The amazing lockstep uniformity of the mainstream liberal media

A reader sent me an article about the new pope. After reading it, I wrote back to him:

LA to reader:

Ho hum, a journalist finding liberal Catholics to tell the Pope that Catholicism ought to be abandoned …

Reader to LA:

Ha! I know…the column is worth its weight in humor. I knew it would be a winner when I found the word “diverse” in the second paragraph.

LA to reader:

It’s amazing. Thousands of journalists and their editors, each writing EXACTLY THE SAME STORY, USING EXACTLY THE SAME ARGUMENTS AND PHRASES, over and over, and it never seems to occur to even one of them, “Gosh, I’m writing exactly the same story, using exactly the same phrases as thousands of other reporters, maybe there’s a different approach to this?”

No. That doesn’t occur to even one of them. Thousands of minds operating in absolute, lockstep uniformity, with nobody thinking.

The humor of the situation doesn’t occur to any of them. Not one has the ability to step back one inch from the situation and look at it objectively.

This is absolute proof of that liberalism is an all-embracing ideology, that liberalism is the only legitimate language in liberal society.

I forwarded the exchange to Jim Kalb who replied:

Part of it is what’s needed for a mass media immediate response journalistic world. For that world to function at all, there has to be instant consensus on the nature and meaning of every event and person so participants can recognize what’s news, how important it is and what it means.

Basically, they all have to believe in the same story to the extent that the story constitutes simple reality for them. And since it’s thousands upon thousands of journalists and publications responding independently to an infinite range of events in a way that lets news consumers take in and digest what they’re told without much attention or effort, the collective story has to determine basically everything in advance in a very simple way leaving only a few blanks to fill in the particularities.

LA to JK:

So, along with the current mindless use of the word “democracy,” it’s another application of Oakeshott’s theory in Rationalism and Politics: the reduction of things to simplified formulae for easy dissemination, marketing, and social control. However, that theory still doesn’t answer my question. Nothing is forcing all those thousands of editors and reporters, without a single exception, to act like social insects and mimic each other exactly. It’s not as though the liberal social order would collapse if one newspaper did a story on Pope Benedict which, instead of taking the same line of evaluating him from the point of view of liberalism, told about his beliefs and record in a fresh way, for example, from his, Ratzinger’s point of view, or from the point of view of Catholicism.

So I think there’s a deeper reason than what you’ve suggested here, and it’s an argument you’ve made yourself many times: in liberal society, liberalism is the only permissible way to think about the world. “Is so-and so conforming to liberalism or not?” “How far out of step with liberalism is he?” These are simply the only interesting questions with regard to any important public figure, especially the head of the Catholic Church, the main non-liberal organization remaining in the world. (Or, I should say, they are the only interesting questions with regard to any important Western figure. Whether non-Westerners are liberals or not is a matter of complete indifference to Western liberals. To Western liberals, non-Westerners are simply the Other who must be accommodated by Western liberalism.) The Church, by its existence and by the persistence of its core beliefs about morality, is an obstacle, a challenge, and an offense against liberalism. Therefore it must change, and therefore the liberal media must keep pushing it to change, and must keep questioning its legitimacy insofar as it remains what it is.

JK to LA:

But producing something at odds with the accepted story line is a lot of work and besides the amount and kind of attention you and your publication get depend on how the story line classifies you. If you want to succeed you play your role within the system.

Of course you’re right that the system’s need for coherence so that it can function doesn’t explain everything. It just seems to me that it’s an important piece of the picture.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 23, 2005 08:40 AM | Send