In news articles the last two days, The New York Times has anomalously referred to the most extreme right wing elements in the Republican Party as the party’s “conservative wing.” If these radicals are “conservative” then how do we characterize the rest of the party? The absurd implication is that most of the Republican Party is somewhere to the left of conservative. Are Boehner and Cantor moderates? In my view, it would be more accurate to refer to the left wing of the party as conservative, the majority being radical reactionaries. (As I showed [http://tony-greco.com/...] yesterday, true moderates are an insignificant minority in the Republican Party.) Among the radical reactionary majority, a significant minority are true fanatics—those are the Times’s “conservative wing.” The times weird usage illustrates the problem “objective” journalism has in characterizing Republican extremism: we get silly circumlocutions like the “conservative wing.”
I politely pointed this conundrum out in a letter to the Public editor of the Times, as follows:
It is certainly a challenge for news media to find value-neutral terminology to characterize the extreme right wing of today's Republican Party; the Times has not been entirely successful in meeting this challenge. The Times has repeatedly referred to the most intransigent, ideologically right-wing groups in the party as the party's "conservative wing." This is highly misleading; it implies that the rest of the party is something to the left of "conservative," presumably, moderate. But Republicans overwhelmingly identify as conservative. Most shun the "moderate" label, widely equated with RINO (Republican in Name Only).
Why not simply refer to the intransigents as the "right wing" of the party?
We’ll see if/how the Times responds.
For further discussion, see www.tony-greco.com, especially posts for 10/10, 10/9, and 9/27.