August 23, 2006
When Elephants and Donkeys Fight, the Gnats Get Strained Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 11:45 AM EST I hesitate to get in between John Steele Gordon and Joshua Zeitz for fear of being hit with all the spitballs and water balloons they’re lobbing back and forth. But I think this whole question of media bias is really one of definition. As we can see from the way Gordon shuns the label “conservative” and Zeitz admits only to being “somewhat liberal,” everybody locates the center close to his or her own opinions and evaluates the media using that frame of reference.* This reminds me of a manuscript we once received from a professor at a Canadian university. The subject was Harry Truman, and the author’s thesis was that everybody thinks Truman grew up poor, when in fact he was middle-class. The reason for this misapprehension, the author said, is that in America, you’re considered either rich or poor; there is no middle ground. We didn’t buy the article for a number of reasons, chief among them being that the basic premise is false. It’s true that Truman came from a modest background, but I don’t know anyone who thinks his family had to beg for crusts of bread on the street. But if the premise was a straw man, the professor’s explanation of it was even more wrong. In America, the popular myth is not that everyone is either rich or poor; it’s that everyone is middle-class. I’m reminded of a New Yorker cartoon, probably from the 1930s, that takes place at the graduation exercises of a wealthy boarding school. I don’t know if Helen Hokinson drew it, but it’s the type she would have drawn. Amid all the trappings of money and power, a young man standing at the podium gazes out over the well-dressed crowd and says, “. . . whilst we, the great middle class, are slowly being ground between the upper and nether millstones.” I had a friend in college whose father was a doctor. His family owned several homes and took frequent and expensive vacations, and I once ventured to suggest that they were rich. My friend looked at me like I was crazy. He explained that you can’t call yourself rich unless you have enough money to affect the movements of financial markets (or some such thing; this discussion took place late at night). Coming from the wealthy end of things, he was aware of degrees and distinctions of richness that I had never imagined; and similarly, people whose families had to scrape to get by will say, “No, we weren’t poor—we always had food on the table and a roof over our heads . . .” I think the same sort of thing is at work in the media-bias debate: Economically, everyone thinks of himself or herself as middle-class, and politically, everyone thinks of himself or herself as centrist. One reason may be that if you feel strongly about politics, you spend much more time reading commentators on your own side than those on the other. So you will be deeply familiar with fine distinctions within your tribe while tending to lump together everyone in the other tribe. People who are quite far to the left or right will say, “Who, me? I’m no liberal/conservative—not like those nuts who want to ban private schools/throw gays in jail” (or whatever wacky cause is being argued on the more feverish websites at the time). A similar phenomenon explains why it’s easier to visually tell apart members of your own race than those of a different one. That’s why Josh Zeitz can seriously assert that The New Republic is even-handed and The Weekly Standard is “an ideological rag.” In fact, if you read The Weekly Standard (or National Review, for that matter), you will see vigorous debate over immigration, religion, abortion, drug legalization, and many other topics, including the advisability of various past, present, and future wars. Now, I’m not saying that TWS is without flaw. While it hasn’t had a Stephen Glass episode, it does publish many articles just as lame as Michael Lewis’s paean to his wife’s rear end (which TNR published in 1994), and its spotty fact-checking lets through plenty of errors just as embarrassing as “In George Orwell’s 1984, the pigs took over” (as TNR asserted in 1984). But the two publications are equally open-minded and equally rigorous intellectually. For better or worse, TWS is to the right exactly what TNR (which has published a few articles by Josh over the years) is to the left. Josh doesn’t see this because his vantage point on left makes him acutely aware of all the internecine disputes in his own backyard while distancing him from the variety of opinion among conservatives, to the point where he can dismiss them all as what his fellow academics would call “the Other.” I think the same is true of John Steele Gordon and most other people who care enough about politics to assess the level of media bias. As Gordon admitted in a recent post, we strain at gnats that come from the opposing team while swallowing camels that come from our own. And that’s why the question of whether the media is biased can’t be answered definitively—one person’s bias is another person’s truth-telling. * yes, this is a popularized technicality from physics, but I couldn’t think of a better way of putting it.
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