Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America by John P. Avlon; Tina Brown

Author:John P. Avlon; Tina Brown
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Current Events, Political Ideologies - Conservatism & Liberalism, Political Ideologies, International Relations, Politics & government, USA, Government, Political Process, General, United States, Conservatism & Liberalism, Political Science, Political Process - Political Parties, Politics, Essays, Government - U.S. Government, Political Parties, Current Affairs & Issues, Right and left (Political science)
Publisher: Beast Books
Published: 2010-02-23T05:00:00+00:00

Escaping the Echo Chamber

The pioneering television journalist Edward R. Murrow said, “To be persuasive, we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful.”71

Truth, or course, doesn’t come tailor-made for any one ideology or political party.

But hyper-partisanship has become an industry unto itself, and it is thriving at a time when the old news industry, aspiring to objectivity dominated by print reporting and the network evening news, seems to be fading. The fragmentation and self-segregation we are experiencing with television, radio and the Internet exacerbates our political differences while they decrease the confidence we had in the honesty and integrity of journalism altogether.

Today, with newspapers fighting for survival, faith in the accuracy and fairness of the press is at twenty-five-year lows.72 You can’t blame people for being cynical. The clearest path to profit seems to come from abandoning the ideal of objectivity and nakedly playing to the base. But even at a time when pundits sound like paid shills for political parties, it was shocking to learn that black conservative columnist Armstrong Williams had accepted a quarter of a million taxpayer dollars from the Bush administration to promote its No Child Left Behind education policy in print and on air.73

Ironically, Williams had previously complained about the partisan straightjacket he felt imposed upon him by the split-scream formatting of cable news, telling Tina Brown on CNBC, “One of the things that I struggle with when I go on television like, let’s say, a Crossfire, [or] Wolf Blitzer, I’m expected to take a certain side. I’m expected to defend the president [Bush]. Now there are some areas I don’t want to defend the president in because I don’t necessarily believe that, but you’re put in that position. And I think sometimes you’re in a predicament that the public is not really getting what you think is their best interests served. So I think sometimes we get caught up in these labels and these stereotypes . . . [and] we do the public a disservice.”74

The spin cycle is baked into the booking of guests where predictable partisanship is encouraged. Conflict sells and balanced analysis is considered bad for ratings—it takes too long to get to the truth.

Politicians have an interest in encouraging an increasingly partisan media. By drumming home the message of media bias, they try to diminish the credibility of their critics while developing contacts more likely to present their side of the story. This self-serving mission requires loss of perspective. Texas Republican Congressman Lamar Smith, for instance, told students in the summer of ’09 what he believed to be the “the greatest threat to America.” It was not necessarily a recession, he said, or even another terrorist attack. “The greatest threat to America is a liberal media bias.”75

Washington is the only city in the nation where the most important thing about you is what political party you belong to. Partisan media reinforces the rampant “team-ism.” If you walk into a congressman’s office and

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