New Liberalism

Late last night, I found myself watching Bill Maher. I usually loathe the guy for peddling a kind of liberal analysis not at all unlike Jon Stewart’s for its lack of intellectual strength or its over-abundance of elitist arrogance and condescension, and last night was hardly an exception. But there was one useful segment, and one that I’ll give Maher his share of credit for. He did an interview with Anderson Cooper, who has distinguished himself in the last week perhaps more than any journalist not named Brian Williams, where he spoke about the anger and hostility in the press towards the government officials who have clearly not lived up to their jobs.

In the interests of “objectivity,” journalists have by and large become lazy. They report on a story by running quotes by people holding opposing views and filling in the rest of the space with some basic details. And with a press that is too sensitive to charges of bias to actually pursue a bottom-line truth, the government has in turn made itself less transparent and more self-congratulatory. Bush, elected by the people, rarely if ever takes questions, and has done fewer interviews/press-conference than any other President in recent history. And with the media being driven by advertising sales and ratings/subscriptions, and with news consumers more interested in Michael Jackson’s foibles, not much was changing.

But the anger we’re seeing in the press towards the bankruptcy of the government’s response to Katrina, perhaps, will refocus the reporters on what their jobs actually are: getting the truth. It sounds corny and cliché, but it is no less the case. One of the reasons I started this site was to raise the level of debate in political discourse [I know I’ll have next to no impact, but at least I’ll be able to say I did my small part]. The black and white boilerplate that has been followed for so long (again, so as not to be accused of bias) has watered everything down.

“Bias” shouldn’t be something we should be afraid of- conservative or liberal. Christopher Hitchens, who lately has disappointed with his descent into “White House Operative” status by going at Cindy Sheehan with a freshly sharpened hatchet and defending Bush in The Weekly Standard, snapped out of it a couple weeks ago to write a column suggesting taking Bush up on his word of teaching Intelligent Design alongside evolution in school science classes [how could reasonable people in the post-Enlightenment age living in the United States, when given a choice between science and superstition, choose superstition?]. If we have a free-marketplace of ideas, where serious liberal critiques and serious conservative critiques are allowed to compete fairly against all other critiques, then you’ll see the best opinions achieve the most prominence and, I think, you’ll also see a moderation in politics. Political extremism- left or right- is bad in the United States just as it is bad everywhere else. And extremism typically comes from an ideologically selective interpretation of “the facts.” So let’s hope the press remembers how to find out what those facts are, and remembers how to complete a serious analysis of them, and remembers how to draw conclusions from those analyses. Let’s hope they remember soon that their jobs require them to actually do work.

# posted by Mayflower @ 9:14 AM