As discussed below Andrew Sullivan on the current struggle to understand and cope with the interconnection between the Supreme Court and "boys will be boys."
At New York Magazine.
"...Our society has less crime and less danger than ever, and yet we see
threats everywhere. It has become more racially and culturally diverse
than any society in the history of humankind, but it is plagued by
“white supremacists” or “hordes of illegals.” And you cannot question
these feelings because subjectivity is more important than objectivity,
and sensitivity trumps reality. Gay, lesbian, and transgender people
live in a world unimaginable to the overwhelming majority of humankind,
and to our predecessors of only five years ago, and yet we are told by
our leaders that we are “under siege.” As women kick ass in our economy
and culture, as they achieve success that previous generations would
have thought extraordinary, what is the response? Rage, of course!
Furious rage!"
This sentence from Sullivan's article struck me, "These tribal instincts are as emotionally satisfying as they are toxic." People get a sick kind of satisfaction from dividing the world up into "us" and "them". There may have been a survival advantage in our evolutionary history to being able to quickly size up people as friend or foe. Yet there is no such thing as liberal or conservative, feminist or patriarchal, supremacist and racist, DNA. It's all learned behavior.
ReplyDeleteWorth the read. Also, after the discussion of American binary outlook Sullivan goes into the intractability of Brexit, in which Prime Minister May and the EU are unable to resolve the choice they have between leaving the Irish North-South border open (giving the folks who quit in a huff a backdoor into what they broke away from) or making the border hard again (reigniting a centuries-old with-us/against-us inferno). They cannot square that circle, and since May's position makes no sense (owing so much to Boris Johnson), Manichean stock is rising there.
ReplyDeleteRe: Brexit, sounds in the article that the Brits are maybe realizing they need to backtrack a bit, but the EU is mad and are going to punish them, even if they hurt themselves in the process. Paybacks are a b*tch, whether in international commerce or SCOTUS confirmations.
DeleteI guess that May's obituary has been written prematurely several times already, but I've read that her failure to hold a hard line against the EU imperils her standing in her own party.
DeleteLabour seems to be backing off its members' support of Brexit. What will happen first? May gets booted? She calls for a snap election? One of the remain groups gets judicial okay for another referendum? Everyone including EU says,"let's forget the whole thing"?
DeleteAnd Boris Johnson will seek refuge in the Trump Administration!
Saw an anti-Kavanaugh protester, in a photo, holding up a sign saying, "Believe the victim." Sen. Orrin Hatch et al would tell you that's what they did in the Clarence Thomas hearings, they believed the one who said he was the victim of "a high-tech lynching." In the end, however this goes, we will have a victim and a martyr, depending on which tribe you belong to.
ReplyDeleteSullivan makes a couple of half-hearted gestures at imposing a plague on both their houses, but the substance of what he's decrying here - the tribalism, the internet mobs, et al - should be laid at the doorstep of the activist left.
ReplyDeleteAs an antidote to what Sullivan describes, please check out this column by Steve Chapman that appeared in our Sunday newspaper. The gist of it is that America as a whole isn't nearly as divided as our politics and some of our media would lead an outsider to conclude.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chapman/ct-perspec-chapman-polarized-america-civil-war-0923-20180921-story.html
One thing his guru is right about: The middle has no room in either party.
DeleteBut you are taking a huge leap of Ailesian faith to impute all the blame to the activist left. Yes, the argument that women ought to get the benefit of the doubt -- since the men had it for two millennia and look at where that got us -- comes from the left.
But, for example, I cannot imagine any Democratic, nor any Republican, senator pulling what was pulled on Judge Garland and following it up by keeping out evidence of lying under oath on a previous appointment -- before Addison McConnell got control of the Senate. Through the years House Speakers have sometimes acted like that because they have a more fractious and unruly body. But the Senate didn't get that way until the year it got a gaggle of members of the House Contract On America gang, primed by the Newtster, moving up to the former house of accommodation. That kind of crap is strictly a made-in-Republican-think-tanks behavior.
This is not both sidesism, either. You might say the left always bleeds for any underdog, deserving or un-; but you would also have to say the right always wants to make other people bleed.
Why the left, Jim? Seems to me that rightwing fundamentalist churches and radio were the first to delineate Us from Them.
DeleteI have maxed out on identity politics, though. I snapped the other day when I heard someone trying to illustrate insensitivity to Hispanics by kvetching about Hollywood directors who cast Antonio Banderas as a Mexican when he CLEARLY speaks with a Spanish accent. Well, yeah, but isn't that better than Charlton Heston in dark makeup and a pencil-thin mustache playing a Mexican cop in Touch of Evil?
Besides, Antonio Banderas can play any part he wants as far as I'm concerned.
Antonio Banderas playing a Mexican is definitely better than Mickey Rooney playing a Japanese guy in Breakfast at Tiffany's!
DeleteCharlton Heston played a Spanish guy in El Cid ...
DeleteI do think Steve Chapman is right that there is less polarization than one would think from the media accounts. Would be nice if the middle could find their voice.
DeleteEverybody who tries to speak for the middle gets pushed to the left. Ted Turner's idea for CNN was to have something like the network news, with the emphasis on news all day. I knew there would be problems with that. For example, to really do a news story about the how the federal deficit got to be as fat as it is would take a lot of time on TV. And that would lead to people tuning in at the middle, wondering whatinhell they were talking about, and moving over to the soaps. So CNN would end up, I suspected, with a lot of personalities, a/k/a "columnists."
DeleteBut then Rupert Murdoch came along and said it wasn't that 24-hour news was a difficult trick to pull off; it was that CNN was "leftist" and TV needed the "other side," which meant almost no news but a whole lot of personalities.
Sort of what happened when the funders decided the middle-of-the-road American Bar Association needed to be "balanced" by the Federalist Society. I wrote about that somewhere else.
If there is such a big middle, you would think it could figure out how to support its own things.
Check out the media bias chart. Of course not all the media outlets agree with their placement position on the chart; but there actually are some center and near-center sources. And some others you wouldn't want to touch with a ten foot pole.
DeleteI agree with Tom: it's an interesting chart. What is most interesting to me is that the NY Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal are basically all clustered together. I suppose that's a tribute to their news reporting, which traditionally (and, I hope, still today) is high quality and strives to be objective. But I wouldn't consider the Wall Street Journal's and the NY Times' respective editorial pages to be very close ideologically. In fact, I'd put both of them in their respective Hyper- categories.
DeleteWhen George Will worked for Fox News (does he still work for Fox?), he insisted that Fox News practiced legitimate journalism, in addition to producing highly partisan opinion content. I think that is basically correct (although I don't watch Fox News so I can't attest to the legitimate-journalism claim). If it is correct, then I think Fox News and the Wall Street Journal (both Murdoch-owned, I believe?) should be occupying roughly the same territory.
George Will had a relatively short relationship with Fox. They didn't renew his contract, probably over him coming out as a "never Trumper". He also changed his party registration from Republican to unaffiliated around the same time.
DeleteWaPo and NYT fall in the "skews liberal, but still reputable" category. WSJ falls in the "skews conservative, but still reputable" category. I think that's a fair assessment. They aren't so close ideologically, but are serious news sources. Fox, IMO, doesn't make the cut for reputable journalism, even though it and WSJ are both owned by Murdoch.
DeleteI thought it was sort of humorous that National Enquirer has it's own circle on the chart. It falls a little right of center but hugs the bottom-feeder category for made-up news.
DeleteI saw my favorite tv news source "Democracy Now". Interesting how they place it at the border of "complex analysis" and "fact". I go there to get things you never see on the mainstream. They were intensely covering climate change science while ignored in the mainstream. WSJ is openly hostile to climate science. I don't agree with the chart, especially who resides in the circle of truth.
DeleteKatherine - I guess I would say this about Fox News as a practicioner of actual objective news gathering: Chicago has a local Fox affiliate, just as it does for ABC, NBC and CBS. All four local stations put on local newscasts, and the local Fox affiliate's newscast is every bit as serious as the other three - it's a credible local newscast. And like the other three, they will insert segments from the national network. In the case of the Fox affiliate, the national network new org is Fox News. And it's really no different than what ABS would offer: a national reporter reporting live from the White House, or the Capitol, or Hurricane Florence, or what have you.
DeleteFor that matter, all four networks, from what I can tell, like their on-camera women to be thin, young and attractive. Fox News's women are blonder than is the case at the other three networks. We could say that Fox News also has a lot of partisan content - but if you've watched the late-night talk shows, you know that the other networks also have partisan content. I am not saying that Fox News is identical in every respect to the three old-line networks, but the distinction may not be as sharp as they'd like us to think.
Jim, Local Fox is not the same as a steady diet of cable Fox. Our local Fox station uses the NBC local news team, which seems to be profitable for both of them. Fox has the local NBC news an hour before the same team does it on the NBC station. I said it was stupid at the time. The NBC affliate was run then by a Boston College graduate with a large-scale model of Fenway Park in his office.
DeleteNow, talking about the network, I don't know how many studies have shown that Fox viewers are more passionate than other viewers and know more things that are not true than other viewers, but they have been many and varied
We don't have "local Fox" here, but it is part of the cable package. The place where I most often hear Fox news is my doctor's office reception area. Thankfully I am not there very often. The last time I watched Fox at home on purpose was Trump' inauguration. The team was beside themselves with glee. I had to leave the room and go do something else. My husband has a higher tolerance for mortification than I do.
DeleteAt least Fox is better than Breitbart. One of the many good things about retirement is that I don't have to listen to my coworkers' recap of Breitbart anymore.
I read this Truthdig report on coverage of Hurricane Florence. Reports linking the characteristics of Florence to climate change was very light to near nonexistent. This would knock the three main TV networks out of the circle of truth. Highest newspaper coverage was in the NYT with 20% of articles referring to the effects of climate change. The recent science of climate change attribution has called out Florence's precipitation as 50% higher due to global warming. Not only are storms increasing in power, the precipitation is higher and they are moving slower. The slowness, I believe, is due to the fact that the poles are warming faster than the lower latitudes. This reduction in the temperature gradient means less velocity from the equator to the poles. Anyway, you won't find out much about it on TV, except for Democracy Now and, God bless them, the Weather Channel. Climate science is not intrinsically left or right, of course.
Delete"Jim, Local Fox is not the same as a steady diet of cable Fox."
DeleteRight. ABC, NBC and CBS all have entertainment divisions and news divisions under the same corporate nameplate. There is also a Fox Network that is an entertainment division, i.e. the network that broadcasts "The Simpsons". But to the best of my knowledge, and unlike the three old-line networks, the Fox Network doesn't have its own news division; their news division is a separate entity, Fox News. (Something similar is observable in sports broadcasting: I believe NBC and CBS still have sports divisions, but ABC's sports division is a separate entity, ESPN).
My point in all this is that Fox News still practices journalism. But it also practices highly partisan huckstering, and I suppose it's clear to all of us that Fox News' perennially-highest-in-its-category ratings aren't due to its straight news journalism. I would say that the NY Times and the WSJ also are a blend of straight news journalism and and highly partisan opinion content. To be sure, the two newspapers' highly partisan opinion content is of a higher quality than Fox News' highly partisan content.
Now: I would go farther and say that, at least in the case of the NY Times and probably the Washington Post, the firewall between news and opinion is at least somewhat porous, because I perceive that those newspapers are letting political conviction guide editorial decision-making, which I suppose is an ancient American newspaper tradition. The NY Times, I'm given to understand, is reporting on Brett Kavanaugh's high school yearbook entry as though it has a bearing on his Supreme Court nomination. In my estimation, that angle is neither newsworthy nor objective. But I'm just a subscriber (I think; I gave them my credit card number a few weeks ago; sometimes its site can tell I'm a paying customer, and sometimes it thinks I'm still a freeloader).
Jim, I don't know what to say. Nobody in the business not working for Fox or drinking its Kool Aid would equate the Fox idea of news with the Times' or WSJ's. The Times and WSJ have, importantly, very different editorial positions on the opinion pages. The news is the news in both. In the early days of Fox News, one of the reporters from the Search for WMD (which Fox "reported" found several times) said, "American troops... Excuse me. We are supposed to say Coalition troops..." (The troops involved, needless to say, were Americans.) And it has been thus ever since.
DeleteDuring the campaign, a Foxy dope explained to me that he knew how the local paper was faking the news -- putting what Hillary said on top, running pictures of Trump looking silly, loading the headlines... So every day for a week, I pointed out all the tilts in the local paper (and Trump came out pretty far ahead of Hillary going just on his propaganda techniques) in an email to him. He pleaded for me to stop. Six months later he was telling a group of us how the local paper attacks Trump -- putting what Hillary said on top, running pictures of Trump looking silly, loading the headlines.
You can lead a Fox voter to truth but you can't make him remember it past the next day's Fox and Friends.
Tom, I guess the reason I won't let go of this Fox-does-some-actual-journalism bone is that I recall that the Obama administration (Treasury Dept., specifically) at one point had threatened to bounce Fox's beat reporter, and the competing networks and news orgs, to their credit, howled in protest. Maybe I'm misinterpreting that incident, but it reads to me like press corps solidarity.
Deletehttps://www.cbsnews.com/news/president-obamas-feud-with-fox-news/
That was then. It will be interesting to see if the same obtains if we ever have another president. Fox has become a preferred news source (with Breitbart and the National Enquirer) for the president, a hiring hall for staffing the White House and the place where bleeding Supreme Court nominees go to "tell their story" and have their owies kissed. It's hard to find the news in all of that.
DeleteYes, but. Wouldn't any major network love to have that scoop: a sit-down interview with Kavanaugh and his wife? That's a legitimate news story. I confess I didn't watch it (I'm not too ashamed to admit that football and the season premier of The Good Doctor were more compelling to me), but I see that Martha McCallum did the interview - I believe she's from the Fox legitimate-news stable. I don't know if McCallum lobbed the couple anything but softballs, but I'd be surprised if some journalism wasn't committed in that interview.
DeleteToday, the President of the United States stood before representatives of almost all the countries on Earth and said: "In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.“
DeleteThe delegates could only laugh. Except the ones from Spain. They were still laughing at POTUS's suggestion to their ambassador -- this didn't get much play in the U.S. -- that Spain erect a wall across the Sahara desert to keep out refugees. After all, he opined, it couldn't be as long as the wall he is building between the U.S. and Mexico. In fact, it would have to be about 1,000 miles longer. And Spain doesn't own land in the Sahara.
Thursday, we face a double-header: The President (possibly) obstructs justice by firing the #2 man at the Justice Department to get a special council off his back, AND a man appointed by a serial sexual offender defends himself against sex charges in a bid for the Supreme Court seat.
It is very hard to conduct conventional journalism with such an unconventional government. One might even say it's impossible. But the sins of liberal media against journalistic ethics are but motes compared to the sins against common decency tweeted every day by the chum of Putin and Kim but not, after today, Erdogan.
P.S. No one will notice, but he also threw a bouquet to Steve Bannon's efforts to replace Angela Merkel's coalition with neo-Nazis. He probably gets something in return for that.
Maybe the Sahara wall was Trump's idea of a joke about Spain, which recently took in some boat people, reducing refugees. Even that would be idiotic, though, because many of those refugees come from North of the Sahara. Plus who jokes about the misery of refugees?
DeleteOh, right.
"In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.“ The scary part is that he really believes his own b.s. He criticizes the media for making him look bad, but he does their work for them. All they have to do is quote what he says.
DeleteOn sort of a humorous note, I did a "copy and paste" for the above quote. It's a good thing I proof-read, because what actually got pasted the first time was my husband's notes for the session on the Old Testament that he's teaching for the RCIA next week.
Interesting chart. But every Trumpster I know would tell you, right off, that the media in the Mainstream category are Trump haters purveying fake news.
ReplyDeleteWell, that's Trumpsters. But the alleged middle majority members I know have all "heard" that all the listed "supposedly mainsteam media" (as they have learned to say)skew extreme left, and it's probably true, as far as they are concerned.