Flattery and the media

Matt Yglesias says:

Some 30-40 years ago, the mainstream media came under sustained attack from the conservative movement. The critique was that, basically, the press should compromise its mission of doing its best to tell the truth and instead give equal rate to the truth and to whatever the conservative movement wanted to convince people of on any given day. Virtually every institution decided that the best way to cope was to slowly but surely give in to that pressure.

Meanwhile, technological change has undermined the financial viability of a lot of these institutions. And now they’re feeling sorry for themselves. But the very same changes open up possibilities for new institutions—institutions that are not as compromised by decades-worth of burning their own credibility—to do amazing work. On balance, I’m excited about the new era.

I think this explains a lot, and I tend to agree. I'm not of the opinion that the media should stick its nose in and declare a victor for every issue--a lot of social issues and economic issues have more than one valid answer, and it's better to report what both sides have to say and let people decide. Obviously, when one side is lying the obligation is to call them out on it, and the media has proven to be almost pathologically incapable of doing this, to the extent of peddling silly trash about Barack Obama's pastor as though it were a revelation (and few people cared), or devising tons of false equivalencies (remember the Social Security debate?) to avoid ever having to make strong statements about anything.

I think that, on balance, this has not only destroyed the reputation of the national press corps, but it's also played a not-insignificant role in the eventual derangement of the Republican Party. The media did not take a skeptical tone on laissez-faire and supply-siderism, which led, respectively, to a financial collapse and enormous deficits. The media didn't deign to criticize Bush's utopianism democracy promotion, which led invariably to a decline of American power and unnecessary wars. Hell, even the Afghanistan War ought to have been questioned--we might well have had causus belli, but was it absolutely necessary to our security to invade and hold another country, rather than just making surgical strikes on al-Qaeda? I guess we'll never know. But had the media stood up and asked tough questions of a conservative president some of these disasters might well have been averted--indefensible positions might well have been knocked down. This is, of course, the point of having a media--to ask the difficult questions, to be skeptical, not to just defer to elected officials and wax indignant when they lie to you. It is ironic that the media did wind up killing the GOP in the end, as they always figured it would--but it killed them with kindness.

I suspect that this is behind why torture opponents haven't won the torture debate--the GOP has turned it into a partisan issue, and Washington elites are therefore not going to even challenge that view. It would be biased. What if the GOP supported a law to make everyone wear polka-dot shirts on Fridays? Would this get a respectful hearing? It sounds silly, but if the heavy-hitters were out there on Sunday morning talk shows, doing a full-on blitz, I honestly doubt that the press corps would mock them. (Read Ta-Nehisi for more on the torture stuff--I do think the lack of concern over this boils down partly to a lack of empathy but not so much about national innocence, as Bush ruined that with Iraq. I suspect it's still lingering fear of another 9/11, and let's be honest here--many Americans are just as utopian as Bush was about removing evil from the world, and fundamentally lack courage, physical and otherwise. But I'm done.)