In the past twelve hours, I have read two marvelous articles by Matt Taibbi, and two posts by Matt Yglesias that have me thinking about a particular bit of frustration I have. For years, decades even, the right has complained of "liberal media bias"; Bernard Goldberg has made a cottage industry out of this particular bit of nonsense, enriching himself and flattering the bloated ego of Bill O'Reilly even though all he is really doing is carrying out a years-long vendetta against Dan Rather because Rather made Goldberg look like a tool at CBS and then, because Rather had integrity, forced Goldberg out. FOXNews is predicated on the false idea of "liberal bias". Eric Alterman, an otherwise intelligent and thoughtful commentator, mistitled a book What Liberal Media?, that actually presented an argument concerning a lack of factual integrity and evidence of partisan rather than ideological bias among a small cohort of commentators rather than actual journalists.
The relationships among these fours pieces I have read is this - the two articles by Taibbi are thorough critical coal-rakings of Thomas Friedman and David Brooks; Matt insists the issue of "bias" is unprovable, and that the criticisms of Media Matters and other Media Watchdog sites concern themselves with issues of facts. The link here is the question of quality, if one considers that a news organization should be judged on its adherence to reporting factual material to its audience, and relating that factual material to their lives.
My own take on talk radio; on FOXNews; on right-wing websites; even on pundits is quite simple - for the most part, they are not factually accurate in their analysis. It is easy enough to call out Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter for their lack of facts. There is a whole industry devoted to each of these folks. Yet, more established pundits like David Broder, George Will, David Brooks, Gail Collins, Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman, and Eugene Robinson suffer not only from fact-free doodling. For the most part, these writers are also quite mediocre. There are commentators out there who do good work (Taibbi is one of the best, but he's just not ready for prime-time, if you know what I mean; Matt Yglesias would be far too dull because he would go off on tangents concerning philosophy and mathematical economics that would glaze the eyes of whoever hosts his appearance). Mediocrity in itself isn't a horrible failing; I am a mediocre writer (at best). Sprinkled within their mediocrity, however, is a tendency toward leaving the boring confines of fact, spiraling off in to the air to construct castles of sublime idiocy untethered to anything at all.
Our discourse is damaged by this convergence of fact-free revery and mediocrity. Matt Yglesias is quite correct that there are almost no incentives for accuracy in either journalism or commentary. Time and again, it seems those who have neither the desire nor innate ability to remain anchored in the mundane are those most rewarded (again, consider the contract Limbaugh has, or the publishing deal Coulter has managed to finagle, or the ubiquity of Sean Hannity). This reality in and of itself pushes further to the side any incentive for accuracy and superior competence.
For some liberals and leftists, however, this isn't enough. They make the same claim, only giving the actors an opposite bias. It seems to me this is just as wrong, and on this point at least, Matt Yglesias, Media Matters for America, Duncan Black at Eschaton, and other media critics are exactly right - the question is not one of bias, which involves mind reading; rather, it involves accuracy. Liberals who complain about conservative "bias" are as wrong as their opposite number because they mistake "error" for "bias". While it is true, say, that Taibbi is a pretty liberal guy, his complaint about David Brooks' column on the NCAA Basketball Championship Game isn't that Brooks is a conservative; rather, his complaint is that it is stupid, quite literally. His review of Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat considers Friedman's many sins as a writer, and how his metaphor-mangling, shallow pseudo-thought actually makes his usually mediocre writing truly awful.
I couldn't care less who different columnists or journalists vote for. I am uninterested in whether or not the White House Press Corps is staffed by liberals or conservatives. FOXNews wouldn't draw the ire of liberals if its news division weren't dedicated to peddling factually inaccurate material. If conservatives are truly dedicated to quality, as they claim, they have an interesting, if somewhat stupid, what of showing it. Their favored sources of information are riddled with error, lazy and shoddy reporting, and a kind of kindergarten analysis that leaves many people stunned by its stupidity.
It would be nice if conservative critics understood this. Apparently, a steady diet of really bad, factually inaccurate nonsense year after year has left their critical faculties dulled to this simple reality - it isn't about bias. It's about stupidity.
