Centerfield

Is Objectivity Half-Lying?

I'm planning to go to the free, 2nd day of Bloggercon this weekend. One of the agenda-setting essays for the conference, posted by Dave Winer, discusses Paul Krugman theory

He tells a story. If the Republicans said the earth is flat, Fox News would report (he says) The Earth is Flat, and people who say it isn't are unpatriotic. Then he says the other press would report Shape of the Planet: Two Sides to the Debate, and would quote Republicans saying it's flat, and Democrats saying it's round. The Harvard audience laughs.

Now I'm not going to say if I agree or disagree with Krugman about the Republcans or Democrats, but I do agree with him about the press. And the story they would report is wrong, it's a lie every bit as big as the ones he claims the Republicans are telling, in fact it's bigger because it's trying to appear balanced. Breaking news: The earth, in fact, is round. To report it as a dispute, while technically accurate, is still a lie. It's not in dispute. The real story is that one half of the political system is lying. That's a much bigger story than the fake story they report. And they do it all the time. Including the venerable paper Krugman works for.

To summarize Krugman, "Democrats good, Republicans bad" and any attempt to find a balance between competing points of view is falling into a trap. Now, I won't say that there is always a middle ground--it would have been foolish to try to find one between the Axis and Allied powers during World War II.

But in fact the ideological differences between Democrats and Republicans are not that great, when viewed from the distance of say, European Socialists. There is, for instance, no ideological content to the bitterness over the disputed election of 2000. Had the Democrats had a majority on the Supreme Court, they would no doubt have determined that Gore had won the election.

The intense partisanship resembles the bitter rivalry of sports fans. The disputed 2000 election has raised feelings of "we wuz robbed" often heard after questionable calls by referees. Krugman reminds me of a Red Sox fan wearing a Yankees Suck T-Shirt.

Nor do I agree with Winer's assessment of the press. If either side of a political debate makes statements that can be easily disproven, journalists will chip away at them, and they will retreat to more defensible lines of argument. Eventually, the debate reaches a point of equilibrium, where both sides make plausible assertions, where both sides have a saleable product in the marketplace of ideas. At that point, all that's left is to wait for new events to revise the probability that either side is true.

Posted by rickheller at September 29, 2003 09:12 PM