Reading libbyshaw's excellent posting The GOP Refuses to Read a Bill it Opposes lead me to connect these things I have reading recently. That and the continuing train wreck that is California these days...
I particular I am reading a book , Media Politics by Iyengar and McGardy (Norton, 2007), with the intention of using it as a text for a course called Media and Democracy. I have no degree in media, but I have a voracious interest in the intersection of how the media's performance impacts the quality of our democracy through time. Anyone who has been paying attention over the last several years, decades cannot help but notice the way in which the media has increasingly become part of the story, not simply the conveyors of news, and this has not been a good thing.
|
 |
I will leave aside the Liberal case against the media's performance for the moment ( think Iraq War for example) and consider the case against the "Conservative" media. Ironically, the basis for their attack is rooted , in one view, in the Marxian view of knowledge or in Post-Modern philosophy in another view. Of course the third option is that people like Rush and Hannity and Beck are hypocritical shrills. They are employed by ideologues who also love money more than democracy or efforts to be truthful and accurate. If the third case is true, it does nothing to undercut the sweet irony of their approach to reporting and commenting on current events. In the what they do and how they do it presumes that there is no objective truth, only social constructed narratives shared by like minded communities. Think of Fox news and commentary , what is that but a concrete example of this philosophy in action? |
| Think also of their attack on their critics and competitors. The standard line is the Liberal Media bend the facts to suit their Liberal Agenda. They can't help themselves, their Liberal world view blinds them to any approximation of objectivity.
To illustrate my philosophical point consider Marx first:
Society as a human creation
Marx ... emphasizes[s] the extent to which people's action ...[are] determined by their social situation; Marx's famous phrase for this is "Human beings make their own history, but not under conditions of their own choosing".
In other words, we are the product of our social circumstance, our economic class to be specific.
Then there are our friends those evil leftists/radical/Post-Modern philosophers...
Paul Boghassian, FEAR OF KNOWLEDGE , Clareon Press, Oxford, 2006 "Over the past twenty years or so....a remarkable consensus has formed - the human and social sciences, even if not in the natural sciences- around a thesis that knowledge is socially constructed."
In other words, we create social communities, which produce their knowledge, their understanding in their unique fashion. The corollary to this claim is that the knowledge created by these communities are true for them , no matter what any other person or community says or believes.
Effectively, that seems to be the presumption of Fox News, but just of Fox news. Recall Senator Franken's point in the video below this posting. We can't have our own facts and , to him and me, much of the Republican opposition to the Health Care reform appears to be ill-informed, misinformed or simply willing and blissful ignorant and irresponsible. See Palin and death panels, see Bachman and blood oath, see the Franken video above if you must review this evidence. This cynical game of partisan only truth is deeply embedded in the culture of the Republican establishment.
The accusation coming back at me , of course , is well liberals and Democrats are the just the same , but only on the left of all issues. Now evidence that the Partisan Blindness is not equally a problem for left and right in America.
The other book Media Politics by Iyengar and McGardy has this interesting summary of research :
Media Politics by Iyengar and McGardy( page 117 ) "Overall, the evidence suggests that exposure to political information by multiple factors: the desire to learn about politics generally, to learn about issues of special interest, and , at least among Republicans and conservatives, to learn about a favored candidate. It is difficult to dismiss this last finding as idiosyncratic to recent campaigns because the very same pattern of anticipated agreement for selective exposure among Republicans and conservative was apparent in the Lazarsfeld, Berleson, and Gaudet study of the 1948 election .
The question these scholars are addressing is "Is there a bias to news exposure among those who get their news online?", do they select and follow stuff that reinforces their preconceived preferences. The answer is probably not for most persons in their studies. The answer for Republicans and conservatives in their studies , is yes they do.
Further evidence is a study of the 2000 election.
Media Politics by Iyengar and McGardy( page 113 ) "The impact of technology on motivated exposure to campaign information was addressed in a study of the 2000 presidential election. The researchers produced an extensive media CD-ROM data base of the of information about Vice President Al Gore and Governor Bush ....
The researchers then tracked individual's use of this CD electronically so that they could monitor what each person chose to read. The partisan polarization hypothesis predicted that Republicans and conservatives would visit pages featuring Bush more frequently then pages devoted to Gore, while democrats and liberals would exhibit precisely the opposite tendency... the evidence showed only weak traces of an anticipated agreement bias. Strong conservative , however, accessed Bush content significantly more frequently . In terms of party identification, CD use did not differ across Democrats and Republicans ; both groups accessed slightly more Gore than Bush pages. "
In other words, Republican voters/identifiers (?) don't show the same bias as the hard core conservative wing apparently does.
What all this seems to mean is that Republican elected officials and key hard core activists groups and allies fit the very model they assign to Liberals. They are ideologues, unmoved by fact or pragmatism. They want what they want because it is necessary to maintain their little private fantasy worlds where their small minded theories of society and economics make their lives predictable and leaves their minds free of the doubt and insecurities suffered by those of us who must deal in the real world. Paul Krugman raises some of the same concerns.
It means also that efforts at bipartisanship will be doomed unless and until we fix the process whereby we create electoral districts. Gerrymandered election precincts drive elected politicians, apparently especially Republican ones , to obtain and keep their positions by feeding the most rabid elements of their base and the enabling think tanks and interest groups. Think Freedom Works, think Tea-Baggers.
Have we really become ungovernable? Time will tell.... |
