For conservatives, CNBC's Republican presidential debate Wednesday night reopened, in a big way, the never-closed bugaboo about "the liberal media." The 10 candidates' discomfort with being asked questions about math, percentages, logic and the like has been met with massive conservative media outrage over such questions having ever been asked, for the candidates' visible discomfort audibly transmuted into something much more: their amusing inability to coherently explain incoherent positions.
For the conservative horde watching, though, not to worry. The candidates had a ready counteroffensive: Only biased, blackhearted bastards from the liberal bad-news cabal would ask, say, why trillions in tax cuts would not result in higher deficits.
And so conservative media's outrage has raged for days. But now comes conservative columnist Tim Carney with a lighter touch — and the final word:
The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC … all slant clearly left. So do a vast majority of other major newspapers and magazines. I'm not talking about their opinion pages, but about their news operations. I don't think it's deliberate, or that any collusion, deception, or bad intentions are at play, except in the rarest circumstances…. But the vast majority of journalists at these major outlets are generally liberal, and this ends up slanting their coverage.
Now there's a reasonable conservative's reasonable opinion, right? Liberal journalists just can't help themselves. (Let's put aside that many liberals — could even be most, from what I read — detest the NYT, WaPo, CNN, CBS, ABC and even NBC, except for its sublimely fair-minded sister network, MSNBC.) These liberal journalists, says Carney, don't mean to pollute their coverage with a toxic slant; it simply slips out, or rather in. However destructive their coverage may be to the guileless body politic, we should understand the liberal media's intellectual helplessness, and thus we must pity them.
Carney repeats his delicate appreciation of what's really going on here: "I think the bias stems not from a conspiracy or a desire to tilt the playing field, but from a cloistering effect, and a subsequent unfamiliarity with conservative arguments." A plainer interpretation of what Carney writes is that liberal journalists are sort of innocent muttonheads who hang only with likeminded muttonheads, none of whom "gets" the conservative mind.
It is, of course, Tim Carney who doesn't get it. Conservatives apply the same critique to the academy. Damn! they cry, all these liberal historians, economists, political scientists and other social scientists; they're everywhere, thick as thieves, stealing conservative virtue from the young. What never seems to occur to conservatives, however, is that most historians, economists, political scientists and other social scientists are what is sloppily labeled "liberal" because they understand the lessons of history, economics, political science and social science. There is a "cloistering effect," yet it's to be expected; there is nothing subtly wicked or closed-minded or innocently muttonheaded about it. Their work is "slanted" mostly because history, and so on, is slanted.
One can analyze, for instance, the New Deal from every possible angle, and one would be hard pressed to conclude that it did more harm than good (or continues to do more harm than good). Likewise, when analyzing economics, Keynesianism has an irresistible tendency to objectively thrash supply-sided mumbo-jumbo. And so it goes through the sciences of politics, sociology, and anthropology. Yes indeedy, Mr. Carney, academics do have a liberal bias — just as quite a few journalists have a liberal bias, but only because they've observed the downright silliness that comes from modern conservatives.
They are, in fact, all too familiar with "conservative arguments," Mr. Carney, and that's precisely the reason they ask conservative politicians why, for example, trillions more in taxes cuts would not result in higher deficits. It is scarcely shocking that conservative pols have no answer to such questions, and so they attack the media.
Don't make it so complicated, Mr. Carney. What social scientists would call the "dynamics" of conservative arguments are really quite simple: What today's political right calls an "argument" is, in realty, inexplicable rubbish — which in turn calls for deflection.