A Modest Proposal

Jeffrey C. Billman tells you what to think

by Jeffrey C. Billman

As the late U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously admonished, you are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts. And yet, even in the sunrise of the 21st century, millions lap up the paranoid psychobabble of Glenn Beck's chalkboard and the line between fringe and mainstream is becoming ever so blurred, particularly on the right, which has become increasingly venomous in its powerless state. Republican politicians have, in recent months, suggested that the Civil Rights Act was anti-liberty (Rand Paul), voiced support for birther lawsuits (David Vitter), likened Barack Obama to Adolph Hitler on the floor of the House of Representatives (Louis Gohmert), touted "Second Amendment remedies" to supposed Congressional overreaches (Sharron Angle) and flirted with secession (Zach Wamp) — and that's without mentioning the regular lunacy of Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin.

Obama's election, it seems, has driven the right off the cliff, and the media have, all too often, been unwilling to call them out on their insanity. Facts and reason are now irrelevant, and things that would once have been derided as fringe conspiracy theories, even by mainstream conservatives, are discussed as if both sides are equally meritorious (remember last year's "death panels"?).

And then, last week, the national political media — and pathetically, the White House and NAACP, too — was all too willing to bite on Andrew Breitbart's deceptively edited tape of black Department of Agriculture appointee Shirley Sherrod saying supposedly racist things. Never mind that Breitbart had hosed everyone before: His website was behind last year's doctored ACORN pimp tapes, which — again, pathetically — led to a great hue and cry in Congress and, eventually, the community organizing group shutting down. The traditional media, eager to find a scandal and petrified of being called liberal, hyped Breitbart's race-baiting hit job without bothering to see if there was more to the story. (There was.)

The well of public discourse has been poisoned. It's high time the media stop offering a megaphone to those living in fact-free, historically illiterate and downright dishonest alternate universes. So here is a modest proposal for the country's political media to take up as we come up on this election season: Don't tolerate the bullshit. If a politician or pundit caters to the fringe's paranoia or intolerance — Barack Obama is a socialist/communist/fascist, Keynesian economics is socialism, ACORN stole the 2008 election, gays choose/can pray away their sexual orientation, etc. — or propagates things that are verifiably false — the world is 6,000 years old, global warming is a lie, the stimulus didn't create jobs, the Bush tax cuts didn't blow up the deficit, Obama was not born in the United States — call them on it. Shame them. Ridicule them. Ignore them. Do not let them pollute the national conversation in the name of objectivity or equal time or fairness.

Is that elitist? Perhaps. Biased? Sure, if reality constitutes a bias. But just look at the consequences of the current media environment: Last week, Senate Democrats shelved a last gasp at comprehensive climate-change legislation because the Republicans won't cooperate, in part because the corporatist right and their propaganda networks — Fox News, talk radio — have convinced broad swaths of the public that global warming is a fraud. We should stop offering a platform for those who would want to distort facts to advance agendas.

But instead, last year the media spilled copious ink of the made-up Climategate "scandal," suggesting that climate scientists were fudging their research for political reasons; but all but ignored NASA's report last month that the first six months of 2010 were the hottest in recorded history — even as, based on the solar cycle, we should be quite a bit cooler. And while we can blame the timidity of Senate Democrats or the obstinacy of Republicans for the fact that this Congress will adjourn without addressing this threat to humanity, part of the blame has to lie with those in the media who allowed themselves to be used by con men to convince the public that global warming isn't all that big a deal.

That's just one example. There are others: The difficulty Democrats had in extending unemployment benefits — with numerous Republicans, including Pennsylvania standard-bearer Tom Corbett, insinuating that the unemployed were basically lazy — and the impossibility of pushing through any additional economic stimulus despite the obvious need, for example. Last Friday, the right-wing Washington Times published two op-eds calling for Obama's impeachment on God knows what charges: One of them called him a "usurper;" the other (written by unrepentant nativist Tom Tancredo, no less) called him "a more serious threat to America than al-Qaida." Fox News happily promoted this derangement on its Fox Nation blog. Of course it did.

And yet, as the Shirley Sherrod hullaballoo evinced, the White House is petrified of ginned-up Fox News scandals, and the mainstream media is all too quiescent to the right-wing noise machine.

It's time to stop taking the lunatics seriously. After all — at least in a world in which journalists are more dedicated to truth than balance — you can't have your own facts.

(jeffrey.billman@citypaper.net)