E.J. Dionne offered what I think is a critically important observation about the dynamics of the American media in his column the other day (also worthwhile are Matt Yglesias’ and Ezra Klein’s responses). Despite the constant conservative clamoring about the a pervasive liberal media bias, it’s really hard to look at the seriousness with which the media treats Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich and not see a rightward tilt. Of course, both Dionne and I are liberals, and if social psychology tells us anything it’s that everyone imposes their own filters and biases on the world. Still, his point that nary a position to the left of the President makes it into the cable news debate is pretty much an objective fact, and this truly does have a distortionary effect on the way policy and politics are communicated to the broader public.
The difference between my claim that the media tilts to the right and the traditional claim about liberal media bias, though, is that I don’t think there’s some conscious effort by reporters and news directors to push the conservative position. Instead, there’s a messy confluence of factors that each push coverage of the debate a little bit further to the right. An important one is cultural. Many far right social positions are tied closely to religion and nostalgic evocations of Americana that make them difficult to criticize.
That’s not to say that the far right positions are valid, or that conservative extremism is endemic to actual American values, but their proponents effectively hide behind the “real American” image. In contrast, far-left policies are associated with cultural and academic elitism that tends to be much easier to dismiss or reject outright. For all of the conservative whining about political correctness, they’re probably the largest beneficiaries of it.
Another factor is one I’ve written about quite a bit before: the intuitive appeal of conservatism. A lot of right or even far right policies are immediately appealing. This is especially true in the case of national security, but also when pundits make empty appeals to “free market principles” and the like. It’s upon reflection that conservative positions turn out to be self-defeating–as when you realize that torture yields unreliable information in exchange for facilitating the radicalization of potential Muslim allies–or simply vacuous, as does much of the stale Reaganomics tripe that is 25 years past its expiration date for relevance.
There are ways to kneejerk to the left, to be sure, but the vast majority of modern liberal positions–on everything from health care to foreign policy–are the result of pragmatic reflection. It’s what makes them so appealing to people like me. But it also makes them extremely difficult to communicate in the modern media environment. Cable news doesn’t even come close to judging policy on its merits; all that matters is well it resonates in a soundbite or how convincing you can sound shouting your argument over three other voices. It’s is exactly the wrong forum to effectively make the liberal case.
Nobody likes paying taxes and it’s incredibly easy to shake faith in, say, health-care reform, by saying how much it’s going to cost. The problem is that CNN, et al. kick it to commercial before the liberal can walk you through how much our mushrooming health costs will end up costing us in the long run without intervention. The same goes for energy policy and education. Pretty much all of the big issues we face right now follow this same dynamic, and it’s proving incredibly troubling for the progressive agenda.
The pontifications of Newt and Rush are perfect for cable news because they appeal to our base instincts. There’s a body of experimental psychology research showing that when you tax subjects’ higher cognitive resources with a variety of distracting tasks (or, in my favorite study, by getting them drunk) they end up supporting more conservative policy positions. Cable news just a real life version of these studies. And this–not a conscious strategy by the Obama administration or high-level editorial policy–is where the rightward tilt in the media comes from.
Where was the conservative bias in Chris Matthew’s “thrill up my leg” when he sees Obama speak? Where was the conservative bias when Evan Thomas called Obama God? Where is the conservative bias in most news organizations’ refusal to cover repeated communists in the Obama administration?