Newspeak, you may recall, has a special quality: It combines two ideas that, conventionally speaking, are virtual (if not precise) opposites, and presents them as identical -- thereby nullifying the meaning contained in each word: "War is Peace." "Ignorance is Strength." "Freedom is Slavery." -- D. Neiwert
David Neiwert has two must-read posts at Orcinus, one of which obliterates any notion of Michelle Malkin considering herself a journalist -- she was recently on O'Reilly bemoaning how very, very mean liberals are to her, which now officially solidifies O'Reilly's show as the last refuge of a scoundrel -- and the other of which highlights the spectacular, brain-molesting revisionism of Jonah Goldberg's new tome, Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton. Yes, that's the real title.
Aside from the fact that David has been hammering on both of these sorry tools and others for some time now (for example, infuriating Malkin by pointing out the flat historical fictions of Malkin's loathsome contra-factual defense of the roundup and imprisonment of Japanese American families in internment camps during WWII), I think David's posts highlight another interesting point, and I think a very, very valuable one, when we are discussing the overall media debate.
We've heard for a long time about the conservative battle with the "liberal" press -- working the umpires, is the popular term. But the reasons why conservatives differ from other observers so profoundly on what a "good" media would look like cuts to the heart of the new conservative movement:
In general, liberals value journalism, or facts, and conservatives value punditry, or opinions. Far-right conservatives are indeed obsessed with the press, because they see the reporting of facts as being inherently "liberal".
Don't believe me? Look at Fox News, lynchpin and self-proclaimed shining light of the conservative-style press. Look at any of the "conservative" publications, either on the web, or in print. The first thing you'll note is that the conservative media revolves around punditry and opinion; conventional newsgathering, when present, is largely relegated to being whatever momentary prop is necessary to provide vague credibility to the point at hand. So-called mainstream journalism attempts, at least, to cleanly separate factual reporting from opinion, even though sometimes (I'm thinking of the Wall Street Journal here) it results in admittedly hilarious juxtapositions. But it is, or was, a core tenet of journalism: report the facts, and expose the truth, and leave opinion out of it. That's anathema to conservatives. It's not what they want; it's not what they have demanded; it's not what they institute, in whatever "mainstream" media hollows they have themselves carved out.
And it largely explains, for example (or at least is demonstrated by) the studies linking Fox News viewers as the least informed about the world around them of any major media consumers. Fox News viewers are more likely to repeat proven untruths -- such as an alleged Saddam connection to 9/11 -- than any other members of the public. Is that by accident, or network design?
The countermeasures that the Right
demanded of the "mainstream" media, in outrage at the terrible liberality of a
New York Times or Big Three network, is that factual journalism include conservative opinions about the story at hand, as "
balance" to the presumed slant of each article. And they got it, in spades: there are few stories in today's press that don't include a conservative talking point from a conservative think-tank-based talking head to balance even a patently obvious and accepted
fact. In the years of the Bush administration, much of factual "journalism" has positively devolved into a Monty Pythonesque
Argument Sketch, with few scientific or other unambiguously factual stories that do not contain at least a token conservative figure to proclaim an unsupportable "No it isn't."
And it's not just limited to the bottom-rung, ambiguously moral ideologues that have historically populated the farthest fringes of the movement. The Bush administration itself has taken up the practice, as well, simply rewriting scientific and other government reports that contradict stated administration opinions about the issue at hand. Facts, now, are optional things in the national debate. Facts are explicitly liberal things in the national debate, in fact, and in that the movement sees facts everywhere, they therefore also see liberalism absolutely everywhere, threatening to rain down on them from every conceivable vantage point and profession.
That is why the most vocal figures of the right are even now continually infuriated with the mainstream media in general, and why there is literally nothing which will satisfy them that no, the press is not actually out to get them. What the press sets out to do on its best days -- expose uncomfortable facts, question government statements and authority, and report meticulously on hidden problems or issues -- are exactly the behaviors that sets the right on edge.
Take this further, and you will see the very nature of the elitist beast that plagues conservatives and threatens to steal their children in the night. Scientists are liberal; the education system in this country is liberal; government agencies are liberal; journalism is liberal; historians are liberal; lawyers are liberal; the medical community is liberal, etc. Everywhere, in every profession that requires a broad span of actual real-world knowledge, the bogeyman of liberalism exists. Is it because those professions are truly liberal, or is it because knowledge itself is considered, by the right, liberal?
I could easily make the argument that science, journalism, and every reputable university campus in this nation is liberal, and is explicitly self-selectingly liberal at that. I could argue that intelligence, itself, is linked to liberalism, if I wanted to be a snot about it -- there is evidence to back the claim. But I could certainly, and without much argument, argue that universities and other institutions of learning may trend "liberal", and their resulting adherents seen as "liberal", simply because liberalism is a natural state of seeking progress and the basic advancement of known facts about the world.
As a matter of core principle, the Right has little interest in scientific rigor; it's hardly surprising that science, then, is populated by individuals more dedicated to the field. Ditto journalism; a Rush Limbaugh wouldn't last any longer in "real" journalism than he did as an ESPN sportscaster, and Malkin, Coulter, and Goldberg's fact-challenged works speak to severe lapses of basic competence on those fronts as well.
Where the right sees liberalism on all sides, the rest of us merely see facts. The conservative response to dedicated scientists have been right-wing funded "think tanks", which do very, very little actual science, but instead reparse statistics and argue untestable hypotheses to "reinterpret" what the actual scientific community must do through peer review, reproducibility, and rigor. The conservative response to education is the founding of educational facilities less interested in factual knowledge than in the shielding of students and faculty from the intellectual challenges inherent to classical learning. The conservative response to journalism is, simply put, Fox News.
If this sounds like a long-winded way of calling the leading lights of the conservative movement perpetual, habitual, and unapologetic liars, if not oversatisfied and overpromoted dunderheads, you've caught me. To put it bluntly, the Right values brilliant liars far more than pedestrian facts. It's a movement that, from science to religion to journalism to government, is "faith based" to the point of proudly dismissing any inconvenient realities around them. Like, for example, the absence of weapons of mass destruction where they remain certain, as a matter of cult belief, that they must exist, or have been spirited away.
I corresponded haphazardly with David Neiwert a few years ago, complementing him on the quality of his work and probing his thoughts on fascism and the far right. I think it's fair to say that, when it comes to the incipient signs of fascism, I am far more a pessimist than he, in that he tends to discuss fascism from the standpoint of what symptoms presently exist, and I tend to look at it from the standpoint of what principles the movement is actively advocating for the future, regardless of whether or not they currently have the national power to implement them. From that point, it is difficult to argue that a site such as Little Green Footballs is not explicitly fascist in nature, nor the imaginings of liberal "treason" or the repeated though glancing imagined violences smiled at by an Ann Coulter or an is-he-sober-or-not-Limbaugh. From that standpoint, the writings of Malkin endorsing the race-based imprisonment of men, women and children would seem to qualify without much debate, and the historical revisionism -- of the audacity to send actual, studied historians into fits of laughter -- of a Jonah Goldberg seems to fit the requirements of disinformation and newspeak to the point that he may now be crowned the new posterboy of the phenomenon.
In any event, at least Newspeak is thriving.