Franklin Foer often writes perceptive pieces for the New Republic, but this isn’t one of them.
Foer, who now also contributes regularly to what he describes as TNR’s new “crackling blog,” The Plank, criticizes liberal bloggers for routinely trashing the MSM.
You would expect this kind of populism from the right, which long ago pioneered the trashing of the MSM, or, as Spiro Agnew famously called its practitioners, “nattering nabobs of negativism.” The right has used media-bashing as political gimmickry — “Annoy the media, vote for Bush” was a 1992 slogan — and to produce mega-selling books like Bernard Goldberg’s manifesto, Bias. When they take these shots, they don’t just intend to rally their rank and file. They want to weaken the press so it will stop obstructing their agenda, a motive that liberal bloggers seem to have forgotten. By repeating conservative criticisms about the allegedly elitist, sycophantic, biased MSM, liberal bloggers have played straight into conservative hands. These bloggers have begun unwittingly doing conservatives’ dirty work.
Even though Foer prefaced this criticism by acknowledging that “[n]ewspapers deserve an army of enemies that nag them to be less lazy, less timid, and less nice,” the substance of his criticism of liberal attacks on the MSM is not that it’s wrong but that it’s politically mistaken. His, in short, is the journalistic equivalent of the hoary old leftist slogan, “No enemies on the left!”
But wait; there’s more. Foer also says that the criticism of the MSM, presumably from both left and right, is that — are you ready for this? — that it’s too objective! And this abandonment of the appreciation of objectivity is — why is this no surprise? — all Bush’s fault!
What they’re attacking is the MSM’s Progressive-era ethos of public-minded disinterestedness. By embracing the idea of objectivity, newspapers took a radical turn from the raw partisanship that guided them in the nineteenth century. “Without fear or favor” was Times owner Adolph Ochs’s famous phrase. That “objective” style worked well for many years, because, in the postwar period, political elites shared broad assumptions about policy with one another–and the media. But the Bush administration has violently rejected that consensus. And, instead of playing by the old rules that governed the relationship between reporters and the White House, it has exploited them. For starters, there was the 2000 campaign, in which the press presented Bush as essentially the heir to Clintonian centrism, even though most of his policy prescriptions should have led reporters to a very different conclusion. The Bushies pulled off this legerdemain–and repeated the trick many times–by taking advantage of the news media’s disinterested style, which obliges it to give a hearing to both sides of a debate, even if one side has uttered a total falsehood.
So, you don’t like Kos’s MSM-bashing? Blame Bush. It should be easy, since you blame him for everything else, from dandruff to global warming.
To state the obvious, I don’t believe either the left or right blogs complain about the MSM suffering from an excess of objectivity.
John,
There’s a difference between objectivity (accurately reflecting reality) and impartiality (giving both sides of an issue roughly equal credibility). The problem with objectivity is that it’s almost impossible to achieve (or at least to demonstrate) so since the decline of the 19th century partisan press, journalists have tended to use a fairly codified set of impartial practices as an approximation of objectivity. In principle, a clever faction could exploit these practices to skew news coverage. I don’t at all agree with Foer that this characterizes the Bush 2000 campaign, but it almost certainly is what the intelligent design people, and to a lesser extent, climate change skeptics have accomplished.