Liberal Media Bias: Has Fox News Made It Worse

Back in the old days, the liberal media at least used to pretend it was neutral and objective.  But now that there is Fox News, the liberal media feel that since there's a conservative alternative they can put the pedal to the metal on their liberal bias.



That's the argument of Robert Stacy McCain at the American Spectator.

The very existence of a conservative-friendly TV news alternative, however, relieves liberals at other networks of any twinge of conscience about bias in their programming. They may well reckon, "If conservatives don't like it, let 'em go watch Fox." And given how liberals have demonized Fox -- portraying it as an all-powerful evil force in media -- some reporters may even feel the need to slant their coverage more stridently leftward, so as to counteract the exaggerated right-wing news menace.

He's probably right.  The trouble is that conservatives get the worst of the exchange, because there about 24 million nightly viewers of the network news versus 3 million for Bill O'Reilly on Fox News.



On the other hand conservatives need to stop whining about this and stand back for a moment.  We need to appreciate the enormity of what we are trying to do.  The yellow press grew up in the 19th century servicing the rising working class, dishing out scandal, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.  For two hundred years there has been a bigger audience for corporate scandals than for government failure.  That's not just because of liberal media bias, it's because a lot of people experience themselves as victims of powerful forces, and buy the idea that government and journalists protect them from those powerful forces.



The destiny of the modern conservative movement is to change this culture, the culture of the working man railing against his boss, the victim railing against the Man.  It is a profoundly middle-class movement, based on the idea that if you want to change something, you get together with your neighbors and change it.  You do not wait around moaning about exploitation until some community organizer in a radical suit turns up to lead you.



In the United States there is a political party that represents people that prefer the "get-together-with-your-neighbors" model of society.  It is called the Republican Party.  There is also a political party that represents the "moaning about exploitation" model of society.  It is the over-under coalition of educated elite and suffering victims we call the Democratic Party.  Liberal media or no liberal media, there is no doubt about where to go if you are a Tocquevillian American that believes in forming voluntary  associations to do public work.  And there is no doubt where to go if you feel that you are a victim of powerful forces.



The point is that, for nearly a century, the majority of Americans have clearly felt that they benefited from a government that ran social programs like Social Security and Medicare.  So long as a majority believes this, the current system will continue.



If you want to change this status quo then you have to start a movement.  Obviously such a movement will experience resistance from the present elite and from the present beneficiaries of the status quo.  It is right and proper, therefore, that we should have a liberal media that defends the status quo, and ridicules the conservative movement that wants to change it.



But if the status quo should be seen to fail, or if its major proposals for change are experienced as negative change (Obamacare) then all bets are off.  That is the situation right now for the liberal media and the educated elite that backs President Obama and the Democratic Party.  Its programs are running out of money.  There is a danger of "austerity" or a collapse of the current patronage/clientage system in a sovereign default.  ("Austerity" means minor cuts in government programs that are experienced as life-changing by people that have adjusted their lives to rely on government programs for basic necessities).



When "austerity" bites, or default happens, then all bets will be off.  Then, and only then, people will be looking for a new political home, and they will be looking for a new media home.  All of a sudden the Democratic Party will find that it must adapt or die, and the media will find that it needs to change its politics or die.



There is no doubt that the Democrats would not have done as well as they did in 2006 and 2008 without the assistance of the mainstream media.  But what good did it do them?  They recklessly pushed through Obamacare, and then suffered the worst reverse in a mid-term in half a century--even though the Tea Party, vehicle of the reverse, was roundly denounced by all establishment opinion makers.



All in all, it is best to think of the media as a trailing indicator, like the unemployment rate, rather than a leading indicator, like stock prices.  When the welfare state collapses--as it will, because government always runs out of other peoples' money--the liberal media will shrivel up and slink away.  And nobody will give it a second thought.



But politics will not change.  People will still be out looking for free stuff from the government.

The "Out-of-touch" Stakes

The Democratic Party, everyone knows, is the up-to-the-minute, modern, hip, intellectual party.  The Republican Party, on the other hand is old-fashioned, turn-back-the-clock, anti-intellectual party--and out of touch.



That's all very well, but if you are running a presidential campaign you can't afford to be sitting around in a big room telling each other how hip you are and how out of touch the other guys are.  You need, at least, to get out more and listen to those out-of-touch people.  Because in a few short months they are going to be entering the voting booths and making decisions.



So the verdict on Week One of the presidential campaign has exposed a dangerous out-of-touchness in the operatives of the Obama campaign.  Let's just list the things that are going wrong.

1. The Trayvon Martin case.  Someone messed up on the due diligence when it turned out that George Zimmerman is half-Hispanic.  It is no secret that Hispanics don't like blacks, and think they are lazy.  (Whites, on the other hand have been carefully taught.)  I have a feeling that while the Trayvon case may raise black turnout, it will send Hispanics into the arms of the Republicans.


2. The Buffett Rule.  Maybe it seemed like a cool idea to gin up a gimmicky idea to make Mitt Romney look like an out-of-touch under-taxed rich guy.  But if this complicated idea only raises $5 billion a year, what's the point?  And then there is the dirty little secret that high tax rates don't really hit the rich.  They hit the people trying to get rich, all the way down the food chain to Joe the Plumber.


3. The Ann Romney Flap.  It's telling that the Romney campaign was ready to execute on a moment's notice on this one.  No sooner had liberal-feminist doofus Hilary Rosen delivered her "never had a job in her life" line that the Romney folks ginned up a Twitter account and were ready with a 1,000-gun artillery barrage.


4. The Social Darwinist Budget.  Democrats have raised Cain for 50 years every time Republicans have raised the question of entitlements.  Of course, Republicans have been right.  The sooner we get the government out of managing pensions, health care, etc., the better for the American people.  But the Republicans have never been able to get the voters to agree.  It's easy to see why.  The voters are right, from a selfish point of view, in agreeing with the Democrats.  The current generation of seniors will always be dead before the entitlements run out of money.  Only not this generation of seniors.  This may be the year when you can get Americans worried not about cutting their benefits but about not "doing something" about the budget.

The Obama guys are smart.  Even now they are reviewing the messes of the last month and making course corrections.  The question is whether they are smart enough to make strategic course corrections.

Because it is just possible that the Obamis are preparing to fight the wrong election.  That would really be "out of touch."

Plato Strikes Out on Immortality

When modern philosophers decided that you couldn't prove the existence of God--or the non-existence of God--they put an end to a vibrant industry.

The same thing applies to immortality.  How would we know if we are immortal?  It's a matter of faith, and properly a question for religion, the sphere of the human quest for meaning.  And everyone is on that quest, whatever they say.  Christians are on a quest to save their immortal souls by experiencing God's love.  Environmentalists are on a quest to save humanity from sudden mortality by saving the planet from humans.

Plato was no slouch in the immortality stakes; he entered at least two likely runners.  There's the proof in the Republic and the proof in the Phaedrus, for a start.

In the Republic, Socrates wants Glaucon to believe that the soul is different from the normal operation of good and bad things on the body.  If something bad "attaches itself to something... [it can] break it down completely and destroy it."[609a6]  Obviously this applies to disease of the body.  But to the disease of the soul, not so.  If you get sick, the sickness can kill you.  If you act unjustly, the injustice doesn't kill you.  A deficiency in the body can kill you, but not a deficiency in the soul.  So, if "something is not destroyed by a single bad thing--whether its own or an external one--clearly it must always exist.  And if it always exists, it is immortal."[611a1]

But why should a deficiency in the soul afflict a man in the same way as a deficiency in the body?  Maybe a deficiency in the body will kill you, but a deficiency in the soul just makes you into a monster.  And if a deficiency of the soul doesn't kill you, or sicken you, it doesn't mean that it's immortal.  It just means that the soul is different from the body.


In the Phaedrus, Socrates uses a different argument on his young friend Phaedrus.  "[W]hatever is always in motion is immortal".[245c5]   That's because something always in motion never had beginning, for if it had a beginning then it must have come from another source.  For us this is ridiculous, because we post-Newtonians believe that everything moves forever unless accelerated by something else.  But for the ancients, things sat around immobile unless they were pushed, like Eeyore.  The idea of something moving perpetually was unnatural, godlike, and therefore immortal.

But really, Socrates, how do you know?  How do you know that the "something" you see in motion was always in motion, or could have been always in motion?  You are pulling a fast one on us.  The idea of perpetual motion is not something that we humans experience.  We only experience objects that seem to have been moving before we first observed them, and that we assume will continue to move after we terminate our observations. We believe with Wittgenstein of the Tractatus: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

Romney's the One

Now that Rick Santorum has "suspended" his presidential campaign, Mitt Romney is the "presumptive" Republican Party presidential nominee.  Mitt's not what conservatives wished for in our dreams, but who gets to have their dreams?



Anyway, back in the middle of 1980 nobody thought that Ronald Reagan was the answer to our dreams.  Back then conservatives and Republicans were worrying about whether Reagan was too lightweight to win against Jimmy Carter.  Reagan wasn't very good at reeling off numbers about this program or that program.  Maybe he really was the lightweight, the B-movie actor that Democrats sneered about.



The situation is this, and it's all about Barack Obama.

1. Barack Obama is not a healer.  He is not the president to bring together red states and blue states as he promised.  He is not the post-racial president we thought he would be.  Instead he has reverted to his inner community organizer and is trying to divide the country along race and class lines.


2. Barack Obama has not fixed the economy.  Way back in 2009 I judged that Obama had made a strategic error in staying on his campaign promises rather than doing a Clinton and saying "oh gosh, fellas, things are a lot worse than I thought" and bagging the health care and environmental agenda till a second term.  The result is that business is on strike, sitting on trillions of dollars.  CEOs don't know what ObamaCare will do to them.  They don't know what Obama's green energy will do to them.  And they don't know what all the crazed regulation like Dodd-Frank will do to them.  So they are sitting on their hands.


3. Barack Obama really doesn't "get" America.  Maybe that's because he's lived in a liberal bubble all his life.  Maybe it's because he's never worked in the private sector, never run a business and understood at a gut level how you found and grow a business.  He regales audiences with the importance of investment in education, research, and health care--government investment.  But we have already spent way too much on education, scientific research and health care.  We could cut them all in half and not see a difference in outcome.  What's needed in today's economy is to lead the world in high-value products and services, things we can charge premium prices to balance the India/China advantage in cheap labor.  And that means business.

The election of 2012 is a strategic opportunity.  Instead of blurring the difference between the two parties and pretending that they are all in favor of business and growth, the Democrats are sailing under their true colors: tax, spend, and elect.  But most Americans instinctively understand that in a crony patronage system they will probably not be at the head of the line to collect the benefits.  So they know that that the way they can get ahead has to be through skills and hard work.  They think like Joe the Plumber.  They don't think about how to get ahead in establishment media, academia, or finance.  Those elite occupations are closed to people without the right connections and the right resume.  They think about how to buy a business and how to pay for it and how the tax system will affect their ability to grow that business.

Ever since Reagan the Democrats have been in a dither about whether to abandon their class/race/entitlement politics, or give it one last college try.  Bill Clinton ran as a New Democrat and won; he passed welfare reform and won again.  Al Gore ran fighting for the people against the powerful and lost.  Barack Obama ran as the healer and the uniter, and then turned into a partisan race and class warrior.  You can understand the liberal reluctance to abandon the bureaucratic big-government model.  It gave them all jobs and power.

The only question is whether Mitt Romney is the one to make the strategic breakthrough, utterly demolish the Democrats' race/class warfare politics, and send the them back to their kennels with their tails between their legs.  I'd say that a 55-45 presidential win, a 55-45 GOP Senate, and a continued Republican House would send a real doggie message to the Democrats.

Because, let us not forget, the GOP last had that kind of majority in Washington in the 1920s.  That is 90 years ago!

Platonic Reincarnation

In the Phaedrus Plato gets to dialog on the love for beautiful boys.  But before he does, he develops a full-scale myth on the reincarnation of souls, the so-called Chariot myth.

Souls, of course, are immortal.  There is something about a self-mover that cannot be created or destroyed, because it never starts or stops or anything like that.

But how does the soul work?   Plato conjures up the notion of a charioteer driving two horses.  That's no problem for the gods, because they have two good horses.  But everyone else has a mixture: one good horse and one bad horse.  "This means that chariot driving in our case is inevitably a painfully difficult business."  This gets ugly when the soul is in love with a beautiful boy.  That bad horse starts causing problems, big time.

Life in heaven is a parade of chariots, with Zeus first in the procession.  When he leads the procession up to the rim of heaven for a banquet, things get tricky for the folks with a bad horse.  Some few, some lucky few keep up with the gods and get a "view of Reality, just barely."  Those lucky ones get to partake in the godly feast, "seeing what is real and watching what is true" They get to see Justice as it is, and Self-control, and Knowledge.  On earth we get to see "knowledge that is close to change", the contingent knowledge that we know down on earth.

But most fail in acquiring knowledge like this. With bad horses and the incompetence of the charioteers, "the result is terribly noisy, very sweaty, and disorderly."  If you don't keep up with the gods then you shed your wings and fall to earth. Oh yes, up in heaven you have wings--with feathers.  What did you expect?

Fortunately, on this first fall from heaven, the soul is not incarnated into a wild beast, but into one of nine sorts of men, depending on the amount of Reality it got to see.  Tier One is your philosopher and lover of beauty; Tier Two is a king or general; Tier Three is a statesman, householder, or financier, and so on all the way down to Tier Nine, a tyrant.  If you live your incarnate life with justice then you get to return in heaven to a better one, to live as their manner of their human life has earned them.  Of course, you spend thousands of years in between lives, discarnate, charioteering and banqueting with the gods, or "condemned to go to places of punishment beneath the earth and pay the full penalty for their injustice."

Then, of course, you could return to earth as a wild animal.  For here is the judgment of the gods. A "soul that never saw the truth cannot take a human shape".  A human being "must understand speech in terms of general forms, proceeding to bring many perceptions together into a reasoned unity.  That process is the recollection of thing things our soul saw when it was traveling with god" seeing the "truly real".  A soul acquires its knowledge in heaven while traveling with the gods, and recollects it in mortal life as a soul-and-body.

You can spend a lot of time in heaven, waiting for your wings to grow, for only wings only grow for "the man who practices philosophy without guile or who loves boys philosophically.

What You Are Not Allowed to Say

Humans are social animals.  We are usually careful to say the right things and do the right things.  We do that because we don't want to risk censure from the cultural invigilators.



John Derbyshire, late of National Review, always admitted that he didn't really care what people thought about him.  Last week he penned an article about race that got him canned.  The article was a satire on "The Talk" that black people give their teenaged children.  White parents should do the same, according to Derb.  Along the way, he wrote things that you are not allowed to write about race.  A liberal writer called for his firing, and National Review editor Rick Lowry fired him.  Reading Lowry's announcement, and a concurring piece from Commentary's John Podhoretz, you can see why.  National Review and Commentary are "respectable" publications that have to survive in liberal-occupied America, and cannot survive any ambush from the mainstream media.



Liberals are always calling for a dialog about race.  But when anyone shows up for a chat, he always gets sucker-punched.  The sucker punch is great fun for liberals but it sends a baleful message to whites.  Never mind about the notorious third rail of politics, Social Security.  Race is radio-active.



Over a century ago, America had a minority group that were considered just as backward, as criminal, as corrupt, as stupid as blacks are today.  This group was the Catholic Irish.  The Irish had to fight their way up in America from nothing, and they did it with leaders like Archbishop "Dagger John" Hughes of New York, who started out as a gardener in a seminary.  The Irish got no help on their way up, and the reform movement of the Progressive Era was, in part, an effort to clean up the wretchedly corrupt machine politics of Irish Boston and New York.  Eventually the Irish climbed their way into the middle class, elected an Irish Catholic president and started to vote Republican.



The African American story is remarkably similar to the Irish story except for one significant difference.  In the 19th century the goo-goo elite was disgusted by the Irish, and criticized their "shanty Irish" squalor and their tribal approach to politics.  But in America today the goo-goo liberal elite uses African Americans as a key part of its over-under political coalition.  Without African Americans as its rock-solid base and political patronage client the liberals would be journeying in the political wilderness.  An African American community that no longer feared a return of Jim Crow, that no longer had 70 percent of its children out of wedlock, that no longer headed the crime statistics, that was getting a decent education would be a placid middle class group that would only vote 60-40 for Democrats rather than 90-10.



One day that will happen, provided that liberal race politics doesn't embroil the US in a race war in the mean time.  It will happen because African Americans, like every immigrant group before them, ache to arrive in the Promised Land of middle-class respectability.



Meanwhile, as the immolation of John Derbyshire proves, you had better not say the wrong thing about race.  It could get you in a lot of trouble.  There is too much liberal power riding on the maintenance of the racial status quo.

Social Darwinism and Liberal Programs

President Obama last week criticized the Paul Ryan's House budget as "thinly veiled social Darwinism." We are to imagine, apparently, that by reducing the rate of increase in government budgets the poor and helpless will suffer, and this is the social equivalent of the ruthless natural selection in the world of nature red in tooth and claw.

Of course, "social Darwinism" is merely a political catch phrase that Democrats deploy whenever Republicans propose to reduce the rate of increase in social programs.  But when liberals want to tie someone to social Darwinism, they grab Herbert Spencer, the self-taught 19th century social philosopher. Here is a lumpen-liberal description of Spencer's idea, from Susan Jacoby in Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism.

Spencer translated the biological theory of natural selection into what he called "social selection," opposing all state aid to the poor, public education, health laws, government tariffs, and even government-supported postal service.  Of the poor, he declared, "If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well that they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to lice, they die, and it is best that they should die."

That is from Spencer's Social Statics.  But here is Spencer from The Man Versus the State, arguing against the poor law, i.e., welfare.  He summarizes his argument thus:

1. That the burden of the poor law falls chiefly upon the industrious classes.
2. That the existence of commercial restrictions, is, therefore, no argument for retaining it.
3. That even assuming a poor law to be directly beneficial, it is directly injurious, inasmuch as it prolongs the causes of distress.
4. That established charity is open to many of the strongest objections that can be urged against established religion.
5. That a poor law discourages the exercise of real benevolence, and lowers the standard of national character.
6. That were there no poor law, the increase of voluntary charity, and the decrease of improvidence, would render one unnecessary.

You can see how prescient Spencer is.  For our modern liberal welfare state  does indeed "prolong the causes of distress" with multi-generational welfare.  It has become indeed a kind of established religion of charity, in which the nation carelessly invests its benevolence in a class of welfare priests without actually ever actively contributing in a benevolent way.  And yes, the welfare state "discourages the exercise of real benevolence." Liberals, who believe in the state church of welfare, are the ones that give the least, as Arthur Brooks has argued in Who Really Cares?  Conservatives, who believe in a moral responsibility to give, give more.  Oh, and guess which group gives the most to charity?  It is the religious working poor.

Walter Russell Mead, in his series of articles about the end of the "blue social model" has argued that it is past time for liberals to own up to the failure of their social model.

It is past time for liberals to stop attacking the straw man of social Darwinism, if for now other reason than this.  The "blue social model" is going to be coming up, one of these days, for nomination for the "Darwin Awards."

For the law of natural selection applies just as much to human institutions as to animal species.  If a human institution won't adapt, it will go the way of the dinosaurs.  Liberals have insisted for a century that the best of institutions is the one that provides tax-supported "state aid to the poor, public education, health laws, government tariffs, and even government-supported postal service."  But what if they are wrong?  What if the state runs out of money?  What if the voters just refuse to pay for it?  What if the state, over the years, does less and less with more and more tax money?  Well, then the welfare state dinosaurs will die out and be replaced by some scuttling rats.

That was what happened in business in the 19th century when a bunch of nobodies started businesses in mid-century that ended up by the end of the century as gigantic enterprises.  The reason for their success was that with a few random ideas they massively lowered the cost of things like oil, transportation, and steel.  Natural selection at work, you might say.  Once they had made their money, of course, they got interested in philanthropy.  One of their benefactions was the University of Chicago.  You'll recall that, Mr. President.