When the media gets pressure from only one side, they will yield to that pressure.
The left and the mainstream have fought many battles since the fifties.
I would like to suggest that the split is not between right and left but between the faith-based and reality-based communities.
When the right attacks the liberal media, what it is really attacking is objective media, with fact-checking.
"Fog Facts"
ReplyDeleteby Larry Beinhart
When the media gets pressure from only one side, they will yield to that pressure.
ReplyDeleteThe left and the mainstream have fought many battles since the fifties.
While they are full of interest groups, from the Sierra Club to the NAACP to NOW,t hey have not invested in anything like what David Brock called the Republican Noise Machine: a loose but interlocked association of a political party with youth recruitment, scholarships, fellowships, think tanks, publishers, newspapers, and a television network.
This is in part because so much of what the right calls liberal and the liberals would consider mainstream has proven itself and it seems self-explanatory. Equal rights are good. Anybody should be able to study any subject and enter any field. Adults should be able to have sex with whom they want, avoid diseases, and control when they have children. Universal education and access to higher education are good. The success and the simple utility of Social Security, the FDIC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, keeping an eye on the banks, all seem self-evident. Clean air and clean water and keeping vanishing species alive all seem like sound ideas. That science is a better basis for biology than prayer is a choice we make every time we visit the doctor or take an aspirin.
But it has abruptly emerged that there are a lot of people to whom these ideas are not, in fact, self-evident. That means if we, in the mainstream, in the reality-based community, care about those ideas, we have to put in the effort to explain them and justify them and then to proselytize. The idea of proselytizing practicality, realism, and objectivity sounds strange, but in a world of theologians it becomes necessary. [ . . . ]
I would like to suggest that the split is not between right and left but between the faith-based and reality-based communities.
When the right attacks the liberal media, what it is really attacking is objective media, with fact-checking.