Last week, I hit my town library's book sale, and while browsing, I was dumb enough to open a heady tome titled Evolution Exposed: Your evolution answer book for the classroom. Labeled a "survival guide for today's students," the book purports to teach teens to "recognize and refute the blatant bias towards evolution" in public school science courses. Which is a lot like saying today's physical education classes are unfair about the medieval period's Four Humours dogma.
No one should be listening to me, a guy who got a C in freshman biology and barely got through The Idiot's Guide to Physics, on Darwinism or contemporary theories of evolution. But I'm happy to fill anyone's ears about the need to listen to scientists when discussing scientific issues, how we got to where we are today on our distrust of science, and why treating evolution as "just another theory" is approaching as ignorant as ignorant can possibly get. So I can say with confidence, after having flipped through Evolution Exposed, that it's garbage, and might make good kindling, but has no other value besides.
Of course, I'm aware that such a callous dismissal of this book opens me up to charges of elitism, bias, arrogance, and maybe even being in a "liberal bubble" that doesn't take such views seriously. Guilty as charged, I suppose. Although I must say, my bubble ain’t all that liberal. I don’t have a si gel acquaintance who doesn’t roll their eyes at my politics or view of the media, and that includes my spouse. I regularly read the Chicago press, full of diatribes about unionized teachers, climate change misinformation and I’m-no-fan-of-Donald-Trump-but-type essays urging more tax breaks and a moat full of crocodiles along the Mexico border. I sort of have to. I’ve been confronted by my own bias before, rightfully so, and if a healthy media diet means having my view challenged, legitimately or otherwise, bring it on.
Still, I just don't see how certain things should be up for debate any more. Like evolution. Or whether climate change is dooming humanity. Or whether Joe Biden was elected in 2020, or whether vaccines work or not. It’s settled. Why would I want to listen to a differing view? Are you a biologist? A climate scientist? Do you have actual evidence? No? Then why are you here? Go sit back down.
Which brings me to The Economist's lead articles for the week: The American media is letting down its readers because of a leftist bias.
This is an old, old charge. I've read Biased! by Bernie Goldberg. I sat through the Munk debate last year: "The Mainstream Media Is Not to be Trusted." I've read Howard Kurtz, Jonah Goldberg, Matt Taibbi, blowhards in the Chicago press, blowhards in the New York Times itself, all railing against this liberal crusader agenda the media is supposedly pursuing. It makes sense, I suppose, if you equate "liberal bias" with attitudes like "trans people are people," or "immigrants are human beings." It makes less sense if you apply The Economist's attempt at objectivity and pro-business, Friedman-worshiping squint towards the issue.
But I gave their work a look. I had to. The writers there, I think, are intelligent and informed, and worth listening to. Even when I disagree. Especially when I disagree. They’ve changed my mind before, so I figured, who knows? Maybe they have a point.
Turns out they do. But it’s not the point they think.
The gist of their case: There are three articles in this week's edition on the media bias in the U.S. To set them all up, the lead article argues that a healthy media of various views promoting a responsible dialogue is essential for democracy, and that “next year’s election will be the test.” No argument here.
Except, they add, the media isn’t providing this dialogue because it’s polarized and in a leftist echo chamber. To back this up, there’s a piece arguing that the media tend to use the language of Democrats. It relies for its conclusions on a data study The Economist carried out on the diction of mainstream newspapers and cable news networks. Their conclusion: since the election of Donald Trump, the mainstream media’s framing and discussion of topics has shifted to liberal-friendly language, which validates conservatives’ concerns about an unfair media landscape. More on this later.
Another piece does a deep dive into conservative media and concludes Trump pretty much controls the narrative despite more “reasonable” conservatives’ efforts to derail him. (Air quotes mine.)
And last, in the 1843 Magazine, former New York Times editor James Bennet, who was famously ousted in 2020 for the publication of Senator Tom Cotton’s op ed pushing for military action to police protests over the murder of George Floyd, gives his own account not only of the publication of that piece, but also what he describes as a complete transformation of how the newspaper operates, a failure of its philosophy of free speech, and an outright refusal to entertain views that challenge its own liberal narrative.
(All links are behind paywalls. No, I’m not gifting them. Buy your own.)
I have absolutely nothing of value to say regarding their conclusions about the conservative media. If they want to equate figures like Rush Limbaugh and Ben Shapiro with quality, intellectual journalists pursuing the truth, that says more about their definition of conservatism than I could ever articulate.
On the other hand, Bennet’s firsthand account of how things worked at the Times should be read by all, even those disinclined to completely accept his take on matters like perspective vs. truth, and the value of presenting differing viewpoints.
I remember the whole Cotton debacle quite well. I remember being outraged that the Times would give space to a member of the government advocating military force against peaceful protestors. Bennet pushes back against my and others’ such characterizations of the senator’s remarks, pointing out that “Cotton had distinguished between ‘peaceful, law-abiding protesters’ and ‘rioters and looters,’ and that Cotton’s target was criminal behavior, not civil unrest.
The hell it was. Yes, Cotton differentiated the two about a third through his article, but then immediately pivoted to blaming one of Trump’s favorite boogeymen. The rioting, he wrote, was carried out by:
nihilist criminals (who) are simply out for loot and the thrill of destruction, with cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa infiltrating protest marches to exploit Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes. These rioters, if not subdued, not only will destroy the livelihoods of law-abiding citizens but will also take more innocent lives. Many poor communities that still bear scars from past upheavals will be set back still further.
His evidence of antifa’s presence? Former Attorney General Bill Barr said so. The link is right there.
I am old enough to remember Trump and the GOP blaming Antifa (whatever they claimed they were) for every act of violence to take place under the sun in this country, including the horror at Charlottesville. So if Antifa equals protestors, which also equals rioters, well, how is that not an attack on civilian protestors?
None of this is to say that I think the Cotton article shouldn’t have been published; nor do I think Bennet should have been fired. It’s complicated. And I read with keen interest his blow-by-blow of unionized reporters butting heads with editors and the tortured efforts the Times went through to manage the situation. That must have been horrible, and I am sympathetic. Plus, anyone who gets that many rage-Tweets deserves, at the very least, a beer and a bowl of pretzels.
“Are we truly so precious?” Bennet says the executive editor asked him bemusedly after the shit hit the fan that summer. Fair question.
But only to a point. If, as Bennet says, the purpose of journalism is to “present debate from all sides” and “not to tell people what to think, but to help them fulfill their desire to think for themselves,” what was the Cotton editorial supposed to accomplish in that regard? To buy into fantasies about a left-wing paramilitary force out to hurt decent, honest Americans? To understand the true threat these protests were to the status quo? Wouldn’t a sit-down with Cotton and a challenge to produce evidence of the antifa plague have been more effective?
It all reminded me of the Times’ Ohio Nazi story from 2017, which also ran under Bennet’s tenure and which he brings up in this essay as well. Bennet can’t quite comprehend the fuss over that article: a vanilla-esque profile of Tony Hovater, a self-described Nazi who the article features cooking pasta with his fiance and talking about his favorite television shows. He was described in the article as the “Nazi sympathizer next door, polite and low-key,” with “Midwestern manners would please anyone’s mother.” When originally posted, the online article had a weblink you could access to buy your own swastika armband.
Bennet defends the article as “in keeping with the Times’s tradition of confronting readers with the confounding reality of the world around them.” And if the article had explored the roots of Hovater’s ideology, even a smidge, I’d agree with him. But what did we learn about him from that article? What did we learn about how hate spreads, about how to deal with bigotry and ignorance?
Nothing. We only learned that Nazis like cats.
Turns out the world is slightly less confounding for angry Times readers than it is Times editors.
Still, even if it’s not quite how he planned, Bennet’s essay does open a debate, and it’s an important debate. If the role of the media is to provide diversity of views and present a rigorous and revealing discussion for the American people, should any views be off limits? Or should it be an open market, free-for-all as one particular billionaire manbaby says it should be? What kind of curation should take place and how should the discussion be handled and framed?
Don’t tell me there shouldn’t be any curation. Not even Bennet goes that far, although I don’t think he realizes it. A newspaper that prioritizes justice over truth, he writes, “has no legitimate claim to the trust of reasonable people who see the world very differently.”
Reasonable people? Who says who’s reasonable? Who gets to make that call? Ten percent of Americans believe the Earth is flat; are you calling them unreasonable? Why shouldn’t they see their views reflected in the newspaper of record too, you media elitist prick?
Bennet also points out that, at one time, Trump himself submitted an op ed, but “we could not raise it to our standards – his people would not agree to the edits we asked for.” Mr. Bennet, I thought you weren’t in the business of telling people what to think. Let the people see the Donald’s words for themselves. Are you so afraid of someone else’s views?
Are you so precious?
Okay, I grow childish, I admit. I do believe the media has a responsibility to cover as many perspectives as possible; I just don’t agree that this responsibility means all views are fair game. I don’t think the Times, or anyone else, should be giving a platform to vaccine deniers, climate change deniers, or anything else of that ilk. I totally understand next to nothing is one hundred percent certain, and that even scientists can be wrong–witness the current dialogue taking place over masks and school closures. But if this is about the pursuit of truth, let’s not elevate balance for the sake of balance. Let’s not pretend there aren’t certain things that are settled, off topic, not worthy of elevation to the level of legitimate debate.
There is a line to be drawn regarding what’s to be discussed and what isn’t. We may disagree on where that line is, but don’t pretend there isn’t one, or there shouldn’t be one. There is a big difference between covering a point of view and endorsing a point of view. It’s why I’d be happy to read a genuine, illuminative profile of a Flat Earther, and why I would cancel my subscription if the local paper gave that Flat Earther a weekly column, headshot and all.
Of course, science is one thing; political ideology and its inevitable effect on a reporter’s worldview is quite another. Which brings me to the most intriguing of The Economist’s articles on the wretched state of American media: The so-called liberal bias.
How did they reach this conclusion? The newspaper went through Congressional speeches over a 13-year period and came up with a list of two-word phrases that they saw as either reliably Republican or Democrat. They then took a sampling of transcripts from prime time cable news shows and online news articles (a limited sample, as they admit) and compared it with those speeches.
The results told them that “Of the 20 most-read news websites with available data, 17 use Democratic-linked terms more than Republican-linked ones. The same is true of America’s six leading news sources on tv, of which Fox is the only one where conservative language predominates.”
What were these liberal terms they found all over the mainstream media? What was this loaded language that frames and shapes the way these issues are discussed?
No idea. The article only mentions two examples: Republicans use the term “unborn baby” while Democrats use “reproductive care”; Democrats favor the term “undocumented immigrant,” while the Republicans refer to such people as “illegal aliens.”
This is, apparently, just the tip of their iceberg when it comes to partisan language, but it’s all I need to call horseshit. The American Medical Association refers to abortion as medical care and health care. The Associated Press Stylebook threw out the term “illegal alien” in 2014. So far as I can tell, this was done not in the interest of social justice or “wokeness,” but accuracy. If this is all partisan language, then by the Economist’s logic,the Republicans are on another planet when it comes to their partisanship. It sounds like fun to cook partisan terms up, so I figured, Fuck it, and made a list of my own:
The Left | The Right |
gay rights | child predators |
racism bad | wokeness |
tax cuts | economic freedom |
aid reduction | economic reform |
Maybe I’m exaggerating, but without the list itself, I’m free to speculate. Take two seconds to think over how acceptable language changes over time and compare it with right wing talking points. Start with Bennet’s essay, if you like. He reminisces over covering Pat Buchanan’s run for president in the eighties and Buchanan’s “coded appeals to racism and antisemitism.” What were those codes, I wonder? And would they have scored as Republican or Democrat language on this study?
To their credit, when assessing their measure of this liberal bias, The Economist acknowledges both the limitations of their methodology and the dubious intellectual grounds Republicans are standing on these days. “These results should be taken with a pinch of salt,” data journalist Ainsley Johnston admitted in the newspaper’s accompanying podcast. Among other flaws, their approach can’t distinguish between changes in media ideology and political polarization. “It could be the Republicans have shifted more to the right than Democrats have to the left,” she said.
Yes, it most certainly could be. Whether it’s abortion rights, climate change, Trump’s culpability for the January 6 insurrection or gun control, the GOP has shown time and time again it is wildly out of step with what the country at large actually thinks. The Hunter Biden laptop story may have been given short shrift by the Fourth Estate originally, but look at the resultant weak-ass case newly minted Speaker Mike Johnson is giving for a Biden impeachment inquiry and tell me that’s anything to do with objective reality. Even as I write this, the Colorado Republicans in my own bailiwick are refusing to certify the results of the last election, despite an absence of any evidence of any kind of fraud whatsoever. The invisible President Obama that Clint Eastwood famously berated during the 2012 Republican National Convention has now morphed into an entire socialist-but-also-Communist-but-also-fascist kingdom, full of progressives selling your children pronouns on the street and stealing hard-earned assault rifles so as to melt them down for millennial participation trophies, which only the right can see. That’s the free, unfettered debate they seem to want. And the Economist is suffering penis envy over that?
“A newspaper is a universe, or should be,” Sun Times columnist Neil Steinberg once wrote. “Like Walt Whitman, they contain multitudes.” Absolutely. But that same universe should, at the bare minimum, recognize and understand the laws of physics; otherwise, it’s not actually our universe. If you see someone levitating, you don’t give them a prime time television show where they get to yell about how levitation cures cancer; you fact check them, and inevitably reveal they’re conning you.
I am more than happy to read the works of those I disagree with, particularly conservatives–the late Charles Krauthammer used to drive me crazy, and I think George Will is out to lunch on any number of issues, to name but a few examples of conservative columnists that make up part of my media diet. I may disagree with them, but I recognize the world they refer to. However, it might be time to make sure we all agree on our definition of conservatism first. When one party eschews this world in favor of scaring voters, placating racists and winning elections, they’ve lost any and all grounds for complaining about any kind of media environment. They’re not conservatives. They’re right-wing nationalists. Treat them as such.
No, the Democrats aren’t beyond reproach. I have no loyalty to them whatsoever. But castigating them for adopting language and attitudes that are closer to the majority of Americans’ is nonsensical. If you want to equate “undocumented worker” with some kind of liberal bias, that’s a charge I’m happy to plead guilty to.
In the meantime, let’s ditch the notion that all views are up for grabs and let’s have a reasonable, rational discussion about how to empower as many voices as we can without losing that “common set of facts” The Economist acknowledges is necessary for a functioning democracy. I am not the arbiter of truth; I rely on a responsible press that actually knows things to frame issues as responsibly and accurately as they can. They will make mistakes. They will correct those mistakes. They can and should seek differing opinions, but they should not conflate “balance” with objectivity, not when one side of this country has moved so far to the right you’d need the Hubble Telescope to see them.
Enough of that. Throw the pseudoscience out of the biology classroom. Ask the Nazis some tough, honest questions. Don’t pretend all points of view are equally valid. Figure out which ones are and plumb them for depth, truth and understanding. The Economist has, both in the past and recently, taken ill-informed shots at my profession. I trust they can accept my own shots at theirs.
