Why Nobody Trusts the Media

It Ain't Their Lack of Objectivity

I'm thinking of how the mainstream media are covering two glaringly obvious facts about the Republican ticket. First, Trump's deepening dementia, which was on flamboyant display at his "news conference" yesterday. No matter the question, his answers were laughable at best—the insane kind that would get you an appointment at the neurologist if you spoke like this to family members, who would meanwhile take your car keys. Second, Vance's ideological orientation, a nice way of saying his ostentatiously fascist belief system, with its deep roots in Peter Thiel's explicitly anti-liberal, anti-democratic intellectual network.

How are these facts treated by mainstream media? As if they're the stuff of background reporting, on the same level as Harris's resume or Walz's coaching philosophy. Trump is "incoherent," not raving, lying, stumbling, mentally incompetent and on his way to diaperhood. Vance is a convert to Catholicism of some kind, not a fascist who has openly expressed his contempt for the Constitution, for democratic norms and procedures, for women who are not mothers, for the people he represents in the Senate and portrayed in his memoir.

It's not "objectivity" that constrains the media. What, then?

My working hypothesis is that the educated people who become journalists suffer from related ideological dispositions. These two dispositions are shared by Left and Right, and are, if anything, more emphatically embraced on the left end of the political spectrum.

One holds that public opinion is based on and animated by irrational assumptions, and therefore leads to ignorant conclusions; in other words, most Americans are clueless on the salient issues, which rightly turn on public policy choices regarding basic economic arrangements, not cultural (read: religious, familial, local) concerns. After all, is this not the most religious nation ever, where the separation of church and state has only enfranchised all manner of Christian extremity and evangelical idiocy? Don’t the American people compose the most ardently, consistently, and gleefully anti-intellectual electorate in the history of modern republics? Well yeah, look at the percentage of Republicans who think the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, or the the proportion of Democrats who think we’ve actually made some progress toward a more perfect union since the Civil War.

The other disposition holds that “extreme” political phenomena such as socialism or fascism are something like foreign imports, exotic items that are normal, even routine dimensions of political discourse in worlds elsewhere, but not here in the pragmatic, phlegmatic USA; in other words, where socialism or fascism appears in the annals of American political speech, it is by definition an anomalous event, to be treated as a physician would a rare illness induced by a random but quite possibly dangerous contaminate. After all, this is the nation dominated since the 18th century by the pro-capitalist, highly individualistic liberalism of the Lockean, isn’t it? We’re a conservative people who live in a center-right country, where the working class has repeatedly succumbed to the false promises of the American Dream, right? Well yeah, even Howard Zinn is one of those “consensus” historians who tell us that the bad guys—colonists, Puritans, slaveholders, Indian-haters, capitalists, racists, misogynists, et al.— have always won.

These ideological dispositions aren’t better named “confirmation biases” that lead to “cherry-picking the evidence.” For the fact of the matter is that everyone, of every bent, comes equipped with a point of view that is ideological at its origin and in its effects. Because that point of view determines the scope, the scale, and the species of data from which the facts will be plucked, all evidence is necessarily “picked” from a limited set.

If there are rival accounts of the same event, the superior account cannot, then, be chosen on the grounds that it is factual, or that it explains more facts. The choice can be made only by asking which account aligns more closely with the values you bring to the event and want to prevail beyond its occurrence, as a consequence of your account. That means disclosing your values as an essential part of your reporting. It also means engaging the relevant issues as if they pose moral problems—what is good, what is evil?—that require discussion and debate if not resolution. These are unthinkable proposition, even at FOX News [sic], where the “confirmation bias” is on proud display.

Here’s another way of putting it:

The daft notion of "objectivity" in reporting (and analyzing) the events of the day is bound to produce a vacuous detachment from reality, of precisely the kind that makes Trump and Vance look like normal candidates seeking election to office. For the truth is that there are no facts absent values, because there is no body of fact independent of the purposes you bring to the project of discovery; and those purposes derive, without exception, from your values, from what you hold most dear, what you believe without thinking, on faith. Objectivity is not a noble dream, it’s a chimera, a delusion born of the inability to acknowledge the ubiquity of ideology, or, what is the same thing, an inability to recognize the fact that no one stands outside or above their ideological dispositions, not even those dedicated to the ideal of objectivity in reporting the facts—or especially those so dedicated.

How, then, do these ideological dispositions manifest themselves, and what would it take to get beyond them? Answers to follow later, in the context of reporting on the two campaigns.