It's the annual UVA law school softball tournament, so today I flew down to Virginia. I landed at Dulles and then waded through the traffic until I got to Charlottesville. On the way I listened to the radio. For a while I listened to an NPR station out of DC. The two main news stories today were the reports that Libby was told by President Bush to make the leak, and that the immigration bill stalled in the Senate.
NPR characterized the leak story by describing the questioning of White House press secretary Scott McClellan: what was he asked, what did he say, what did he not say. For the immigration bill, it had some political correspondents give their views of what happened. They essentially said that it had been filibustered by both sides - by Republicans who thought the bill translated into large scale amnesty and are against that in principle, and by Democrats who were of one of three basic motivations: those reflecting the concern expressed by organized labor that the bill might result in depressed wages, those who thought that the bill would end up gutted in the House and didn't want to get stuck with such a version, and those who just didn't want Republicans to get any political capital out of the bill.
Contrast that coverage to the news report I heard on a country music station out of the Richmond area. On the leak story, they began by characterizing Scott McClellen as "refusing to debate" allegations about the leak. But they didn't mean it as him avoiding the questioning; they meant it in the sense of him refusing to dignify this apparent attempt to smear the President. Meanwhile on the immigration bill story, they simply stated that Democrats had killed the bill.
I suddenly understood why Democrats have such terrible traction in rural red states. If the country music station's report is emblematic of the "news" they get, no wonder no one votes for them. Rather than in any way explain the substance of the issues, the report was nothing but political rhetoric designed to marginalize Democrats.
Now I can see, particularly when pitted against the country station's report, that the NPR report was at the more liberal end of the spectrum. The country music station's, on the other hand, was clearly on the conservative one. But political persuasion ultimately has nothing to do with the quality of a news report - a report that similarly advanced the Democratic party by demonizing the Republicans would be just as bad. Nor is underlying bias necessarily the issue either. Though NPR might have had its biases, they did not interfere with the quality of its reporting. The report still held both parties accountable and focused substantively on the issues and related political perspectives. While it did take the view that the allegations of the White House were very serious, by any objective measure, they are serious. Their truth and, if true, their implications, should be the subject of more inquiry and debate. But NPR didn't have to skew anything in order to describe the current state of that inquiry and debate.
The real problem is what happens to inquiry and debate when the "news" is of the kind proffered by the country music station. For one thing, people are left without quality information to understand and draw informed opinions about matters. Even if it were perhaps true that the White House is being unfairly attacked, the country music station listeners cannot themselves know that since they've not been provided with any information about the underlying substance in order to be able to make that evaluation - never mind being able to react in an informed way if these "attacks" turn out not to not be unfounded after all.
Also, and perhaps worse, there is a particular harm to inquiry and debate that results from painting political opposition as the enemy. First of all, it's questionable whether doing so really advances one's own political preferences. By putting forth a report that in essence is nothing more than, "Republicans, yay! Democrats, boo!" there's no chance to evaluate whether the Republican team is truly advancing those political preferences.
Moreover, by characterizing political opposition as anathema to the interests of America, by making political discussion a matter of, "Either you're with us or against us," it robs discourse of any wisdom that opposing viewpoints could provide. Plus it divides America. Rather than us feeling unified, with a sense of "We're all in this together," politics becomes a confrontational war of "us" and "them," where victory is measured in terms of political power taken from the other, and not in terms of public policy problems solved.
Posted 4/10.