story accurately and fairly, while an “objective” reporter who merely allows “both sides” to spew their spin, with no attempt to fact-check, is doing the public no service.
To too many, “objective” means “halfway between moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans”. But by world standards, that results in a very biased view on many issues, since the US is way out on the fringe on some issues if you take a European, Latin American, or Asian perspective.
walt
I am a liberal who is partisan, often close-minded, frequently rigid, and obnoxiously opinionated. But I’m this way in service of objective reality, not faith-based fantasies and belief systems. That is, if science were to inform me today that mass transit causes cancer or baby harp seals cause the plague, I wouldn’t deny it from my own beliefs. Those beliefs must be grounded in something real.
What is real can only be a political question when one faction has decided that power is more important than truth. That faction is today’s American right.
Zifnab
@scarshapedstar:
This.
Although, to a lesser degree, confronting a bald faced lie would be the job of even the most non-partisan “pure journalist”. If you aren’t addressing they lie then you are perpetuating it.
In that sense, I suspect the perfect example of conservative journalism would be the treatment of the Swift Boat Veterans back in ’04. They were treated fairly and openly, their statements were taken down without serious question, and their positions and opinions were accepted and repeated as credible. ABC News did an excellent job of conservative journalism when confronting these guys.
Citizen_X
But why would anybody be driven to diligently practice this “gathering and disseminating” of this news and information? Because they feel it is necessary to the function of democracy, and I think, along with Bret above, that that automatically selects people of a liberal bent.
I would question your definition and second statement though. Journalism is gathering, disseminating and analyzing news. The analysis is inherently a political act, and dependent upon one’s political beliefs–i.e. “biased.” So what?
The classic statement of journalistic questions–who, what, where, when, how and why–encompasses both information and analysis. Who, what, where, when and sometimes how are matters of fact, and they should be replicated whether one is getting news from a “conservative” or “liberal” source. The questions of why and, sometimes, how are matters of interpretation, and should be different from sources with different politics.
I am suggesting that journalism can be compared completely to the scientific method, somewhat parallel to the IMRAD (introduction, methods, results, analysis and discussion) model. Nobody bashes fellow scientists for having a point of view–instead, an interpretation of the data is expected. What will piss scientists off, however, is when a writer or speaker mixes up data interpretation so that no one could ever untangle them. Obviously, human motivation, and thus politics, can be much more murky than the natural world, but journalists would do well to consider the scientific model as an ideal to be approached in their work. When FOX (or anyone else) mixes up the facts and their comment on same so that they’re not clearly distinguishable, viewers should suspect that they’re being manipulated at worst, and victimized by journalistic incompetents at best.
LGRooney
@cleek: In other words, Archie Bunker was a model rather than a foil.
morzer
@Joe Buck:
There are rumors of a colony of moderate Republicans on Alpha Centauri, but the species is currently considered extinct on earth.
Capri Sun-Bagger
Eh, this is going to be another one-sided pounding of Kain for engaging in yet more of the sloppy, unfactual philosophizing that people are pointing to as the MUP for conservatives.
Kain seems almost immune to research and learning (especially for an academic). Is he a PoliSci? He sounds like a PoliSci.
p.a.
E.D., Sully, Frum et al. all seem to suffer from some sort of, I don’t know what to call it, maybe ‘Huguenot Syndrome’. They are ex pats., not by choice but by expulsion.
Yet they keep trying to define themselves as the actual residents of Conservitopia, not as a diaspora. I say majority rules, and what you see is what you get. The American conservative movement has self-defined as a bunch of loons to such an extent that even those that may sotto voce agree with the apostates must pull the forelock and mumble the magic words to avoid expulsion themselves. So good luck waiting for a broad based rationalist conservative journalism to bloom. (John Cole must be smarter than all of you; he saw the movement for what it is and said ‘fuck ’em’ and left without all the hand-wringing and chest-beating.) For a start the Republican Party must wean itself from the Christianist/Extractive Industry/Billionaire Heir money tit. (Cue the laugh track).
The left has its loons too, but the anti-immunization/9-11 was an inside job/CIA mind-control folks are truly and rightly marginal. They may control a few school boards in Cali., but they’re certainly not capable of anything more.
Downpuppy
Todays “Conservatism” is the authoritarian later stages of a long & sucsessful class war* fought with the usual tool of using social distraction to set the lower classes against each other. It’s basically insane at this point, with the stories needed to push it getting more preposterous by the day. Inequality has reached the point where it’s destroying the economy. Does that mean it’s time for the Right to back off? Of course not! Even though the next stage is civil disorder.
Trying to take back the word “conservatism” at this point is kinda cute. In the “pointless, hopeless & utterly blind” sense of cute.
*The lack of serious opposition (so far) from the working class doesn’t make it not a war.
Karmakin
No, little c conservatism does exist. It just doesn’t exist within the Big C Conservative movement. At all. There are some people on the fringes I guess, but not enough to really be any sort of presence or effect.
Where does little c conservatism exist? Well, it exists on the left really, probably further to the left than most people in politics. These are the people who want to create a more stable and equitable society. Not do anything overly radical, protect the environment, and so on. That’s little c conservatism.
Not something you see on the right usually.
Movement Conservatives are very radical. They’re about upshifting everything and letting the pieces fall where they may. Obedience to authority and ideology matter more than actual results. There’s no room in that mindset for actual journalism.
mikefromArlington
@JGabriel:
I think the evangelical south brought Carter into the WH.
And, I think there was a brief time when the right didn’t completely sell out to corporations as they do now.
flounder
NPR isn’t close to being fanatical with its fact checking.
I listen to Talk of the Nation rather regularly, and literally every single week their “political junkie” douchebag lies about something or lets someone else lie about something on air. One major one was where a guest was claiming that a whole lot of blacks fought for and supported the south during the Civil War.
I have written and called numerous times asking them to correct simple factual errors, and I can’t say they have ever corrected one of his mistakes.
One time Talk of the Nation led off their show with some teabagger talking about how she sat there and cried during election night, and threw her shoes at the TV because she knew that since Obama got elected, that there was going to be a bank bailout. The bailout happened before the election. I asked them to correct this, and the screener simply said no, that they didn’t do on-air corrections..
morzer
Off-topic, but I rather like this man, and there doesn’t seem to be an open thread, whether conservative or liberal:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/oct/27/jimmy-mcmillan-the-rent-is-too-damn-high
Sly
Conservatism, at its most fundamental core, seeks to protect institutions from “overzealous” reform. Wittingly or unwittingly destroy a society’s major institutions and you destroy that society, and all that jazz.
In this respect, mainstream political journalism is, at its heart, a conservative enterprise. It is accountable only to the whims of the elite that are its patrons, which are often very large political or economic institutions. This occurs to such an extent that political journalism even ignores basic market forces: Cable news venues that, at most, are perused by less than 5% of the electorate (on a good day/night) combined are granted immense influence and credibility.
An individual journalist who seeks to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted will quickly find themselves being subtly and not so subtly co-opted by this system, just as a teacher who wants to broaden the horizons of their students and get them to think critically of elements in their own society and culture (or, horror of horrors, elements of their own education) will find themselves under pressure from their school district to conform to the demands of those with the social capital to maintain the traditional status quo.
wonkie
I’m sorry and don’t mean to be rude, but I think that Dougj is right. One of the fundamental differences between liberals and conservatives is that liberals are oriented to reality, willing to learn and change their minds, but conservatives live inside their heads, unwilling to see or understand anythinng except in terms of their preconceptions. Liberals solve problems by examining situations and thinking. Conservatives try to solve problems by applying their ideology and if that doesn’t work they either apply their ideology more, blame the problem on someone else and claim that their ideology would have solved it or insist that the the problem no longer exists because their ideology solved it.
The core difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals see the purpose of public activity–government especially–is to serve the greater good while conservatives think the purpose of public activity such as government is to serve them. Only them. No one else. That’s why conservatives are rigid, fearful, selfserving and intellectually dishonest when it comes to political discourse: because everything they say about pubic issues gets distorted by their selfishness.
Liberals, acting within their desire to serve the common good, make mistakes but they are mistakes of generousity from people who are not trying to serve their own egos or short term interests first and are therefore much more likely to admit error or change their minds.
Liberalism is a political philosophy. Conservatism really isn’t. Galbraith ws right: its just a rationalizationn for selfishness.
roseyv
I’m not trying to be snotty, I’m honestly just asking: If your only goal is to help conservative politicians in the polls and help fuel the culture wars, why would you even care about promoting conservative causes beyond the very short term? I don’t mean you, E.D. Kain. I mean the sort of editorial “you,” or “one” — why would one, if one say, an employee of Fox News, care? As long as they’re getting what they want, right now, who cares about the future? And if they sincerely cared about the future, why would politics or ideology even enter into it? I suppose this could be said of either side, if there actually were a viable “liberal” news network out there (Olbermann and Maddow do not jointly or individually constitute an entire network). I’m not a particularly political person one way or the other (I kind of subscribe to Elon James White’s position of not being liberal, just anti-evil). But I think its naïve to talk about how something can be improved when, from the point of view of the people running the show, it’s working just fine exactly as it is, thanks. It would be great if that were not the case, but if it weren’t, you’d be talking about a lot of billionaires who suddenly had to learn to rough it as mere multi-millionaires, and I think that reality would be a fairly hard sell, even anyone were theoretically interested in listening (which I doubt they would be).
Comrade Dread
I agree.
I don’t think journalism is, in itself, a liberal or conservative activity.
Journalism is (or should be) an investigation into the facts surrounding a story.
An ideal journalist would have qualities associated with both traditional (not necessarily political) liberalism (e.g. an open-mindedness to challenge one’s own world view) and conservatism (e.g. a deep skepticism of power). As well as more neutral or shared qualities.
I wish that there were more traditional conservatives who were objectively skeptical (as opposed to bats*** insanely hostile) of the power establishment in Washington regardless of the party in power.
morzer
@Capri Sun-Bagger:
People, except you, aren’t pounding Kain. They are debating an issue which he brought up, generally in civil tones.
You could learn something, grasshopper.
BGinCHI
The comments so far are why I read this blog.
Smart and exactly my definition of liberal: curious and engaged and even a little spicy.
LGRooney
@Sly: Which is why schools are overburdened with testing now. It keeps the teachers away from actually teaching critical thinking skills and focusing on the
money,test scores, keeping their jobs.robert green
e.d. is like john without the intelligence.
can we skip the next two years of self-defensiveness and get to the part e.d. where you realize you were just clueless and stupid for a large part of your life?
as someone mentioned upthread this is all POST-reagan. e.g. e.d. you have NO excuse to buy any of your own crap. yet still you do.
sad.
Sideshow Bob
I highly recommend “Why I Am Not a Conservative” By F. A. Hayek. It’s funny that he can’t align with conservatives, and he has some damning things to say about conservatives.
roseyv
Okay, and to slightly qualify what I wrote above — I’m now seeing references to Pacifica in the comments.
Honest to God, I haven’t heard anything about Pacifica since around 1992. I didn’t even realize it still existed.
kth
@Tractarian: not fair, Kain’s post was McArdle-stupid, not McArdle-dishonest.
morzer
@kth:
It isn’t stupid to open a question up for debate, whether or not you agree or disagree with ED Kain. It is stupid to respond to that invitation by substituting name-calling and abuse for honest discussion on the merits. Why behave like the teabaggers?
cleek
f.f.s., people, if you don’t like a particular poster, just don’t read their posts – it’s easy to do, their names are right there at the top.
there’s no need to get all rude and offensive and hostile.
morzer
@cleek:
Well said!
wvnk
It seems to me that every self-identified conservative in the media functions as a political party operative, at least much of the time. They are given a bit of room to establish their “independence” but they always can be depended on to support the big picture. That includes people I sometimes enjoy reading, like Parker and Bobo.
On the other side, other than liberals who actually have been political operatives, I can’t think of any self-identifying media liberals who behave anything like political party operatives. Rachel and Olberman push hard against Obama when they disagree with his actions, certainly as hard as they would push against a republican doing the same thing.
Capri Sun-Bagger
morzer: I don’t give a shit about civility, I care for decency. And ED Kain’s looseness with the facts and tendency to engage in rhetorical hair-splitting to support his own sheltered worldview offends my sense of decency.
So, fuck him and fuck you too. You can put that in your civility pipe and smoke it.
Martin
Ok, but this is VERY small-c conservative in the same way that I argue that Social Security is conservative and that single-payer healthcare is conservative because they focus workers efforts away from survivability issues and toward productivity issues.
So yes, fact checking and the like are very small-c conservative things, but big-C Conservatives at this point have fuck-all to do with small-c conservatism. I’m not talking about rhetoric, but actions. And big-C Conservatism is so drastically removed from small-c conservatism that arguing that DougJ is wrong is like arguing that Steve Jobs loves Flash (the Adobe runtime environment) because Apple uses so much flash memory in their products. Yeah, it’s the same word, but they are so completely removed from each other in meaning that we might as easily just use completely different terms for the two.
Conservatism (big-C) died ages ago. It died to Civil Rights and Communist paranoia. It died to co-opting and being co-opted by the religious right, who by definition care nothing about facts on the ground and everything about maintaining the narrative. And now it’s dying to the Tea Party movement that are building a new religion around the Constitution and the Founders, and happily willing to take what is indisputably written in not very many words and twist it to fit a new worldview. When WWJD is getting redefined as ‘What Would Jefferson Do’, it’s become pretty clear that big-C Conservatism is a word that really needs to get tossed from the lexicon.
catclub
@TooManyJens:
“A conservative mindset, broadly and in the less political sense of the term, is wary of change and gives heavy weight to tradition and authority when trying to find the truth.”
Exactly. A conservative Mindset is Thomas Aquinas reading Aristotle in order for Aristotle and Christianity to agree on
THE TRUTH.
Aquinas was a giant, but he seems to have set limits before he started.
Newton was also deeply religious and looking for the hand of God in the works, but significantly more open to finding out how things worked.
YellowDog
In a world with no resource constraints, fact-gathering and dissemination could be objective and therefore neither liberal nor conservative. (long and long-winded remainder of the post deleted by the author because it only elaborated on this simple point)
WereBear (itouch)
@cleek: What you just described is the feauture, not the bug.
If modern conservatism is to be successful, it must ruin the lives of those who embrace it. This subsequent misery cannot be blamed on the true source. Thus, the constant Enemy is the reason it’s fans are so miserable.
Lucy Finn-Smith
lovely rant Robert Green, I saved it for its sheer poetry
kth
@morzer: Sorry, I was responding to the assertion that Kain was being dishonest. It was intended as a defense, however snarky and backhanded. I actually like most of E.D.’s posts, but the factual howler regarding Democracy Now was pretty hard to ignore.
Linda Featheringill
For decades, folks who might be classified as outside of the Liberal spectrum [left and right] have stated that liberals are quite good at conducting studies. Liberals do that a lot. The discussion [or controversy] arose from analysis of the results of those studies.
If some liberals seem to be hard wired to dig for information, and if some of these go into journalism, they would probably gravitate towards investigative journalism. Hence the liberal investigative journalist.
This is not to say that others, with different opinions, could not do the same job and just as well. The trick would be to not allow previously held philosophies skew the results.
morzer
@Capri Sun-Bagger:
Ah, Mr Proffitt, alive and well, I see.
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
I see journalism as an enterprise which seeks to understand overlooked aspects of society or bring to light new information to inform society’s opinions. Good journalism (that is, journalism with a lot of value to society) isn’t necessarily “muckraking”, but it’s close.
I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s “liberal” as “anti-conservative”. To the extent that journalism seeks to challenge existing viewpoints and upend the status quo, I think it’s very likely that people who believe in the wisdom of the status quo and have a strong just world theory (traditional conservatives) will mostly not choose to engage in it.
NewHavenReview
E.D., we actually do know what this looks like, it just doesn’t exist in radio. It’s called The Economist.
JGabriel
Tractarian:
Can we just inform & mock Kain when he gets something wrong, like we do with Cole, and not automatically accuse Erik of bad faith?
Erik spent a lot of time in the trenches of the conservative blogosphere, reading and believing their misinformation. He’s still going to possess a lot of assumed knowledge, things he doesn’t know are lies yet, because he never had any reason to question them before. It’s like leaving a cult.
So, when he gets something like the Democracy Now! affiliation wrong, let’s just assume it’s trained ignorance instead of willful mendacity?
.
morzer
@kth:
I take your point about the howler – but ED Kain might well correct it. I have yet to see McArdle offer a real correction or an apology. Hypotheticals and statistics, you know.
Judas Escargot
What would a conservative doppelganger to NPR look like?
It would look remarkably like NPR: Because there’s nothing particularly ‘liberal’ about NPR.
Which begs the question of what you mean by ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ in the first place.
We live in a weird age: To anyone who accepts the fundamental tenets and techniques of the Enlightenment, we now swim in a sea of frightening-but-proven facts (at least to the extent to which one can ‘prove’ anything). There is climate change. There is a peak oil problem on the horizon. We’re not only descended from apes– we (cladistically) are apes. I’m sorry, but you can’t dispute these things anymore. One might as well wait for the sun to rise in the West tonight at midnight.
Yet every one of those issues I’ve flagged above has been tagged as a ‘liberal issue’ to be denied by so-called conservatives: I’m surrounded by these people in my daily life, and the extent to which they will spin tales inside their heads to avoid facing some hard general truths head-on is– frankly sad. Tales of climate scientists colluding and plotting just to keep the grant money coming. Liberals lying about future oil scarcity just to ‘kill capitalism’. Evolution as a plot to destroy religion. WTF?
But what’s specifically liberal about the atmosphere, or about the contents of the oil fields, or about the content and history of our genes? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Yet they are. Why?
I’d be more sympathetic to the soul-searching going on amongst those right-of-center types turned off by the teabaggers if I had a good understanding of what “conservative” is really supposed to mean at all in this context.
What is it that you think so badly needs ‘conserving’ from the liberals? It’s the left trying to conserve the ecosystem. It’s the left trying to conserve capitalism. And it’s the left that’s trying to conserve the Constitution, and the Republic.
So how is the left not ‘conservative’ enough for you?
Linda Featheringill
@YellowDog:
Yes. This would be good. And the disseminators of information could hold whatever opinions they wished. It wouldn’t matter to the rest of us.
BR
@NewHavenReview:
I was going to say the same thing. The Economist is as close as it gets, except with their US political coverage, which is downright awful.
(I subscribed to them for years until I saw how bad their political coverage was in 2007-2008.)
kth
@Judas Escargot: that gets to my favorite analogy regarding the Weekly Standard, which was originally conceived as a conservative version of The New Republic. Much as the Bay City Rollers were conceived as a bubblegum version of the glam rock of T. Rex and Sweet.
But the Rollers were mostly a failure because the bubblegum version of Sweet and T. Rex already existed: i.e., Sweet and T. Rex themselves. Similarly, the conservative version of The New Republic is The New Republic. In a sane country, they would be the magazine of the right.
Sly
@wonkie:
Which is a philosophy, really. Say what you will about the tenants of American Conservatism, Dude… at least its an ethos.
But thats not what defines conservativism. Not really. Conservativism is ultimately about the fear of losing institutions which are perceived as the anchor of a society; cultural, economic, social, political, etc. Economic conservatism is based on the fear of losing the material pillars of a society; the perceived locus of production (whether the state in the 18th century, the proprietor in the 19th century, or the corporation in the 20th century). Cultural conservatism is the fear of losing a common heritage and value system (most often expressed in religious terms) to anomie.
It’s not that, as Buckley wrote, conservatives stand athwart history and yell “Stop!” It’s more like they stand athwart history and yell “Slow the fuck down because you’re going too fast and scaring the shit out of me!” As an aside, it should not be surprising that the elderly are more likely to be conservative than the youth; the youth have not been inculcated into the status quo, and are often more readily accepting of change.
In other words, its not always about preserving institutions that have material benefit to conservatives. Conservatives believe that all institutions have a societal benefit, otherwise they wouldn’t have become institutions in the first place. Liberalism, by contrast, lacks that sense of timelessness and permanence. An institution may have had some necessary function in the past, but that doesn’t last forever. And if an institution becomes destructive toward society it either needs to be altered or abolished.
eemom
I would really like to hear what YOU mean when you say the word “conservative” — because as others have already pointed out, that word as used by most people today has absolutely nothing to do with its old-fashioned dictionary meaning.
It has become nothing more than a label on the random grab bag of self-contradictory rhetoric spewed by “conservative” “leaders” such as Limbaugh, Palin, Beck and parroted by the Teatard sheep.
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
@BR:
It’s not just The Economist, it’s a general problem with British publications (the same is true in reverse of American ones). Because both countries speak the same languages, commentators assume knowledge of one allows them to understand the other, and frequently make mistakes like assuming Republican-Tory policy concordance (where a lot of their policies are closer to the Democrats, even though their rhetoric and relative political position is not), stuff like that.
danimal
I sympathize with ED. I want conservatives to care about facts and engage in honest debate without hitting the mute button. I want conservatives to read liberal thoughts and engage them intellectually. And I want liberals to do the same for conservatives.
But in the real world, conservatives have demonstrated they don’t want these things. They want the candy of Fox News. They want Rush Limbaugh to speak for them. Or, at the least, they won’t challenge or engage the propagandists on their side because challenges would threaten their grip on power.
Liberals are frustrating and maddening because the internal debates impede our political success. Conservatives are frustrating and maddening because they have sold their intellectual souls for 30 pieces of political gold. ED – at some point you’ll realize that the desire for high-minded conservatism isn’t bad, but it just doesn’t fit the current conservative political structures. There isn’t a market for it.
fasteddie9318
Remember what Turd Blossom told Ron Suskind:
That’s the modern conservative movement in the United States; a fervent belief that facts and fact-based analysis don’t matter because History’s Titans get to make up reality as they go along.
Colbert also pegged these guys on his first broadcast of his show, remember?
How things actually are is irrelevant to the American conservative when compared to how it feels things should be. Rush’s first book was The Way Things Ought to Be, and that’s the world they live in. The one where things are The Way Things Ought to Be, because that’s what keeps them happy.
Capri Sun-Bagger
JGabriel: Yes, god forbid that someone posting on the internet could y’know, do some fucking research. After a certain point, sheer laziness becomes an act of bad faith. No one is forcing Mr. Kain to post factually challanged statements.
morzer: You got me. Incivil words are identical to bad acts. You should join the AG’s office.
Bubblegum Tate
I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say that journalism is by definition inherently liberal, but I think it’s plainly obvious that conservatives ceded journalism to liberals a long time ago in favor of punditry and narrative construction/propagation.
John Bird
I’d just say that the type of conservatives for whom real journalism is a moral virtue and not a weakling’s vice are not considered conservatives by most self-identified conservatives, and often do not consider themselves conservatives.
I’m leery of true Scotsman debates, but it may be that the label has left you behind, E.D.
BGinCHI
@Capri Sun-Bagger: Can you let us know where your lawn is so that we can just go ahead and stay off it in advance?
Capri Sun-Bagger
cleek: f.f.s. if you don’t like the way that certain commentors are responding to the OP, use your own goddamn filter.
eemom
@morzer:
the demographic that I normally associate with CapriSun — the manufacturer of soft, colorful juice “boxes” that come with their own little bendy straws stuck to the side — is not known for its willingess to stop throwing sand and play nicely with others.
Barb (formerly gex)
Do explain how both you and DougJ and Cole have all moved leftward on many issues as you began grappling with reporting – via blog.
What I see is that when you look at facts of the world, you see the class war has been on going, staged by the rich class, and has largely been won. That makes you left in this country.
What I see from the other side is a reliance on myths, shortcuts, and oversights. Every conservative has it in some sphere. American exceptionalism in general, they made it as rugged individuals by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, etc. etc.
How consistently and how thoroughly do conservatives of all stripes have to be found lacking in the depth of their reasoning before we can admit that there is we should *always* be skeptical of defense of the existing powers? Conservatism is at heart a deference to the existing powers and traditions.
I don’t know if that makes any sense. But over the last decade I’ve just come to see liberalism as focusing on end goals and flexibility on how to get there. I see conservatism as focusing on how to do things and less concerned about the end results. (Abstinence only, war planning, clap louder).
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“I view the current conservative movement as something of a supernova:”
Starbursts!
“it keeps burning hotter and hotter and expanding in its bitter rush to implosion and eventual self-destruction.”
And after a supernova, a black hole often results.
I believe E.D. has just hypothesized the Wingnut Event Horizon aka Peak Wingnut. Didn’t John reject his prediction of Peak Wingnut about a year ago?
So yeah, E.D. is John delayed 2-4 years.
John Bird
@Bubblegum Tate:
Yeah, but why? And why have liberal efforts to do the same – and there have been plenty – met with lukewarm response?
Going back one step, I’d say that liberals in America consider internal criticism and friendly skepticism toward one’s political fellows to be important virtues, while conservatives in America do not (although they would say they do, naturally).
This doesn’t mean that liberals practice these virtues consistently – many don’t practice them at all. However, I think the gut reaction for contemporary American liberals hearing or reading a story that agrees with them is “what do I know that I can use to question this?” While for today’s American conservatives, the reaction is “Right on, damn straight.”
Once again, though, these traits are not historically bound to either left-wing or right-wing politics. So, we’re still left with: why?
seabe
ED, you’re wrong here, and I’ll quote one of the best reasons why:
////I have been in 2 universities as a student (both public colleges), and have taught/researched at 5 to date. I have been a member of faculties of psychology, business, psychiatry, pediatrics, and biostatistics. Thus, I feel that I can address this question quite cogently.
In terms of those who I have known in various departments over the years, this is probably 200-300 enough to classify their political beliefs. I have acted to hire a number. Of those that I have known, hired, and dealt with, 3-4 were conservative, 10 or so more moderate, and the rest pretty liberal.
Not all faculty are liberal. Conservative to liberal, departments generally may be ordered engineering, business, medicine, law, liberal arts. Business faculty are quite strongly conservative, as are engineering. Law and medicine faculty can fall on either side. With medicine, doctors are often conservative, due to income, and professionalism. Research faculty are more like liberal arts than physicians. Liberal arts faculty are predominantly liberal, although political science can be an exception.
There are reasons for liberalness in faculty members. These are:
1.) Selection factors: Those who are interested in making money are often (not exclusively) conservative. These tend to go to schools of business, law, and medicine, and do professional things. Those who are interested in intellectual pursuits go to academic grad schools, and these are less dogmatic, less rigid, and more often liberal.
2.) Orientation of liberalness/conservativeness: Conservatives are interested in pat answers, set results, and known truth. This is antithetical to the academic approach. Liberals are more open to change, and less happy with stated fact. This is the academic orientation. As an academic, you progress by finding that an older organization of facts is incorrect. This requires that you redo an organization, and reject the tired shackles of the past.
3.) Hostility of conservatives to research and study: In recent years in particular, the Republican Party and conservatism has maintained a stated, strong, and powerful anti-intellectual approach. Thus, if you are a conservative, to become an academic requires that you reject the argument of conservatism that intellectualism is bad, wrong, effete, etc. This requires a re-orientation, and often requires that you become more liberal. Thus, becoming an academic requires that you be liberal in some ways.
4.) Orientation of the current funding environment: In the current time, funding comes from the federal government for 75% of research. This requires that you be in favor of or at least comfortable taking money from Uncle Sam, or put another way, be in favor of science socialism. We in the research field do act in a competitive manner, in that competition for grants is quite high. But it is not the competition for dollars from people. It is a socialist, government run enterprise. This is antithetical to many conservatives. To be a conservative in research involving the government, you must agree that your living comes from doing things that your political ideology opposes.
Truth and reality has a liberal orientation. This is not just a statement, it is the fact of academic life.////
JGabriel
mikefromArlington:
Perhaps there was, though it must have been the blink of an eye, since they’ve been doing that since Taft — my point being that if there was ever a time that conservative meant something beyond, in your blunt characterization, power hungry whores and religious zealots, then it was at least more than 30 years ago.
But if we’re talking about the corporate strand, it’s clear that the GOP’s pro-business whoring can be traced back at least a century, to Taft, and runs through the Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, even Eisenhower to some extent (though he’s obviously your best bet for a counter-argument), Nixon, Reagan, and both Bush administrations.
.
jonas
Can E.D. name one major current Republican/conservative meme out there that is based on facts? I can’t think of one.
“Global warming is a hoax” — uh, no. Sorry. It’s real
“Abstinence-only sex education reduces teen pregnancy” — uh, no. Sorry, it doesn’t
“Tax cuts raise revenue and reduce deficits” — Again, the opposite is true.
“Obama tripled the deficit since he took office” — Obama’s budget in fact reduced the deficit compared to Bush’s last budget.
“The stimulus didn’t create a single job” — opposite of the truth
“Health care reform was “crammed down our throats” by Nancy Pelosi” — if by crammed you mean passed by a simple majority vote, then ok.
“The Wikileaks docs prove Saddam had chemical weapons” — no they don’t; they prove that there were some discarded shells lying around from the Iran-Iraq war.
“There’s no separation of church and state in the Constitution” — And the New Testament never mentions the Trinity explicitly, either. Yet it’s one of the most fundamental theological concepts in Christianity.
And we could go on and on and on. A “fact-based” conservative news outlet would just be a guy at his anchor desk sort of drumming his fingers and looking at a clock.
Zifnab
Given that E.D. hasn’t dropped a comment in – what are we at now? 100 comments? – I think we can all rest assured that if he’s reading the responses at all, he doesn’t give a shit about what is being said.
The mythical “good conservative journalist” remains unproduced. The retort undelivered.
I think we can add this to the small but growing pile of shit which E.D. Kaine has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about.
eemom
@Capri Sun-Bagger:
That would be “uncivil.” Do some fucking research.
Citizen_X
@fasteddie9318: Was it ever established, by Suskind or anyone else, that it Rove who said that? I know a lot of people think so, but I hear the contempt and will-to-power in that quote, and I think: Cheney. No one else could spit that out quite like that.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Reporting (just like performing surgery or picking your nose) is a politically neutral action. People who attempt to inject politics (or go along with the idea that it should be) into the action, do not understand what reporting is or should be.
Midnight Marauder
@Martin:
This is a very astute point, and it’s one of the main reasons this entire post is an exercise in futility. We are talking about a political “movement” that has rigidly enforced the idea that there is a vast liberal media bias and conspiracy in, essentially, every single journalistic entity that is not Fox News or otherwise controlled by Rubert Murdoch. They have passed this idea down from generation to generation over the years, and it’s only become more strident with the evolution of Fox News. They don’t even make it to the point of analyzing facts anymore because if they hear information that comes from a disreputable source (i.e. – not Fox News), then they automatically reject the information as being not truthful upon its discovery.
But as someone else mentioned upthread, I think it’s highly telling that E.D.’s entire approach to this is grounded in a fanciful construction of what conservatism could be without acknowledging that its current form is far from a mistake, and indeed, was a highly methodical and much sought after construction. Again, to make a comment like this:
without ever once acknowledging that the conservative movement is entirely built on the very opposite of these things strikes me as a very shallow analysis.
E.D. writes that “FOX is an enabler of this astronomical atrophy” of the conservative movement, without noting that the movement conservatives are the ones who make Fox News their “news” outlet of choice. Movement conservatives are the ones who have elevated people like Hannity, Glenn Beck, Megan Kelly, and the clowns on Fox & Friends as some kind of noble American Truth Tellers. Movement conservatives are responsible for elevating know-nothing assholes like Christine O’Donnell and James O’Keefe to icon status. Movement conservatives are responsible for crushing Republican Bob Inglis after he told them to “turn Glenn Beck off” because of how Beck is “trading on fear.” The dude got obliterated in the primary for having the audacity to tell conservatives that one of their heroes was nothing but a propaganda peddling ignoramus.
It just strikes me as completely unserious to write at length on a topic of this nature without noting that the movement in question is diametrically opposed to the very thing you are attempting to convince them of as being worthwhile.
cleek
@Capri Sun-Bagger:
as you wish
Martin
@jonas: The notion of ‘shared facts’ is an important one. If different people cannot agree on a common set of facts, then you can’t even debate around those facts.
Karen
This is the reason why Fox and the rest of the media is “Conservative.”
“Conservatives” are emotion based.
“Liberals” care about facts.
The reasons why “liberals” lose so many times is that they think that if you know the facts, you’ll make an informed decision.
“Conservatives” don’t care about the facts. Murdoch has managed to encourage that unimportance for “Conservatives.” They play upon fear (emotion based) and present information already shaded by what they believe so they don’t see actual facts. They see it as how threatened it makes someone feel.
The problem is E. D. the words liberal and conservative are subjective to the way the words are used. Each word definition changes to suit whoever is saying it.
What makes someone Conservative? Is it financial? Is it idelogical?
The same thing is true of what makes someone Liberal? Financial or idelolgical?
BGinCHI
I’ll give you a vivid snapshot of the liberal versus conservative viewpoint.
In the film Out of Sight, Jennifer Lopez is sitting in a hotel restaurant by herself and minding her own business. A group of white, suited businessmen are at the bar and checking her out. You can see that they are daring each other to try to pick her up. If you watch this scene you have to either choose between the white guys or the woman, and you do so by having to put yourself in their place.
If you can’t understand why the guys are douchebags, and why a woman by herself shouldn’t have to insist that they leave her alone, then you are a modern American Conservative.
If you are a liberal you are Jennifer Lopez before her career went to shit.
Larry Bird
This was all very vague. To me it’s clear which side of the political spectrum makes a more reliable source of journalism. Its the side that takes facts in scientific studies on climate change or evolution and doesn’t think about how it can publish this information in a way that doesn’t piss off its core viewership. When peoples religious beliefs or disdain for science are taken into account when presenting information who can argue its the better form of journalism?
Sinister Eyebrow
I think the terminology applied is confusing. It is not liberal v. conservative journalism (and never was). It is pro-authoritarian vs. anti-authoritarian.
What is termed “conservative” journalism is primarily a bias in favor of authoritarianism. It may take different routes–religious fundamentalism, militaristic (neo conservatism), corporatist (“pro-business” or ani-tax), right-wing populist (tea party)–but it all essentially promotes authoritarian control systems and viciously attacks ideas, persons and policies that would question the standard bearers and ideologies of that authoritarianism.
“Liberal” journalism, such that it is, is really more of what was intended as the role of the press in a democracy–to poke and prod and question those in power, to expose corruption, and to help curb the power of those who are in a position to bend the shape of a democracy toward a more authoritarian model of government, whether it be theocracy, oligarchy, militarist or whatever other form that may take.
John Bird
@Barb (formerly gex):
I’d go beyond just myths and shortcuts. The right wing as explored by Matt Taibbi from The Great Derangement to his latest article on the Tea Party seems to drink endlessly from a well of individual delusion.
Religion and politics on the right have taken on a form of folk humanistic psychology, all about personal tragedy and constructing phantoms of self-actualization (bringing down the government, rooting out the Reds, etc.) to address personal problems.
I will note that anecdotally, if you venture among the Tea Partiers, you will meet a lot of men who feel embittered and scarred by divorces, custody battles, child support disputes, and other legal conflicts with people close to them. It’s not just that they’ve experienced those (very common) things, but that they will return to them time and time again as examples of injustice in the world.
WereBear
The appeal of conservatism in our present state is that they hearken back to a “golden time” which, by and large, was brought about by liberal principles and policies like unions, the GI bill, and regulated capital.
Shame, that.
robert green
i can’t believe i have to point this out here, and it is why again we see that E.D. isn’t worthy of this blog outlet, but…
IF YOUR ERRORS OF FACT CONSTANTLY HAPPEN TO SUPPORT YOUR THESIS, YOU ARE A BAD ACTOR
this simple syllogism should be put over o’reilly’s producer’s door. and hannity. and breitbart. and brooks. and all of them. all of them. and e.d. is right there. “oh, did that mistake i make turn out to be CENTRAL TO MY POINT”, yes, e.d. goldberg, yes it did.
hey all, some straight pimpin’–i produced a video that is out today on youtube–go look up “al tirah USA” on youtube. if you like the message please propagate.
John Bird
@Barb (formerly gex):
I’d go beyond just myths and shortcuts. The right wing as explored by Matt Taibbi from The Great Derangement to his latest article on the Tea Party seems to drink endlessly from a well of individual delusion.
Religion and politics on the right have taken on a form of folk humanistic psychology, all about personal tragedy and constructing phantoms of self-actualization (bringing down the government, rooting out the Reds, etc.) to address their personal problems.
Taibbi describes right-wing Bible studies he attended, and they’re more or less Catholic confession without the element of reconciliation, except conducted in a setting resembling a cockeyed TV-version of group therapy, and containing a large amount of groupthink that is asserted at the beginning and end – a false consensus that everyone in attendance agrees on everything.
I will note that anecdotally, if you venture among the Tea Partiers, you will meet a lot of men who feel embittered and scarred by divorces, custody battles, child support disputes, and other legal conflicts with people close to them. It’s not just that they’ve experienced those (very common) things, but that they will return to them time and time again as examples of injustice in the world.
Barb (formerly gex)
@kth: I find it is more of the latter. It was dishonest to represent DN as NPR. Not intentionally, which is where I gather you are inferring stupidity. Very smart people can have holes in their knowledge. However it is dishonest to assert as true something that you do not know is true.
ETA: Speaking in general terms this is my feeling on the stupid/dishonest binary if presented. I’m not trying to superimpose that binary on this post or apply one or the other to E.D.
Zifnab
@JGabriel:
In all fairness, FDR and Truman and Kennedy and LBJ and Clinton all had varying degrees of pro-business whoring in their administrations.
Our political system has always been glued to the interests of the wealthy. The difference has been the size and the influence of any given corporate master. Back in the early 1900s, Woodrow Wilson had to deal with forty-something states and the myriad of small and mid-sized business owners within them. He wasn’t facing off against a singular National Chamber of Commerce that could kick around a hundred million dollars on mid-term elections. It was a different ball game.
Judas Escargot
@Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan:
I believe E.D. has just hypothesized the Wingnut Event Horizon aka Peak Wingnut.
One weird attribute of an event horizon: Assuming that you’re not torn apart by tidal forces on the way in, you have no way of knowing exactly when you’ve crossed it.
Until you try to turn around and go in the other direction.
sherifffruitfly
Sorry, Kain – reality is NOT fairNbalanced.
suzanne
From Wikipedia:
Of course, the essential problem being that these traditional institutions and social orders are predicated on a lack of social equality for entire marginalized classes of people.
Serious conservative journalists would have to admit this to be true, and no one will ever admit that their movement is borne out of and entirely dependent on racism, sexism, homophobia, etc etc etc. If you seriously and honestly want to be a conservative, it means you want to retain social structures that are unjust by their very nature. If you want to do that, then you are a horrible person. If you don’t want to do that, and no one who seriously analyzes facts and evidence would do so, you’re a liberal.
The fundamental premise of the question is wrong.
terraformer
Bertrand Russell said:
The essence of the liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but how they are held; instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new information may at any moment lead to their abandonment.
Good journalism operates the same way, at least on the op-ed page. Conservative journalism is dogmatic. It does not change.
wonkie
@eemom:
The functional defintion of conservative is a teatard, a corporate shill, an ideolog unhinged from reality, an ivory tower elitist who pretends to be all intellectual but in fact just expresses teatardism in multisyllabic words, a self-serving cynical politician, a religious fanatic–because those are the people who call themselves conservatives and those are the people that politicians who call themselves conservatives appeal to and those are the people who watch or read or listen to conservative media.
Who else would conservatives be?
We have to deal with the conservatives we have, not the ones we wish we had.
ChrisS
“Liberal” Journalism – reporting of facts that can sometimes be uncomfortable in that they may require reassessment of a lifestyle or shared cultural knowledge (e.g., climate change, Columbus Day, racism, historical treatment of Native Americans vs. established tradition as taught, etc.).
Conservative Journalism – Reporting to reinforce a selected ideology.
That’s as it stands. I don’t think there is such a thing as liberal journalism, but I certainly think that conservative journalism exists.
FlipYrWhig
I thought that “conservative” and “liberal” were for the most part shorthand for the role of the government: if you take a “conservative” view of the role of the government, you want it to do less or work more narrowly; if you take a “liberal” view of the role of the government, you want it to do more or work more broadly.
But of course that’s not the same definition of “liberal” as the philosophical/economic one that has to do with individual rights, or the same definition of “conservative” as the Edmund Burke riffs on struggling to maintain the traditions and institutions of your society.
So it should be fairly simple to be a conservative journalist. Think of the news pages of the Wall Street Journal (not the editorial ones). Being a “conservative journalist” need not be the same thing as a “journalist committed to advancing right-wing goals,” and that’s where I think many of us are getting confused. I don’t actually think fact-gathering and empiricism are “liberal,” certainly not inherently liberal. People who want to advocate right-wing causes du jour don’t use journalism to do that: they use faux journalism, like John Stossel and James O’Keefe. But acknowledging the bad fit between journalism and right-wing activism is not the same thing as saying that “conservative journalist” is an oxymoron.
I’m not sure I’ve made my point, but, basically, I think we’re getting mixed up between “conservative” and “right wing.”
Martin
@Midnight Marauder:
Yeah, and I think that’s a common theme in E.D.s approach to these discussions. He seems to be struggling mightily to reconcile these two definitions for ‘conservative’. He realized that he is a conservative person and he’s trying to figure out why he doesn’t fit into the Conservative movement, which has been marketed as a place for conservative people. Well, it’s not. It’s a place for radical people, people that want to change society based on what some dead guys wrote two millenia ago, people that want to keep doing the same thing over and over even when there is zero evidence that it works.
Downpuppy
@kommrade reproductive vigor: @Barb (formerly gex): Neutral? Hah! I pick my nose in your general direction.
KG
Good journalism is temperamentally conservative in that it is careful of facts and use of language. The ideological conservativism of the currently constructed conservative movement in this country is not temperamentally conservative, and really doesn’t care much for facts or the use of language (which has led to people saying really stupid things). One can be temperamentally conservative while being politically liberal – the president is a good example, I think. My concern, and perhaps it is off base, is that because of the “success” of Fox News, more journalism will move in that direction, being ideological on whatever side and we will be worse for that.
Punchy
I have to assume Acronym Kain is trolling for page views, cuz nobody could honestly posit that there exists such a thing as “conservative” journalism.
“Conservative” is the whole concept of keeping shit the way it was, whatever that is. Dont ask questions, dont look around the corner. That’s surely not how real journalism works.
Another Kain FAIL, it appears.
gnomedad
In a better world, journalists would be even-handedly skeptical, but what the correct approach when the right is generating lies at an overwhelmingly greater pace?
YellowDog
Fox News is just the latest manifestation of a type of journalism that has existed since the founding of this country. The Founding Fathers knew all about it, as many of them were the subject of stories and rumors that we would now find on Drudge or TMZ. Fortunately, their Enlightenment view was that rational public discourse could overcome the worst excesses from all sides. A free press was essential to that process. Yes, it would come with it’s own excesses, but it could also promote that public discourse. Unfortunately, the cost of this particular form of public discourse is today very high and is dominated by corporations and their interests. Even this is not new–Hearst had other interests besides newspapers. A professor I knew in graduate school often said that if you wanted to know what was going on in a city, read the alternative weekly; the big papers were controlled by their advertisers. I think he would now advise everyone to read the local blogs, at least while we can. After all, a free internet is not enumerated in the Constitution.
Barb (formerly gex)
@John Bird: I think that a great many are misled while fewer are the ones deliberately misleading, but point taken.
John Bird
As a counterpoint, I think American conservatives really do care about “facts” – not the factual truth, but rather, hidden and esoteric secrets that provide simple explanations for the things going on around them.
This isn’t something restricted to conservatives – it’s the basis of New Age thought, which is at least mixed in politics – but it’s the foundation for conservative politics.
That’s how you get death panels, or Glenn Beck’s chalkboard, or a great deal of what passes for evangelical Protestantism, or “The Secret”, for that matter.
It’s the idea that if you sit down with a document and skim it for hidden meanings, based on your previous knowledge as a nonspecialist, you will uncover devious evils that specialists have carefully hidden from the eyes of non-elites.
This is the full-time job of the right-wing media, including right-wing blogs.
John Bird
As a counterpoint, I think American conservatives really do care about “facts” – not the factual truth, but rather, hidden and esoteric secrets that provide simple explanations for the things going on around them.
This isn’t something restricted to conservatives – it’s the basis of New Age thought, which is at least mixed in politics – but it’s the foundation for conservative politics.
That’s how you get “the government is gonna kill Grandma”, or Glenn Beck’s chalkboard, or a great deal of what passes for evangelical Protestantism, or “The Secret”, for that matter.
It’s the idea that if you sit down with a document and skim it for hidden meanings, based on your previous knowledge as a nonspecialist, you will uncover devious evils that specialists have carefully hidden from the eyes of non-elites.
This is the full-time job of the right-wing media, including right-wing blogs.
morzer
@eemom:
‘Tis a sad creature to be sure, but now that it likes copious amounts of boysenberry pie, its venomous folly is much abated.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@cleek:
I would put Terry Gross in the category of liberal bias. I’m not saying that she is in the same class as the Fox pundits (they are pure propagandists), just that some of the assumptions she makes and some of the questions she asks clearly come from a liberal perspective. NPR has even run ads on its member stations about how confrontational her interviews with conservatives (like O’Reilly) have gotten. More liberal listeners eat that up. However, more conservative listeners see that as evidence that NPR has a liberal bias. That is really a shame, because I don’t see bias in their reporting, just some of their shows. Yet, that is used to discredit their reporting.
terraformer
Just want to second that the comments herein are why I read this blog.
Lots of really sharp folks around here!
Felonious Wench
@terraformer:
And you win the thread with that quote.
liberal
Problem is that journalists cannot refer to facts; in many settings they can only quote claims of officials and other interested parties. If they cite facts without a “he said,” they’re viewed as biased.
The problem is that then the “facts” are just those claims put forth by the side with the better propaganda wing.
morzer
@terraformer:
“The essence of the GOP outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but by whom they are purchased; instead of being held on principle, they are held for financial reasons, and with a consciousness that new sources of revenue may at any moment lead to their abandonment.”
Midnight Marauder
@John Bird:
I mean, this is kind of a ridiculous counterpoint, though.
You’re just reiterating that conservatives have an extreme aversion to facts, and in response, seek out convoluted, repeatedly debunked nonsense to assuage their fear-mongering and conspiracy driven concerns. The delineation of “facts” doesn’t mean anything; all you’re saying is that conservatives care about “non-factual truth” (an absolutely mind-boggling concept), which is just a fancy way of saying that they are motivated by creating their own reality.
There is nothing remotely factual about that, air quotes or not.
morzer
@Midnight Marauder:
Perhaps the right word is “factiness” which is the objectivey basis for “truthiness”.
We could even go so far as to define “factiness” as the point at which a hypothetical is as valid as a statistic.
bemused
I agree that it is a broad generalization but not by much.
jabuhrer
I’ve never lived in a market where Democracy Now! is actually carried on the local NPR station.
I know that this apparently happens somewhere, but I’ve always found it hard to believe that it is very prevalent. NPR so blatantly and forcibly maintains its moderate posturing that I’ve always assumed that DN! is only broadcast on a handful of NPR stations, probably at 3am. In every market I’ve ever lived in, the local NPR station goes out of its way to praise moderates and scoff at actual liberals. As far as I’m concerned, NPR is the radio equivalent of television network news. People from CATO are featured almost daily, and actual full blown liberals are almost never given air time.
Ripley
Conservative journalism? Nostalgia failure: the thing remembered and revered didn’t actually exist.
fasteddie9318
@Citizen_X:
According to Wikipedia,
So it really sounds more like “a lot of people think so” than definitive proof. Still, I have the opposite reaction to that quote; the idea that “reality” can be manufactured strikes me as totally Rove. I don’t read it as contempt so much as some kind of bullshit post-modernist wank, and Rove is at heart a bullshit post-modernist wanker.
Martin
@terraformer:
I think that need to be repeated as its a definition I would like to see more broadly adopted rather than the ones that are traditionally bandied about.
But it doesn’t work when it comes to discussing outcomes. What’s a liberal vs a conservative outcome? I don’t think liberal works in that view at all, or even conservative – they just confuse matters. I think that’s where we need to switch to progressive vs traditional. The former asserting that changing existing structures should be more strongly considered and the latter the opposite.
I can see someone arguing dogmatically for progressive outcomes. I can see someone arguing tentatively for conservative ones. I like that approach much better when trying to discuss things.
Barb (formerly gex)
When the Times was looking for a new conservative contributor, Larison was probably the favored conservative based on BJ endorsements. Is he about what E.D. Kain is looking for? Because while he can seem pretty reasonable, the xenophobia and misogyny can be pretty startling when they pop up. I guess no one is perfect.
Downpuppy
@Midnight Marauder:
I thought JB was describing utter lunacy with that hidden text explanation, not suggesting that it had rational validity.
Dennis SGMM
Unnamed aide to George W. Bush, quoted in a New York Times Magazine article by Ron Suskind, Oct. 17, 2004
kommrade reproductive vigor
Seconded. And I have to say these attempts to carve out some form of conservatism that doesn’t mean howling hatenik got old back when Regan was in office.
Midnight Marauder
@morzer:
I like this. A lot. In fact, let’s check out an example of “factiness” in action quite recently:
“I don’t have all the facts, but I know that he is.”
If there is a better example of factiness in action, you would be hard pressed to find it.
JGabriel
Bertrand Russell via terraformer via Felonious Wench:
That’s not entirely true, though. For instance, I believe that we all possess equal rights, regardless of gender, race, wealth, sexual orientation, creed, etc., and there is nothing tentative in that belief.
I like Russell quite a lot, but I’m not a fan of that quote, because it reinforces the myth of liberal spinelessness and paints us as having NO strong beliefs, which is obviously untrue. If we love doubt, it is not for its own sake, but because we love honesty, which compels us to admit that so little can be known with complete certainty, and because we love the pursuit of knowledge, which can only take place in the space of the unknown.
.
morzer
@JGabriel:
You can believe something strongly, but still be aware that your belief cannot be perfectly defended, and that you might be wrong. There’s nothing wussy about being open to the possibility – it is in fact a courageous position, in that you don’t retreat to lazy certitudes, but face the complexity and unknowability of the world and our place in it. The real wusses are those who cling to “facts” without a basis and “truths” without reason.
I happen to think Russell’s first claim is wrong – in that certain things seem impossible for a liberal to believe and remain a liberal, but I agree with him about reasoned doubt as a core part of the liberal world-view.
Midnight Marauder
@Downpuppy:
I would agree with that, but I was specifically striking against the idea that “sit[ting] down with a document and skim[ing] it for hidden meanings, based on your previous knowledge as a nonspecialist” is a wholly counterfactual move in its very nature. Sure, acknowledging it as the conservative pursuit of “facts” is a somewhat appropriate way to note the difference, but I would say that still does a disservice in correctly classifying the action. The very nature of the act is not to seek out anything “factual,” but rather, to seek out justifications and confirmation of dogmatically held beliefs.
I just think we do ourselves a disservice to being able to discuss this issue in an effective and critical manner (such that it can eventually be pushed in the mainstream to the citizenry at large) if we cede the rhetorical language of “facts” in any way to the conservative behavior to seek out confirmation of your stridently held beliefs that were imparted to you from an extreme, misguided, ignorant ideologue in the first pace.
morzer
@Midnight Marauder:
Also too, the way the right wing now thinks that belief is as good as facts. It doesn’t matter what the reality actually is, what matters is whether you believe it. Thus, global warming can be dismissed as a matter of belief because “scientists” and “experts” get things wrong, and anyway they are liberals. Similarly, there must have been WMD in Iraq, because Bush believed there were.
rb
@JGabriel:
But if you differentiate garden-variety beliefs from non-negotiable moral convictions, and stipulate that the quote addresses the former, then the quote becomes more appealing and accurate. Indeed it can help to parse the con vs lib worldview, as conservatives seem to hold to an astonishing number of petty, pedestrian beliefs (“Holder is anti-gun!”), and to defend these pedestrian beliefs to the pain, as if they were bona fide moral convictions.
Douglas
Good journalism is per definition anti-authoritian/anti-totalitarian… and since the authority in the media is (even under a democratic president) is right-leaing, I guess journalism is liberal.
FlipYrWhig
@morzer:
That feels right to me too, but I don’t think it’s necessarily inherent to a left-wing or progressive vision. Left-wing utopian thinking has a long history too: little self-doubt, humility, or critical detachment there. I think, again, there’s a distinction between being a philosophical/cognitive/empirical “liberal” and being a social justice/equity/rights-crusading “liberal.” (John Locke, interestingly, worked in both areas.)
Which takes us back to Martin‘s point about outcomes.
gnomedad
@morzer:
That’s a different kind of “belief”; I’d call it a value. I’d guess that a soft libertarian “believes” that the free market produces that most equitable outcome in a given situation and would be willing to look at evidence that this is not the case (and would also be open to regulatory instruments to account for the costs of pollution, for example), whereas a hard Randian would “believe” in the free market as an intrinsic “value” and damn the consequences.
some other guy
You know, I’m still struck by the fact that Rush Limbaugh can plainly admit on his radio show that for years he’d been “carrying the water” for the Republican party even as it abandoned everything he and it supposedly stood for, and conservatives still embrace him. Shows just how little they value honesty.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Too late in the thread, but I’ll try anyway.
EDK, your definition of “good journalism” boils down to a fundamental commitment to empiricism on the part of the journalists. Empiricism in its modern form was born out of a period of ideological struggle between the precursors of what would later come to be called the Left and the Right. The bastions of conservatism in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries were (amongst other things) defending faith against science. In that sense, empiricism was originally a Whig/liberal value, not a Tory/conservative value.
Your present day confusion is arising because within living and near-living memory (i.e. for the last 120 years or so) the pro- vs. anti-empiricism battle had been won so decisively by the pro-science side that science (and empiricism more generally) has been adopted by both sides in our partisan political wars as a commonly held value, rather than being merely the ideological property of only one side. Or so it was up until quite recently.
But that set of common values, like a sweater whose loose threads have been constantly picked at and pulled on, is now, at least in the contemporary US, unraveling. Contemporary conservatism in the US today is a collection of fundamentalisms (both religious and secular) which are all of them anti-empirical in character, as if the intellectual battles from the Enlightenment thru the mid-20th Century can be re-fought and their verdicts reversed. They don’t just want to stand athwart history yelling “stop” – they are trying to turn the train around and run it back down the tracks in the opposite direction.
I know that it is extremely disorienting to witness this and painful to realize the full magnitude of what is actually happening, but it will be a constant struggle for you to make sense of our politics until you do. Sorry – living in interesting times and all that…
morzer
@FlipYrWhig:
I agree totally about Utopias, and it’s one reason why I am much more inclined to empirical/utilitarian points of view, with a does of healthy skepticism thrown in. I don’t care whether a social/economic theory is beautifully constructed and eloquently defended. If it doesn’t help people on the ground and work for them, it doesn’t seem worth a small pile of beans.
Speaking of John Locke, I’d be interested to see ED Kain do a post on him, and perhaps one on Hobbes, and lay out where he is coming from, how he views their ideas and arguments. I wonder whether the Man With The Pink Mohawk might be amenable to trying something like that?
Mike
“Conventional, fact-based reporting is a liberal activity, just as teaching, academic research, social work, public defense, and public broadcasting are liberal activities. Can we just accept that once and for all and move on?”
I didn’t read through all the comments before posting this but:
I read this as Doug saying that these disciplines are invariably denounced as liberal propaganda operations whenever their activities come into conflict with right-wing ideology/fantasy world.
In other words, straight reporting isn’t inherently liberal, but it’s practitioners are bound to be challenged by partisans whenever they present inconvenient facts.
JGabriel
morzer:
Me too. In fact, I almost added the line, “If we love doubt, it is born of courage, not fear,” to the post above, but even without that it was already looking a little too melodramatically sincere for my generally ironic eyes, so I held back.
Honestly, you seem to be taking exception, albeit mildly, where we in fact see eye to eye.
rb:
Yes, exactly. Which is why I don’t particularly like that quote, and would prefer one that does what you describe.
.
morzer
@gnomedad:
Actually, the person you are quoting is not me, but JGabriel.
FlipYrWhig
@Douglas:
IMHO journalists flatter themselves when they think that way, going back to Walter Lippmann. I don’t think you can be “anti-authoritarian” just by reporting truth about politics. Or at least not automatically. For instance, Ezra Klein did a nice job covering aspects of the health care bill and related policy, but was he “anti-authoritarian” in the process? Hardly. I think way too many journalists see themselves as _structurally_ “speaking truth to power” and “afflicting the comfortable” and stuff, when they aren’t really doing either of those things, they’re just asking questions. I happen to think that dialogue is more potentially small-d democratic than an info-dump, but a passive reporter who regurgitates what he’s fed might still easily hold “liberal” political views.
So, again, I’m back to my earlier point about how one kind of “liberalism” involves skepticism and empirical proof, but subscribing to that notion doesn’t automatically confer upon you a set of “liberal” political views having to do with individual rights or social justice or common good.
morzer
@JGabriel:
I am not sure (liberal skepticism!) that I was taking exception. I believe I was more putting an emphasis on something slightly different within a shared view. Not to take exception, you understand.
Jordan
There’s some truth to it.
Journalism…and science…are both inherently inductive. You collect facts & evidence, put them together, then decide what conclusion arises. You write the article first, then write the headline (so to speak). This is part of what Bertrand Russell means when he talks about liberalism accepting conclusions tentatively. Induction is tentative reasoning, used when all salient facts are *not* known. It’s an exploratory, skeptical, evidence-hungry mindset.
Conservatism, on the other hand, is inherently deductive. (To be fair, so are progressivism, bolshevism, monophysitism and any other ideology.) That is, conservative thought proceeds from given premises (e.g., the divinity of Christ) to incontrovertible conclusions (one must follow Christ to be saved).
Conservatism may not hold that all answers are known from the outset, but it does hold that the important premises of any important question are already given.
There’s nothing wrong with deductive reasoning per se, but taken as a view of reality as a whole (rather than an approach to discrete logical problems), it does not lend itself to a skeptical, methodical approach to complex situations where not all facts are known. Evolution; climate modeling; political theory. Or journalism & science.
gnomedad
@some other guy:
He’s Jesus in Gethsemane, abandoned by his disciples. The Repubs and his listeners let him down, and he still fought the battle! For them! For Freedom! And several hundred million dollars.
FlipYrWhig
@Mike:
I thought he meant that they all have to do with questioning and critical thinking, which in his account are quintessentially liberal.
JAHILL10
As a former journalist, I profoundly disagree with the sentiments expressed in the main post. A free and fact-based press is in its essence an extraordinarily liberal idea and in its practice is almost diametrically opposed to the conservative philosophy. “Follow the money”, “Afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted,” and all the old rules of thumb I learned in J-school, is not something you are going to hear from conservative practitioners. More like “Comfort the comfortable or they might go Galt!”
I deeply mourn the loss of the independent press in this nation and make no mistake it is dead, bought and sold to corporate America. If a bunch of lefty bloggers can’t keep truth alive, we are dead as a nation, we just don’t realize it yet.
quaint irene
Sh*t. More fodder for Fox’s ‘Scary Muslims among us !!”
“A Virginia man who believed he was trying to help al Qaeda plan bombings at Washington area Metrorail stations was arrested on Wednesday, the Justice Department said.
Farooque Ahmed, 34, of Ashburn, was taken into custody early in the morning, the department said in a statement.”
morzer
I note that Tim Profitt now believes he is owed an apology, even though what happened is not that big of a deal:
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/10/kentucky-stomper-wants-an-apology-from-woman-he-assaulted.php
morzer
Also too, we have been just denounced by Radley Balko….
http://www.theagitator.com/
It’s always heart-warming to see these in-depth critiques by thoughtful conservatives.
jacy
@morzer:
Wow, I clicked over on that link, and it was refreshing to see such in-depth analysis.
WTF was that, the blog equivalent of a drive-by dodge-ball throw?
morzer
@jacy:
I suspect dear old Radley had a back problem… at least, I believe that’s the current excuse in conservative circles for stomping people. Curiously enough, our fearless tribune of the people has nothing to say about the Kentucky “incident”.
JGabriel
@morzer:
Ah, so it was extension, not exception. Carry on, then.
.
TooManyJens
@morzer: Cole has “sold out to Team Blue.”
That’s adorable.
CZL
Public Defense is not a liberal activity. I’m a democratic socialist and a prosecutor that works with a bunch of conservation defense attorneys.
morzer
@TooManyJens:
It sounds almost like a paintball contest, doesn’t it? Team Captain Wadley has been betwayed, bwutally betwayed by one he wuvved.
It seems that the libertarian rottweiler is, in fact, a GOP bassett hound.
JGabriel
morzer:
So are you, Tim. Is it okay if my friends hold you down against a curb, while I kick you in the head and neck? I don’t want to, but I can’t really get down with the rest of the guys. My back hurts. I’m sure you understand what that’s like.
.
morzer
@JGabriel:
While going home, Your Honor, I accidentally tripped over Mr Profitt’s head as he lunged towards me from the gutter, causing his testicles to savagely molest the toe of my boot. I was left no choice but to stomp him in order to preserve my first amendment rights.
lou
I’d disagree. The great journalists of the past — the Mike Roykos, the Jimmy Breslins — were blue-collar working stiffs. The problem with journalists now is that they’re too college-educated and insulated from the working class and the poor, especially the Beltway types who went to Ivy League schools and come from wealthy families. So they’re more accepting of status quo than the old class of journalist.
People used to be attracted to the profession because they want to expose wrongs. They were trained by editors to be skeptical. As a journalist, you’re supposed to follow this rule: if your mother says she loves you, check it out. That’s something conservatives might have a hard time believing.
Dennis SGMM
@morzer:
I didn’t know Radley Balko from our local homeless guy who yells at cars so I looked him up:
When a magazine calls itself “Reason” and its editor tells you that he’s “award-winning” I’m guessing that the observation that we’re stupid here comes from dickism cubed.
Erik Vanderhoff
The problem isn’t the presence of bias, it’s the lack of honesty.
FlipYrWhig
@JAHILL10:
OK, there _are_ journalists who uncover hidden agendas and muckrake, but what proportion of journalism-as-actually-practiced is actually that? IMHO the idea of journalism _isn’t_ “in its essence” anything so elevated and courageous as that, and it raises my hackles a bit to hear journalists continuing to wrap themselves in that mantle.
David Gregory, for instance, appearing on Laurence O’Donnell’s show, was–I’d say–blatantly pro-Rubio in his wrap-up… but he’d probably say that he was simply confronting Crist and not allowing him to be evasive. So he was adversarial and skeptical, which is better than nothing, but not liberal in either the philosophical or political senses. Mostly that’s a problem with the toolishness of David Gregory, but it applies to other journalists too. Being confrontational rather than deferential doesn’t in and of itself square with liberal ideas, policy, or, to use Martin’s word again, outcomes.
morzer
@Dennis SGMM:
He’s done some good work on prisons and screw-ups in the criminal justice system, which is why I am rather sad that he doesn’t transfer his intelligence and work ethic over to other domains, and chooses to behave like a bog-standard glibertarian jackass when not pursuing his cause.
Dennis SGMM
@morzer:
I agree; it seems as though he’s done some good work when his inner Megan McArdle isn’t in control. I wonder how many nights he spends awake lest his left hand strangle him in his sleep.
FlipYrWhig
@lou:
I think that’s the origin story journalism has crafted for itself: journalism as challenge to or check upon governmental and social power. But I don’t think it’s _inherently_ that, and in inept hands, it ain’t that at all.
Pangloss
For most Conservatives, Conservapedia, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and Fox News is their idea of reasonably fair and impartial fact-based journalism. After acknowledging that fact, why are we even having any discussion about this?
JGabriel
morzer: WTF? Did Cole hit on Balko’s SO or something?
.
morzer
@FlipYrWhig:
To be fair, the Passion of the Crist is largely caused by the fact that he has now performed enough u-turns on ideas, policy, and former comrades that he resembles a white-haired, rather dapper anaconda negotiating a series of road cones.
morzer
@JGabriel:
I suspect Tunch hissed at him at a party. Or something like that.
morzer
@Dennis SGMM:
It’s always the invisible hand that you have to fear most….
benintn
Just wrote something on Daily Kos (click my name) about conservative moral psychology and in-group/out-group issues. I think we need to be clear about what we mean by conservative. If by conservative we mean cautious, attentive to detail, high-brow, respectful of tradition … then fine, it’s entirely possible to be conservative and be a good journalist. David Frum is this kind of conservative, though it’s clear he’s been thrown out of the conservative den as a pariah and turncoat of some kind.
But Jonathan Haidt has talked about conservatives being focused on purity, in-group loyalty, security, safety, etc. Disgust and fear are powerful conservative motivators. These kinds of conservatives (Sarah Palin/Glenn Beck/Erick Erickson conservatives) defend the in-group at all costs, even at the expense of being reality-based.
And it’s in this sense that journalism tends to be a liberal enterprise. Fundamentally, I think it’s about openness to the Other and a non-allergic response to difference. Ideally, journalists seek innocence (something Jay Rosen says is impossible) and objectivity (something unattainable but romanticized).
Martin
@gnomedad:
Actually, I’d call it an outcome based on facts.
Inherent in the ‘belief’ that race and sexual orientation are equal are a lot of facts showing that the different races are, in fact, equal in potential. The case for rights for gays is massively strengthened if facts present that refute the notion that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice. What you are calling ‘belief’ isn’t a belief at all because there’s no leap of faith there. In fact, it sits on very strong scientific and sociological grounding.
So once you have those facts in hand, you set an outcome consistent with the facts (that being equality). Sure, there’s always some filling in of beliefs to paper over the gaps and uncertainties, but they are very minor relative to the facts.
If we get into a situation where ‘belief’ becomes synonymous with ‘consistent with the facts’, we are truly fucked. Let’s not be lazy with that terminology.
Martin
@morzer: Well, in Balkos defense, partisanship does make you stupid. Unfortunately, he fails to recognize that libertarians are also partisan.
I wouldn’t call this blog partisan, though. If anything it’s anti-partisan. Thoroughly rejecting Republicans doesn’t make you a Democrat, it makes you not-a-Republican.
JGabriel
Pangloss:
I guess because Kain still retains a sort Panglossian view (you don’t mind, do you?) that the myths he was sold of a small-c conservative weltanschauung — that holds dear fiscal restraint, traditional values, and the honorable small-businessman — actually exists, rather than it being a mask constructed to hide the states’ rightism, bigotry, promotion and exploitation of ignorance, xenophobia, and free-market extremism from which conservatism is actually composed.
Erik is, apparently, still unwilling to accept that conservatives are what they buy into — Fox News, WSJ, Conservapedia, Rush Limbaugh, the Tea Party, etc.
Erik, face it, conservatives just aren’t that into you. You can’t change them with your love! It was all an illusion.
.
morzer
@benintn:
Correction: Frum is SOMETIMES this kind of journalist. Don’t be fooled by his intermittent lucid intervals. He’s perfectly capable of going into full wingnut mode without any warning.
morzer
@Martin:
Theoretically true, yes, but not likely in practice in the hyper-partisan world of US politics today.
gnomedad
@morzer:
I backfilled the pointer and apparently missed. Sorry.
wengler
I’m reminded of an article I read awhile ago about one of those freakish Conservative cruises where all of the talk radio hosts bilk their fans out of thousands of dollars all in the name of creating some crazy rightwing echo chamber on the ocean.
In the article a dying William F. Buckley was denounced by the crowd for even mentioning that it mattered that no so-called “WMDs” had been found in Iraq. One of the fathers of the modern conservative movement was heckled by its present-day adherents for having a passing respect for truth.
Good journalism needs at its core to be a quest for truth. Conservative economic policies make rich people richer and everyone else a slave. In a country where all the people get to vote for their leaders, this presents a major obstacle to winning elections. Hence the freak show that is considered political discourse in the popular media.
I guess good Conservative reporting would present why it is better for our society to have most people be slaves.
FlipYrWhig
@wengler:
Talk about a boat full of dildoes.
terraformer
@morzer:
Nicely done.
gnomedad
@Martin:
You make a good point. Certainly the “belief” in equal rights becomes stronger the more it is supported by evidence, but I think most of us value it so highly that we reach as far as possible beyond evidence, for instance in giving as much freedom and enfranchisement as possible to mentally handicapped people.
Mike
Conservative journalism: Memorize 10 talking points. Regurgitate on demand. Win E. D. Kain Klone award.
Martin
@morzer: But I don’t see a lot of Democratic cheerleading here. If there’s any cheerleading it’s mostly in the procedural sense (Cole’s compliments of Pelosi, for instance) and not so much in the policy sense (see gay rights, Afghanistan, etc.)
There’s tolerance of the approach and a recognition of the practical realities, but how many people here really are cheerleading Democrats, other than as a realistic means to keep Republicans out of power?
Remember November
Does a subject, verb and predicate care which side of the septic tank it’s on? No, neither should reportage of the 5 W’s. Facts is facts- tho unsexy by todays standard. It now has to be buttered to taste for the target audience and gel with the ad traffic of the hour.
at it’s root, we are conditioned ( thanks to advertising and mass media) to make a snap decision within three blinks of an eye, just as we are conditioned to expect a shot to cut on that exact same rhythm.
Concepts are no good unless distillable to a 30 second sound bite followed by a few shots of stock b-roll.
Martin
@gnomedad:
But that too is an even broader extension of facts, or more accurately, a rejection of beliefs. The reason why most of us seek the outcome of equal rights for the mentally handicapped is that we don’t see them as having been possessed by demons or punished by God for some sin committed by parents or whatever. We see them as people no different than us that have suffered from a genetic anomaly, disease, or injury. Simply being able to explain their handicap without invoking the supernatural puts us in the realm of facts, and so the outcome is clearer to assert.
But even there, there’s lots of room for a progressive/traditionalist approach. Should these individuals get *full* rights, upending policy tradition of declaring them unfit to make decisions for themselves, or should that tradition be retained and the institutions (from courts to care facilities) be changed to give more weight to their rights vs. those of care providers and society? We can still have a wide range of disagreements on policy and implementation without disagreeing on the facts.
John Bird
@Midnight Marauder:
Well, consider us in agreement then? I’m not sure if you actually have a problem with anything I said.
My point was that conservatives don’t hate intellectuals so much nowadays as they believe that everyone is an equally qualified intellectual on every topic.
John Bird
@JGabriel:
I just don’t think there’s any conception of ‘traditional values’ as expressed that way that isn’t a smokescreen for bigotry and xenophobia.
When you actually talk about specific defensible values, like a hard day’s work for honest pay, or the family as the basic unit of society, you’re no longer talking about the ‘traditional values’ that attack Spanish language options or gay marriage, because traditional values are always forced to accommodate new social developments.
The correct way, and I am speaking of objective truth, for the traditional value of ‘family first’ to be defended is to make it as inclusive as possible without damaging the institution. As there is no evidence that gay marriage would actually damage the institution for anyone – this is clearly the weakest argument of opponents of gay marriage and perhaps the only one they have left – gay marriage is an expression of traditional values.
Traditional values are givens in a functioning civil society; they don’t need ‘defending’ unless we’re at a point of crisis approaching breakdown due to a radical new movement in morality (fascism is one example). Traditional values are merely the way that people in each society think about moral concerns.
Bigots and xenophobes, on the other hand, see crisis as a constant. And they define themselves as concerned with traditional values – as though almost everyone in their society wasn’t bound by those values whether they like it or not.
Midnight Marauder
@John Bird:
I would certainly say we are largely in agreement on this issue. I think the only point I would take exception to is the idea that conservatives today don’t hate intellectuals; they still very much scoff at the idea of intellectual elites, which is a driving force behind their belief that “everyone is an equally qualified intellectual on every topic.”
John Bird
@Midnight Marauder:
That’s probably right.
John Bird
@morzer:
Thanks, I don’t think that’s a half bad way of putting it either. It describes the underpinnings of 9/11 conspiracy theory, for one.
lucie13
@Billy: Yes, Democracy Now is produced by Pacifica and is picked up by member stations. Usually by demand and supported by local donations plus corporate underwriting. “Public” radio stations receive almost zilcho public funds now, so even if you define Democracy Now as excessively partisan and unfit for “public” airwaves (and all airwaves belong to the public, btw), there’s no taxpayer money going toward it.
Karen
@lou:
I see. You’re one of those people who think that education is the eqivalent of arugula. Just like the narrative during 2008 was that Barack Obama could not identify with Joe Public because he ate arugula instead of iceberg lettuce, your narrative is that because journalists are too educated, they can’t identify with Joe Public.
By the way, the problem with journalists is that there are only a handful left. What we have now are reporters. I was a broadcast major in college so I know the difference.
Journalists investigate to get the facts. Reporters report. Period. They even say that it’s not their jobs to challenge what they report. Reporters are parrots. They report what they’re told to.