I have nothing of technical value to ad to the debate over health care reform. I do not know any of the specific ins and outs, nor can I give you any special insight into the likely efficacy of different proposed policies. Today’s post was going to be about how the spittle inducing right wing fear over health reform is nothing new and was completely predictable. Then Rick Perlstein went on the op-ed page of The Washington Post and did almost everything for me (and with vastly better research too!). I highly recommend the entire piece, but here are the key points:
So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers — these are “either” the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president — too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters’signs — too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don’t understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can’t understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.
Yup. There’s more:
Conservatives have become adept at playing the media for suckers, getting inside the heads of editors and reporters, haunting them with the thought that maybe they are out-of-touch cosmopolitans and that their duty as tribunes of the people’s voices means they should treat Obama’s creation of “death panels” as just another justiciable political claim.
Indeed. And, finally:
It used to be different. You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to “debunk” claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president’s program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn’t adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of “conservative claims” to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims.
Aaaaaaand we’re pretty much done. The point Perlstein is making is the same one made by Charles Pierce and Dave Neiwert in their respective books: American Crazy has always been with us, only now it gets much wider play and far less mainstream skepticism. The whole thing is worth reading, even if only for one of the best Adlai Stevenson stories evah. I have but one small observation to add.
While this is a symptom of profit mad journalism it’s also a permanent feature of the flatter media world of the early 21st century. The greatest attraction of the internet has always been agreement. No matter how particular your interest or how illogical your notion you can find someone to agree with you. And if your particular notion happens to be that Barack Obama isn’t a citizen, Nancy Pelosi is a fascist, or Bill Clinton is a drug dealer, well, that just means that there are literally millions of people out there to agree with you.
We used to have fewer but brighter media stars. As recently as twenty years ago national journalism consisted of only three television networks and a handful of newspapers and magazines. These days media stars can be supported by a much smaller population and in much cheaper mediums. In this more evenly distributed media galaxy almost any notion can be proven “popular” so long as that bar is set at the mere level of a few million people. It’s a tiny fraction of Americans, but it’s still more than enough people to fill up a FOX News lineup and get decent ratings.
Minority opinions like these must be heard, and responses must be offered, that can never be forgotten. But the media threshold for what constitutes a legitimate story and the real threshold have diverged. This was largely brought about by modern technology, and it isn’t going anywhere. Calling for a return to journalistic responsibility is an almost useless gesture.
