Bias? Hypocrisy? Or the Old Deception Two-Step?
Henry at Crooked Timber wants to take some blogs to task for what he sees as hypocrisy. Unfortunately, the premises on which he bases his argument are wrong, which makes his post an exercise in futility.
He’s prompted, apparently, by the attack on Power Line by newspaper columnist Nick Coleman. I’m not going to recap that except to say that Coleman’s attack was pretty vile, even for a columnist. You can wander over to Power Line and follow the story, if you want to get caught up. But that little fracas prompted this from Henry:
Coleman’s effort to “fact-check” the factcheckers is rather weak, but his main point is hard to refute – it’s a bit rich for slavering right wing hacks to accuse the mainstream media of ideological bias and expect to get taken seriously.
Well, as a slavering right-wing (although Libertarian) hack, I feel obliged to respond. First, clearly Henry doesn’t understand our argument about the MSM. He seems to believe that we have problems with bias all the way around and are hypocritical for being biased ourselves.
But that’s not the case. There’s a distinction, and it’s pretty obvious and hard to miss unless you really want to miss it.
I have huge problems with bias in the MSM. But, if you notice, I don’t criticize MSM columnists for bias. Why is that? Because columnists (and bloggers also, by the way) are supposed to be biased. They write their opinions and opinions are always biased. Opinion columnists like Coleman are expected to tell us what they think on any given issue and that will, every single time, involve their biases. Good columnists will be quite specific about their biases. That’s why we read the ones we read – because we like their biases or because they present them entertainingly.
Not so with news reporters. News reporters purport, loudly and at lengthy, that they are “objective” – that they do not allow their biases to creep into their stories and that they and their editors work very hard indeed to excise bias from their stories so that only the unvarnished facts remain.
But, as we’ve seen, that’s a load of hokum and we bloggers are quick to point out when those biases appear. And, believe me, they appear in spades.
Henry is comparing apples to oranges in the hope of conning you into believing that bloggers on the right are calling the MSM kettle black. Just pay attention the next time you read a blogger talking about bias and I’ll bet you that you’ll see a post about a news story that’s supposed to be telling you the facts – that we’re assured by the MSM is being written objectively and without bias – and covering the story evenly but really isn’t.
When you see a blogger “take on” a columnist, it won’t be because of bias but because the bloggers disagrees materially with the columnists opinion. They’re not criticizing the content of the piece necessarily but the conclusions of the piece (though sometimes they talk about the content also, if the columnist just gets the facts wrong on which the conclusion is based). That’s an important distinction and one that Henry does’nt want you to see at all.
Next, Henry takes on Glenn Reynolds and, by extension, a good hunk of the blogosphere.
There’s a curious sort of doublethink going on here, which culminates in a sort of dodge-the-responsibility two-step. On the one hand, bloggers like Glenn Reynolds respond to their critics by saying that they can’t cover everything, and that they’re not providing a news service, only opinions. On the other hand, they seem to believe that blogs should radically change or replace the mainstream media. Either of these statements is reasonable enough on its own,1 but taken in conjunction, they’re pretty jarring.
Unfortunately, Henry’s not being honest with you. I’ve never seen Glenn Reynolds ever say that bloggers will replace the MSM as a whole. He has said that we can radically change the way the MSM works but that’s a different contention.
See, Glenn is honest enough to know that no blogger right now has the resources or the manpower to cover the news as extensively as the MSM does. A blogger can’t send out reporters to far flung areas of the world and get the stories from the ground. What bloggers can do is to report those stories that the MSM misses (anyone remember how long it took the MSM to report on the Swift Boat Veterans? I believe it took them a month.) and to point out when the MSM’s news coverage contains a slant when they strenuously say that it doesn’t. Bloggers fill the gaps in the coverage, extend stories that the MSM just can’t because they’re speaking to a wider audience, and act as watchdog and fact-checker. That’s not replacement. If anything, it’s a symbiotic relationship between the two. The “taking down” that Henry points us to so breathlessly isn’t the comple demolition of the MSM but the destruction of the imperial attitude that so many news organizations have: that they’ll report what they want, when they want, and how they want, and we’ll sit there and take it because we’re the public. The blogosphere has shown in 2004 that we are quite capable of pushing back and demanding that they live up to the objectivity they claim to practice and that if they don’t, they shouldn’t be covering the news.
There’s no hypocrisy at work here no matter how much Henry wants it to exist and no matter how much he bends the language and invents opinions to make it so.
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Category: General
