The Media and the Bonfires of the Partisans

James Madison wrote that “liberty is to faction, what air is to fire.” It’s fair to say that Madison’s “faction” can be understood today as “partisanship” or “special interests.” * Faction was the fire that could destroy the republic, but the only way to extinguish the fire of faction – again meaning partisanship and special interests – was to remove liberty, the oxygen of free society, which of course was out of the question.

Instead the founders did their best to create a political system that would minimize the spirit of faction through a variety of mechanisms, including those we think of as “checks and balances.” It was not enough. The system horrifically blew apart at the time of America’s Civil War. A powerful federal government ended the threat of more civil wars, but today the smoke is so thick from fiery partisanship that much of the public chokes on its bitterness and our elected representatives can’t see to get anything done, or done well.

The problem is that the bonfires of the partisans have been burning more intensely and growing more powerful in recent years. The new partisanship can be attributed to a variety of sources, but none is as significant as those associated with the revolution underway in media.

On the one hand, the digital age is subversive to totalitarianism because governments and other powerful entities can no longer maintain exclusive control of political messages. In places like Tehran, Iran, a beleaguered opposition draws strength, organizes, and communicates with the outside world through the web.

But on the other hand, the Internet also encourages the kind of blind partisan attitudes destructive to democracy. The Web makes it easy for like-minded people to get only the information that satisfies their predisposed opinions, as opposed to the information they need to form balanced judgments. In the worst case, the Web allows extremists to gather together from diverse locations to form communities and even plan acts of violence.

With advertising dollars fleeing to the Web, traditional media have had to form new business models, often serving niche markets with distinct economic, sociological and, yes, political characteristics. The old media that survive have learned to cater to their niche audiences and provide what those audiences demand, even if it’s not what they really need to be informed citizens.

I confess that I no longer watch much news, but on September 12 I briefly turned on the television. It happened to be the day of the big tea-party protest in Washington, the significance of which I only later understood because most of the media under-reported the event. But on Fox News one Republican politician after another was given the air time to take sound-bite hacks at President Obama. It was what every one has come to expect from Fox and its tongue-in-cheek “fair and balanced” news philosophy. Needless to say, the Democrats were not given equal time. Fox is the pioneer of openly partisan television.

So I turned to CNN, where they were still “reporting” on Congressman Joe Wilson’s one-word heckle of President Obama four days earlier. Wilson had yelled “liar!” in the middle of the President’s address to Congress. Yes, Wilson was a rude jerk, but his catcall should not have still been “news” days later. We are not talking here about Preston Brooks beating Charles Sumner nearly to death with a cane on the floor of the Senate.

The CNN focus on Joe Wilson is part of a larger elitist story line told by Democrats and supported by their media allies which depicts the President’s opponents as crude, racist, “unAmerican” and potentially violent. This form of media-driven partisanship is particularly offensive because it seeks to characterize the President’s opponents as a dangerous threat and beyond civil society; implicitly they are therefore in need of silencing. Such tactics Joe McCarthy would have understood quite well.

Insidious and creeping post-modernism is also changing the way journalism is practiced and intensifying partisanship. Journalists no longer make it their business to seek out “the truth.” Notice here that I am compelled to put “the truth” in parentheses. Everyone knows, after all, that there is no such thing as “the truth.” Elite culture teaches us that there are many “truths,” depending on one’s perspective, and that perspective is generally formed by race, class, gender and culture. We “know” this about “the truth” being variable and subjective because this post-modernist idea now permeates society as common knowledge. (But then again, how do we “know” anything if there is no absolute “truth?” Hmmmm.) This post-modern philosophy makes all journalistic endeavors nothing more than a collection of subjective perspectives. Why try to be objective when everyone knows that such an effort is futile?

Arguing that it is impossible to be completely objective and that we are all biased is to knock down a straw man. Of course everyone is biased, but why not savor the challenge of overcoming one’s biases? To be objective or subjective is to choose between a false dichotomy. Journalists, and also individual citizens, can choose to be to be less fair or more fair. They can seek out opinions that challenge their own assumptions. They can examine arguments from a variety of points of view, they can play “devil’s advocate,” etc. Media professionals can and should take pride in producing copy and programming in which the audience cannot glean the bias of its creators.

The slippage of journalistic standards has not gone unnoticed by the public. According to Pew Research, public confidence in the media is at twenty-year low. Only 26% of Americans say that news organizations are careful that their programming is not politically biased.

One television news program still stands out as a truly model effort at “fair and balanced.” Under the leadership of Jim Lehrer, the Lehrer New Hour constantly strives to meet that standard. A variety of perspectives follows each story. Reasoned questioning helps clear away the partisan smoke in a way that James Madison would approve. I have heard that to keep himself as unbiased as possible, Lehrer is not even registered to vote. No matter, he more than does his civic duty. It is no wonder that Jim Lehrer is probably the most called-upon journalist to moderate Presidential debates. Journalists of the world, please take note. Sometimes striving to be fair has its advantages.

Going forward, the new media and the public will be pushing and pulling at each other, driving the discourse of the future. Everyone understands that the media have the capacity to manipulate public opinion. But the media also serve markets and are therefore ultimately a reflection of our character as a people. Will we accept politics as a sort of sport in which we do little other than cheer on our own team and jeer at the opponents? Will we be intellectually curious enough seek out a variety of perspectives? Will we be humble enough to recognize the capacity for error found in every human being, including ourselves? Will we be brave enough to look deeply into issues that take us out of our comfort zones and confront our most tightly held beliefs? Will we be creative enough to look outside the box in order to solve the challenging problems of the 21st Century? The new world of partisan post-modern media does not challenge us enough with these questions. We must therefore ask these questions ourselves, and demand from our media a higher standard of fairness, intellectual rigor and civility.

*”By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community” – James Madison in Federalist #10.