Archive for October, 2009

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Faux News

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

The White House has accused Fox News of not being a genuine news organization, and the accusation has the Washington Press corps in a snit as they circle the wagons to confront the evil gov’ment censors.

Many commentators, such as Campbell Brown, have accused the Administration of heavy-handed tactics and of failing to acknowledge the biases of other news organization who often espouse more liberal views.

This criticism is nonsense.

The problem with Fox News is not that it is ideologically biased. Nearly all news organizations are biased in some way. Fox News is ideologically extreme, to say the least, but they have a right to their opinions, and their is nothing inherently wrong with opinion journalism.

The problem with Fox News is that they are liars and are nothing but a mouthpiece of the Republican Party. It is unusual when I agree with Mickey Kaus about anything, but his commentary on this issue is exactly right:

I guess there are two distinct axes on which you can judge press organizations–actually, there are many more than two (see below), but two are important here: 1) Neutrality–Are they attempting to be “objective,” trying to serve the “public interest” in some balanced way, or are they ideologically (or otherwise) driven in a way that inevitably colors their coverage–what topics they pick, what ‘experts’ they rely on, etc. 2) Independence–Whether they are biased or generally neutral, can somebody–a political party, a Mafia family, a government– tell them what to do?

I think it’s pretty clear MSNBC and the NYT and Breitbart.tv are not neutral. They all have an agenda and they pursue it. But they are independent. The Obama White House can’t tell Bill Keller what to do. They can’t tell Keith Olbermann what to do. […]

I think Fox is also not neutral (which, again, doesn’t bother me) but it’s also not independent (which does). This isn’t because it’s owned by Rupert Murdoch–moguls are, typically among the more independent sorts. It’s because it’s run by Roger Ailes. I have zero faith that Ailes is independent of the Republican party or, specifically, those Republicans who have occupied the White House recently–the Bushes. As I said, I think if Karl Rove called Ailes in 2003 and said “We don’t want so much coverage of X” it’s extremely likely that X would not be covered on Fox. A … suggestive example of Fox’s loyalty is the debate on immigration, in which Ailes’ network initially seemed to try valiantly–against the beliefs of most of its audience–to push the Bush White House line in favor of “comprehensive” legalization (while brushing aside its viewers’ views).

In fact, one of their so-called journalists John Stossel is participating in rallies opposed to health care reform.Via The Plum Line:.

This doesn’t seem like great timing, given Fox News’ efforts to convince the world that it’s a legit news outlet.

John Stossel, who is described by Fox News as a journalist, is appearing at a series of rallies against the health care reform proposals with Americans for Prosperity, one of the most determined and well-funded foes of reform. [...]

Yes, Stossel is an on-air personality. But at a time when Fox is embroiled in a high-profile battle with the White House over its legitimacy as a news outlet, it seems less than helpful for one of its proudly touted journalists to participate in an event decrying Obama’s health care reform proposals as “government-forced health care.”

This is not journalism; it is political activism passing as journalism. That is why Fox News is not a genuine news organization.

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Resistance to Change

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Political philosopher Bill Galston points to disturbing trends in recent political polling.

The current state of American politics presents a paradox. On the one hand, survey after survey testifies to the rock-bottom standing of the Republican Party. Fewer Americans identify with the party than in the past, and fewer trust it to deal with the country’s problems. On the other hand, there are hard-to-ignore signs of a conservative resurgence. A 15,000 person Gallup survey out today shows that 40 percent of Americans now identify themselves as conservative (up from 37 percent at the time of Obama’s election), while only 20 percent regard themselves as liberal (down from 22 percent). Far more independents (35 percent) consider themselves conservative than was the case a year ago (only 29 percent).

These findings would be less compelling if they were not linked to conservative shifts on specific issues–but they are, and the Gallup organization enumerates a considerable list. Among them: increasing opposition to government regulation of business and gun ownership; an uneasy feeling about the influence of labor unions; increasing support for immigration restrictions and government promotion of traditional values; and diminished support for strong action on climate change. The percentage of Americans who believe that government is trying to do too much stands at its highest level (57 percent) in many years. Trust in government is near all-time lows, and Americans believe that 50 cents of every federal tax dollar is wasted–the highest level ever.

When I conceived Reviving the Left, the percentages of self-identified conservatives and liberals were roughly the same as reported in this recent poll.

Despite the historic achievements of liberalism, its recent electoral successes, and the utter collapse of conservatism as a governing philosophy, liberalism still has not captured the political imaginations of most Americans.

In Reviving the Left, I argued that liberalism’s troubles stem from a  variety of false and pernicious background moral beliefs, deeply rooted in the American psyche, that explain the persistence of anti-government attitudes and the mistrust of liberalism. There is as yet no evidence that those background beliefs have changed, despite the extraordinary events that have shaped politics in recent years.

It is likely that only generational change will produce meaningful political change.

Thus, Galston is right to be concerned, although his prescription for less government action is misguided. Without a firmer commitment to liberal principles by a larger proportion of the public, we could very easily slide back into a conservatism that has already shown itself to be nothing but one disaster after another.

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Posted in Future of Liberalism, Political Theory, Public Opinion, Reviving the Left | No Comments »

Au Contraire

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Last week I posted twice (here and here) about the limits of contrarians who seek publicity by going against the conventional wisdom. Both Bill Maher in his diatribes against the flu vaccine in particular and Western medicine in general, and Brownless and Lenzer, the authors of a poorly researched article in Atlantic Monthly on the effectiveness of flu vaccine, are guilty of a kind of knee jerk response to conventional wisdom on an issue that is important to people and may cause harm if not properly understood.

But the conventional wisdom is sometimes wrong, so it is worth thinking about when being a contrarian is justified.

My short answer to this question is that “hit jobs” that cast doubt on the conventional wisdom  by oversimplifying the issue are never worth our attention. The point to remember is that if a contrarian is right about some issue, it typically makes the world more complicated, not less. The conventional wisdom is sometimes wrong but it is seldom without any reason or evidence behind it. Usually, people who hold conventional beliefs, especially in the sciences and social sciences that are evidence-based, have good reasons for holding the conventional belief.

When doubt is cast on those “good reasons” we are faced with attempting to confirm the new data, weighing the actual import of the new variables, assessing whether the new variables will produce multiple effects, and separating what was right about the old view from what was wrong about it and trying to accommodate the new information with what is worth saving of the old.

This process produces reactions, counter-reactions, and uncertainty among interest groups, and in the end the radical “new” insight is seldom as revolutionary as it appeared.

What matters then is that contrarians, or people who write about them, need to stay focused on the difficult search for truth and the need for nuance rather than bold statements that succumb to the temptation to be cute, hip, and cynical. Unfortunately, they are usually looking for entertainment value or promoting an ideology. Thus, contrarians are usually misleading.

This article at The Economist.com provides lots of examples of contrarianism run amok. (The new book by the authors of Freakonomics, called Superfreakonomics, is the latest example.) But there are others:

The first time I ever encountered an argument that I would now clearly recognise as “contrarian” was in elementary school, during Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign, when I first heard someone argue the supply-side case that lowering taxes would raise government revenues. Another early encounter I recall was my father describing a social scientist interviewed on NPR who’d argued that the main effect of minimum-wage laws was to raise the unemployment level for poor urban youth. And it’s been my experience ever since that contrarian arguments tend to skew rightwards.

I doubt that the right has a monopoly on contrarians.

At any rate, it would be good if contrarians were devoted to encouraging people to think more. Unfortunately it is quite the opposite. To the extent they encourage us to oversimplify matters they encourage us to think less.

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