Courting crackpots

Rudy Park on the phenomenon of the partisan press.

My only quibble is in the last panel: The president's middle name is only used by his enemies, more or less the same people who were convinced that FDR was Jewish rather than Dutch Reformed, with the difference that Roosevelt didn't have any Jewish relatives and Obama does have Muslim relatives.

And that delusional crackpots weren't given routine, unfettered access to the major media back then. At least, not indefinitely.

I said recently that ending the Fairness Doctrine unleashed a flood of screwballism upon us, and it's important to realize that we're not just talking about "giving a voice to the voiceless."

People like Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King found ways of being heard, as did the anti-busing forces of South Boston, without needing to gain actual control of the broadcast media.

It certainly didn't hurt to have money or power, but even pranksters like Abbie Hoffman or Dick Tuck could gain the media's attention by knowing how to play the game.

And it may be true that "neutrality" in coverage was a sort of fad, one of those ephemeral moments when the needs of the business community and the aspirations of idealistic journalists happened to coincide. 

Still, there was, for a few fleeting decades, a sense of decency that may have required Barbara Eden to cover her navel in "I Dream of Jeannie," but at least spared us from the vulgarity, racism and crackpot delusions that are now routinely shoveled into our living rooms.

And there was a sense -- at least outside the pages of the Manchester Union-Leader, the Orange County Register and the Chicago Tribune -- that people could disagree without becoming abusive.

Or, at the very least, an understanding that it was fair to make jokes about political loonies.

I used to visit high schools to do lectures on political cartoons and, in explaining Nast, I had to first explain the partisan press. When I started doing it in 1994, I had to explain that each town had two papers, one backed by Democrats, one by Republicans, and give examples of how one would praise a speech on Page One while the other would bury it on Page Five, where it received scant or even disparaging coverage.

A decade later, I had only to say that each town had two newspapers and that they were like Fox and MSNBC, and the kids got it. Handy for me, not perhaps so beneficial to the nation.

Now, on a practical level, people have opinions and prejudices and inescapable viewpoints, and journalists bring their backgrounds to work with them each day as we all do.

But that's true of every profession, and, as GI Joe says, "Knowing is half the battle."

A reporter who recognizes the inevitability of subjectivity is at least able to correct for some of it, and, if he works for a publisher who recognizes that disparaging a large segment of readership is bad for the bottom line, his instinctive sympathy for workers and his boss's instinctive hatred of unions won't so much cancel each other out as become issues each realizes they need to deal with.

However well it worked, we're not there anymore, and not only are we not there, but we're at a much more vicious stage of partisanship than we were at the start of the 20th century.

That is, the newspapers of the period were full, not just of racist jokes in the humorous features, but of racism in general coverage: I recall a clipping my grandfather copied and sent around, a news feature about Italians caught swimming in a NYC reservoir, and it was not just that they were identified as Italian but that it went on about the impact of garlic and sausage on the sweat and therefore the resulting water quality.

You would see similar race-consciousness in the contrast of coverage when a foiled thief was black versus when he was white, or when the victim was a Jew or other minority.

But in coverage of major issues like bimetalism or the Spanish governing of its colonies, while there was clear division, clear self-interest and a starkly obvious attempt to sway public opinion through slanted coverage, you didn't see a lot of accusations of overt lying, and there was more dismissal than derision in discussion of the other party's views.

Though I suppose if the president had been black or Jewish or Italian, that might not have been the case.

Though I'm sure that, if the president had been black or Jewish or Italian, that certainly would not have been the case.

(Yes, that's better.)

The fact that we slogged through that sewer before, however, is no reason we should have to slog through it again, and arguing over whether we were knee-deep, waist-deep or chin-deep in effluent the last time really isn't germane to what we should do this time.

Nor is the fact that we've never achieved perfection any reason not to keep trying to be civil and responsible.

If you do value civility and responsible debate, you'll find this story encouraging: In a scientist's defamation of character lawsuit against rightwing climate-change deniers, a judge has ruled that their attacks on him are not necessarily protected as opinion.

“Having been investigated by almost one dozen bodies due to accusations of fraud, and none of those investigations having found Plaintiff’s work to be fraudulent, it must be concluded that the accusations are provably false.  Reference to Plaintiff as a fraud is a misstatement of fact.”

Moreover, the judge wrote:

“There is sufficient evidence presented that is indicative of “actual malice.” The CEI Defendants have consistently accused Plaintiff of fraud and inaccurate theories, despite Plaintiff’s work having been investigated several times and found to be proper. The CEI Defendants’ persistence despite the EPA and other investigative bodies’ conclusion that Plaintiff’s work is accurate (or that there is no evidence of data manipulation) is equal to a blatant disregard for the falsity of their statements. Thus, given the evidence presented the Court finds that Plaintiff could prove “actual malice.””

The system has not yet failed.

Not yet.

Comments

[Mary in Ohio]

Yes, it IS still possible in the 21st Century to hear geezers "of a certain age" refer to "Franklin Delano ROSENFELT, if you know what I mean."

Or, as Eleanor pointed out in the 40's, the charming rhyme making the rounds: "You kiss the (N-word) and I'll kiss the Jews/ And we'll stay in the White House as long as we choose."

"After changes upon changes / we are more or less the same." -Paul Simon

[gezorkin]

When Polish jokes were popular, there was also one where Italians were not allowed to swim in the bay/lake/whatever because 'They leave a ring'.

Of Fox and MSNBC, only one of them calls itself news.