In The New York Times, Paul Krugman excoriates not only Paul Ryan and the barbarian hordes (my loose interpretation of Krugman, anyways) who boost him, but also the journalists who made him look good:
The answer, all too often, has involved what we might call motivated gullibility. Centrists who couldn’t find real examples of serious, honest conservatives lavished praise on politicians who played that role on TV. Paul Ryan wasn’t actually very good at faking it; true fiscal experts ridiculed his “mystery meat” budgets. But never mind: The narrative required that the character Ryan played exist, so everyone pretended that he was the genuine article.
And let me say that the same bothsidesism that turned Ryan into a fiscal hero played a crucial role in the election of Donald Trump. How did the most corrupt presidential candidate in American history eke out an Electoral College victory? There were many factors, any one of which could have turned the tide in a close election. But it wouldn’t have been close if much of the news media hadn’t engaged in an orgy of false equivalence.
I have not studied Speaker Ryan closely, so I can’t speak comprehensively. The few times I’ve paid attention to him, he’s struck me as a buffoon – long-time readers may realize that. Between his mismanagement of the major bills in the current Congress, his incompetent grasp on the basic principles of insurance, and his adoration of Ayn Rand, it’s fairly clear that Ryan, who’s been a member of Congress since age 28, hasn’t had a lot of engagement with the realities of life.
But the facet of Krugman’s column that really caught my attention actually had nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with the journalist’s behavior. Why? Because it’s a familiar plaint in another context, namely that of the skeptical community. Very often, the leading skeptics complain that a journalist’s analysis is, well, too balanced, although I suspect the word they’d use in a undiplomatic moment would be credulous.
Just for a taste, consider serious articles that might compare evidence-based medicine therapy for some medical condition to that recommended by apitherapy enthusiasts. Consider a comparison of evolutionary biology to the latest attempts by creationists to explain dinosaurs, such as hypergolic dinosaurs co-existing with humans. Or an article on the last electromagnetic gizmo for detecting ghosts vs the electrical engineer explaining what they’re really detecting.
Articles like these have been and continue to be published, much to the chagrin of the skeptics.
Look, like everyone else, skeptics have a particular world view, and often have little patience for those folks whose view that clash with it. For them, taking subjects as varied as Uri Geller’s spoon-bending, ghosts, bleeding statues, chiropractic, homeopathy, creationism, and dozens of others are a waste of time, and, worse, will legitimize them in the eyes of their readers. But they do have a bigger point than most in their favor: they have evidence and science on their side.
When they talk about journalistic shortcomings, they admit that it’s a rare journalist at your local newspaper who happens to have a science degree on the side. Such folks exist, but they tend to write for science magazines for the common citizen, publications that very rarely take ludicrous views seriously. Your general journalist rarely has applicable expertise when it comes to appraising mumbo-jumbo dressed up in science’s stolen clothes, or in the priestly robes of religion. And there doesn’t yet seem to be a set of rules available to journalists for making such determinations. After all, they do have to consider the source of those rules, don’t they?
The same problem applies to politics. Long time readers will know that I agree with Krugman’s sentiments in that NYT article: the GOP leadership (by which I mostly mean their elected members of legislatures at the state and federal levels) consists of second- and third-raters, the power-hungry and the power-mongers, the ideologues who find it easier to shout out their ideologies than to consider how reality really doesn’t support what they want. It’s not as if the Democrats are angels: every political party of any weight inevitably attracts cockroaches, and we get to see them every year when they suddenly resign from their positions over sexual or financial “improprieties,” which is a very clean word for what are generally rather dirty and shameful acts.
But, speaking as an independent, by and large the Democrats currently seem to bring a better class of person to the table, smart people with ideals and looking forward to the future, rather than ideologies and a yearning for a past that never was. Paul Ryan, for example, advocates amateurism, a doomed philosophy in a world where specialization yields better results – as does high level forms of crowd-sourcing. This is not uncommon among a GOP which denies realities that clash with its ideologies.
But the problem for the journalist is this: the GOP remains one of the top two political parties in a country whose elective system downplays the #3 party. When faced with a candidate from the GOP who appears to be a third-rater, such as Saccone in PA-18, what is our journalist to do? Tell them to take a leap because they’re inferior?
That’d be media bias.
Fact-checking is one approach, I’m sure. Perhaps demanding coherency might be another. We have occasionally seen candidates getting coverage despite doing nothing more than repeating talking points designed to stimulate the conservative viewer’s fight or flight reaction. Telling them that it’s either full sentences addressing the subject at hand, or the only coverage they’ll receive on this occasion is an announcement that the candidate, or elected official, was incapable of coherent speech or thought.
But I’d love to hear how a real journalist thinks the media should cover these third-raters in order to avoid reasonable media bias charges.
