Have you been over to Culture11.com yet? Lots of great stuff there. I'm just reading Conor Friedersdorf's excellent piece about why the Right needs more conservative journalists and fewer conservative activists. Excerpt:
Escaping this ghetto requires understanding why the media slants left. Contra the least-thoughtful conservative critics, there isn't any elite liberal conspiracy at work. Bias creeps in largely because the narrative conventions of journalism are poor at capturing basic conservative and libertarian truths. An instructive example is rent control. A newspaper reporter assigned that topic can easily find a sympathetic family no longer able to afford its longtime apartment in a gentrifying neighborhood. Their plight is a moving brief for a rent ceiling.As almost everyone long ago conceded, however, opponents of rent control offer superior counterarguments. Limiting rent degrades the quality of a city's housing stock, causes shortages as a dearth of new units are built, and spurs a black market where well-connected elites game their way into subsidized flats. A talented reporter, given enough time and space, could craft a narrative that illustrates how rent control ultimately makes poor families worse off. His job is relatively difficult, however, for he can hardly write a pithy anecdotal lead about the hundred families that won't occupy a non-existent apartment building because a foolish policy eliminated an unknown developer's incentive to build it.
The right, in other words, has a problem with narrative. The stubborn facts of this world contradict pieties left, right, and libertarian, occassionally forcing each group to revise its thinking. But the core critiques of liberalism intrinsically resist the narrative form. Who can foresee the unintended consequences of government intervention in advance? Who can pinpoint the particular threats to liberty posed by an ever-growing public sector?
Conor goes on to say not only that we need more conservative journalists, but that those conservative journalists who are now working need to quit seeing journalism as an opportunity to rally the base. In other words, they should be confident enough that simply telling the truth, and doing so in a compelling way, is sufficient. I can't tell you how strongly I agree with him.
In fact, I think many conservatives are under the impression that liberals sit around newsrooms thinking of ways to slant stories to the left. That's not how it works. Most liberal journalists have no idea of their own biases. They think they're showing the world as it really is. Conservatives who believe that journalism is an intentionally liberal game err if they think the antidote to that is to spin the news the other way. Having more conservatives in newsrooms would likely change the kind of stories that get written, and the way some stories are now written, but I would not count it a victory, but rather a defeat, if we traded one bias for another. As Conor points out, one reason The New Republic is such a good read is that it doesn't mind taking on its own side at times.
What Conor's getting at is the subject of my column in the DMN this coming Sunday: why whatever happens with the Republican Party is less important to the future of conservatism than what happens in the culture-making institutions of our society. A big part of this is storytelling -- not only narrative journalism, but also novel-writing, filmmaking, television-producing, and the like. Conservatives have got to learn how to tell stories, not just write op-eds and organize politically. Three cheers to Conor and Cuture11 for making that point.
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Hmmm. Interesting piece, but I'm not so sure about the conclusions. More and more I find myself looking back to Sorokin, and realizing that we're not just talking about competing narratives within the same worldview, but competing worldviews.
If liberalism has a journalistic advantage, it comes from accepting some givens that form a subtle template to just about every story:
1. Every problem has a material solution.
2. Every problem could be solved given sufficient funds to provide the material solution.
3. It is the job of the government (federal, state, local) to gain the political will and procure the funds to provide the material solution to every problem.
That's why stories about poor families losing their housing, or similar stories about people losing their jobs or suffering any of the other consequences of material disadvantage are seen in a similar light. The people who are in trouble need something, and it's somebody's job to provide it for them, whether it is affordable rent or a job or "free" healthcare or education or transportation or even entertainment (as we'll start to read about when those digital TV converter boxes become necessary).
But that template reflects what Sorokin calls the sensate culture. Every "bad" situation in the world can be solved by applying the logic of the problem--solution advertising form. Any deeper probing into the non-material aspects of the problem (why do so many people need help paying their rent? What does this say about us as a society and culture? Is there an aspect of the breakdown of first the extended and then even the nuclear family that contributes to the number of isolated or loosely-grouped people needing apartments for which they can't pay? etc.) is "out of bounds" for a typical journalistic investigation and would be straining the limits even in a feature article or series.
I don't know what the answer is, but unfortunately for now even trying to raise the question would be twisted into accusations that one is heartlessly trying to blame the victim. But that isn't, and wouldn't be, the point. At times in our nation's history when people have found themselves overwhelmed by the cost of living they have tended to "fall back" to family units and "regroup" until some financial stability was achieved; government-subsidized rent, vouchers, or even rent-control laws are a poor substitute for the community of family and the ability to be surrounded with support while trying to get back on your feet, so to speak.
I'm a second-generation journalist with 40-odd years under my belt. I've seen my trade go to great lengths to institutionalize fairness, objectivity or what you will, only to be charged with bias with greater frequency and intensity. By now, it's almost conventional wisdom that all news media, up to and including The Associated Press, are biased.
The people charging media bias are going to get a stiffer-than-ever dose of what they've been complaining about. Long-established primary sources of news, newspapers and broadcast networks, are in steep decline. More and more people are turning to cable-TV and online sources with much narrower circulation and more pronounced ideological slants.
Don't worry, Rod, you're going to get more conservative journalists. More liberal journalists, too. But you'll have a hard time distinguishing them from commentators, because there won't be much difference.
And to get the unvarnished facts? Guess you'll have to do the legwork yourself.
In the early '90s, when I was but a lad, I visited my cousin in NYC, who rented a room in a loft in Soho.
For her share of the sublet, she paid $800/month. Another art student rented another room for another $800/month. The principal lessee's nephew also lived in the place -- perhaps paying, perhaps not.
Meanwhile, the official "renter" was paying just $600/month on this rent-controlled loft -- she'd been there since the '70s -- and lived upstate.
Separately, my sister's then-boyfriend's family had us over a for a wonderful dinner in their apartment in Midtown. Small but charming place with great views. Did they live there? Oh no, they lived in New Jersey, but they'd had the rent-controlled apartment so long, it was too cheap to give up.
(My sister tried the same racket when she moved upstate, but her landlord quickly caught on.)
Your anecdotes may vary, of course, but my (very middle-class) experiences with rent control reveal systematic fraud. Just saying.
Politics is -- epistemilogically speaking -- merely one category of social action. Along with economics, education and cultural pursuits such as architecture, performing arts and physical exercise, it is the way a human being stops being an individual and enters into relationship with other like-minded men and women of good will, exercising virtues and inhibiting vices. The way to tell when virtue is the course to tack, or a sea change of vice needs to be met and overcome, is to read the signs of the times: the direction of the winds and their force.
Boats cannot sail directly into the wind and knowing how to tell where the wind is coming from will save you a lot of frustration. For racing, this skill is particularly important. Sailors learn to use devices like "tell-tales" to judge wind direction. Thus Rod's "A big part of this is storytelling -- not only narrative journalism, but also novel-writing, filmmaking, television-producing, and the like." is so apropos: journalists are the instruments of the culture that inform us of when the wind blows. The challenge is one of first causes - Who makes the wind blow? Those who deny the necessity of answering that question will have a heck of a time coming up with narratives to explain the competing ideologies of a "Campaign for Liberty from Wind" or the "Defeat the Ocean of Evil: Drain the Swamp"?
Since the advent of the Enlightenment, and Descartes 'cogito ergo sum,' the temptation to justify acts that contradict reality with loosy-goosing sophistry has overwhelmed the concupiscence of fallen mankind: this tone of this very thread betrays the worshiping of a social justice of two dimensions - that the only fair way to practice equality is a "pris fix."
WRONG!
The 'pris juste' of marginal utility is the narrative of millenia of human social encounter and commercial intercourse from Mesopotamia onwards. Read Menger. Praxeology in the political theatre is no different than praxeology in an orchestra pit - the wind instruments may only harmonize with the strings when they follow the composer's score helped along by the conductor's careful prompting. A "conservative" ideologue blasting indignation from his tuba is no more able to win a standing ovation than a "liberal" ne'er do well discordantly clanging his tympani. A society that permits abortion on demand is like an orchestra that uses sawblades instead of bows on their stringed instruments, and a society that permits FIAT currency via fractional reserve banking is like a chorus singing the refrain uninterruptedly without the verses, wondering why the crowds have turned their backs. Without the lyrical evocation of a life well-lived, the droning beat echoes the marching orders of a slave driver on a chain gang.
That's where we are at - the Left wants a Marxist chain gang tune, the Right wants a Falangist chain gang tune. Both are tyrannts of the relativism of "mind over matter" ideologies - whether wage parity or capital accumulation, neither acknowledges a third dimension: the most important factor of production, the dignity of free will of the human person. Such a narrative is the "a priori" wisdom that modern schools of political and economic science outright DENIES!
Until our churches preach -- and our schools teach -- the personalism of the sanctity of life, we are doomed to be serfs in a sculling contest where the Gold medal goes to China!
Who does this forum see as the finest of conservative journalists?
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