At least we’re TALKING about media bias
At least we’re TALKING about media bias
Since I’ve been writing about this subject for over 10 years, I want to add my voice to those who’ve commented thus far about Tim Rutten’s Los Angeles Times column, “Fact or opinion? Yes, it really does matter.” The piece is important, because it advances the debate over whether an objective press is a) possible and b) desirable in a democracy.
At issue is the question being posed with increasing frequency by right- and left-wing partisans: Have the American media simply failed in their decades-long effort to separate facts from opinions and to make impartial reporting the governing ethic of their news columns? Or, alternatively, has American society’s changed nature simply made the whole project irrelevant?This assault on the ethic of impartiality has two sources, one intellectual, the other social.
“It’s certainly true that we are now two Americas,” said CNN political analyst Bill Schneider, who is also a leading scholar of public opinion. “We’re seeing this with greater clarity as we move further into this election cycle. There is no attempt to find a center. On the left, the Democratic front-runner, Howard Dean, wants to purge the party of its centrists, to repudiate the ‘Third Way’ Bill Clinton advocated. On the right, not even President George W. Bush talks about compassionate conservatism anymore. Look at the bestseller lists. They’re dominated by people like Al Franken and Michael Moore on the left and Bill O’Reilly and Anne Coulter on the right.”Our nonfiction literature, in other words, is today a shouting match.
Liberal and conservative intellectuals who have sipped more Kool-Aid than they realize from the post-modern punch bowl insist that because pure objectivity does not exist, only pure subjectivity remains.
Give the guy an F in debate. Pomos are extremists only in the minds of those who are extreme in the Modernist view — people like Mr. Rutten. It is the utter failure of Modernism to deliver on its promises that has given rise to Postmodernism, just as the science of Modernism replaced faith in the church many centuries ago. It is the cultural change that’s driving all of this angst over objectivity, so it’s much, much bigger than journalism.
Finally, Mr. Rutten argues that the revenues generated by objectivity’s sterile environment have been a boon to publishers, who have reinvested in newsgathering methodologies and technologies, and that we’re better off for it. I agree completely, but in saying this, he also reveals his ignorance about Postmodernism and the cultural shift. Pomos will gladly use the technological advances Modernism has given us, and nowhere in my view of the new world do I see a wish to dismantle science and technology. Postmodernism only demands that it take its rightful place, somewhere BENEATH God status.
I hope Mr. Rutten and others keep writing about this, because this discussion has been long overdue.
