Centerfield

RE: the Red Sox. There was an abundance of Devil costumes at the parties I attended last night. One suspects that they were here seeking warmer climes....

I feel like it's as hard for a good moderate leader to win a party nomination as it is for a small-market team to compete in Major League Baseball from year to year.

The classic "run to the extremes for the nomination, run to the middle for the election" still holds. I suspect it will as long as we have a two-party system.

I think one of the key factors that's come into play over the last decade or two are changing media patterns.

Basically, both liberals and conservatives have developed their own media centers. It's now possible for a conservative to get his news and analysis from fellow conservatives, and liberals are developing syndicates like Air America to provide a daily feed of talking points. You tune into the right channel, and you don't have to consider conflicting information or ideas.

That development represents an inevitable intensification of ideological fervor. It increases the sense of certainty and determination on both sides to bring someone from their side to power. It increases the tendency to see folks from the opposite side as corrupt or unethical, rather than just misguided.

Both sides have developed a core media culture tha pushes harder and harder for the left or right. For the most part, we haven't joined in that struggle and are not offering alternative ways of looking at things from the center.

Basically, there's a lot of overt energy on the right and the left, and we're pretty quiet by comparison.

It's possible that we'll see a strong centrist emerge in either party -- maybe a McCain or Powell among the Republicans. But in the long run, we won't win too many battles until we have a cultural presence of the type represented by the increasingly popular liberal and conservative media.

William said
Basically, both liberals and conservatives have developed their own media centers. It's now possible for a conservative to get his news and analysis from fellow conservatives, and liberals are developing syndicates like Air America to provide a daily feed of talking points. You tune into the right channel, and you don't have to consider conflicting information or ideas.

I say.
That explains alot in this election. I knew this, but hadn't drawn the above conclusion.

William's right on target. I've written about the re-segmentation of the media market recently, and we're now seeing some of the obvious effects.

The media in America used to be clearly segmented by ideology before the rise of the broadcast media. Newspapers reflected their publisher's ideology, and were often named the "Democrat" or "Republican." The advent of nation-wide broadcast media brought journalism towards an actual "non-partisan" model--national broacast media had huge start-up costs, limited channel space, and they had to compete in all markets simultaneously, so they had to homogenize their viewpoints. The right began to perceive a leftist bias in the media monoliths (note I am speaking of perception here, so don't buzz me about whether it was true or not) and when the technology allowed (cable, Internet) split off to follow their own media providers. After all, there was a clearly defined market segment that was disgruntled with the broadcast MSM, and profitable markets WILL get served.

The obvious result is that the audience demographics of the original broadcast media changed. Their audience moved left, as their "center" demographic shifted. It's fun to blame the media themselves, but the truth is that they have to please their audiences, or continue to lose business to the newer offshoots.

I hope that someday someone will prove that an outlet for purely objective news can survive in the current marketplace. In the meantime everyone claims to be objective--an easily disputable contention.

I agree with William, Donald, and Tully. I watched all three debates on PBS (not the same as NPR). I felt like I got the best unfiltered picture of how the candidates made their respective cases. What do you think of PBS's treatment of the news?

I like PBS. They tend to delve deeper than the 30 second soundbite.

"I hope that someday someone will prove that an outlet for purely objective news can survive in the current marketplace. In the meantime everyone claims to be objective--an easily disputable contention."

Tully,

What's purely objective news? Is there any such thing? Any person describes things in the way that they understand them and inevitably inparts his or her experiences and biases. Even on this blog, we all disagree about what seem to be "objective" facts.

There have been a lot of great presidents in this country, men who showed "leadership, wisdom, and a determination to put the needs of our country and all of its people ahead of partisan politics." And everyone of them was a politician that used all the tricks of the trade to get elected, who manipulated and exaggerated opponents statements, who appealed to the lowest common denominator. I think we need to get over this 9th grade civics view of politics. It just ain't that way. People vote for self-interest, bias, all sorts of things. What to you is leadership and wisdom is my arrogance and rigidity. I'm not cynical about the system, just realistic. It's unrealistic expectations about politics that, to me, are more dangerous and corrupting that the way politics are. People's expectations cause them to become increasingly cynical and, instead of recognizing that politics is about human frailty and will never be perfect,yearning for a perfection that will never be. My point is stop waiting for the candidate on the white horse. He doesn't exist.

I haven't seen one yet, Marc. (White Horse candidate, any office, any election)

"Purely objective news"--an unattainable ideal, as is the perfect human, or the White Horse candidate. But is that any reason not to try? To abandon even the simplest of ethics? Indeed, it's at the core of the journalist's Code of Ethics--striving for objectivity and truth in reporting, without distortion or external agenda. And that's what the media today seems to moving away from, not moving towards.

Yes, we argue here about what the objective facts are, but that objective facts exist and can be demonstrated is not a dispute. The dispute is over how people interpret the facts, and with those who simply will not accept any demostrated facts at all that disagree with their views, regardless of the weight of the evidence.

Jamie, I watch the debates on PBS as well, then turn off the tube when they finish. It's annoying to have the talking heads what you're supposed to think about something you saw for yourself, as if you're too stupid to think for yourself.

The Curse has merely been tranferred to the Patriots. Not only has their winning streak been broken, but I predict at least 86 years of darkness for the franchise.

I expected some karmic rebalancing in return for the breaking of the bambino's curse. The Patriots lost, but it was a nice run. I give the Steelers credit for making all the big plays, but I also note that we had 4 turnovers that led to 24 Steelers points, and that our staring running back, best wide reciever, and both starting cornerbacks were out of the game.

I have no worries about a Patriots curse. If I had to guess, I'd wager that the cursed teams in the NFL are the Vikings, the Bills, and the Bengals. Even though I'm a Red Sox fan, I share the concerns of whoever mentioned the problems with being a small market baseball team. I've said many times that I'd trade being a fan of the team with the 2nd most resources for a level salary playing field for all teams, such as could be created with a salary cap. There's a big reason why the 1995-2004 yankees won a bunch of world championships followed by 2 WS losses and then an ALCS loss. The reason is not Yankee Pride, it's unbalanced resources. This is not a sportsmanlike way to run a league. Red Sox fans know this, Yankees fans know it too, but they love it and defend it.

MWS, I feel you mischaracterize my plea by describing it as waiting for a white knight. I'm just looking for a higher minimum quality. That's a huge difference. I don't think there's any reason to assume that finding a 3rd way is an impossible task. Uphill? Sure. I also disagree, just like Tully, with the idea that, just because perfect objectivity is unachievable, there is no way to make things better by striving for it.

Both these views, in my opinion, cross the lines of skepticism into cynicism, which is a hopeless theology.

I'd like to add that while we love to blame ideology and politics for the ongoing shifts in journalism and curse the players, market forces and the technological changes that facilitate them play a driving role. We're getting the media we demand, as determined by how we spend our money. My hope is that there's enough of a market for the "middle ground" to make/keep/grow it as a viable option. I get tired of switching back and forth in attempts to integrate fuzzy opinionated stories into real data, but that's the only "middle ground" option the re-segmented market gives us right now.

IOW, I'm hoping that some market consolidation results in a swing back towards the middle from both ends. The left and right outlets will always have a market, they just shouldn't be the bulk of the market. That's a reflection of the bi-partisan nature of our political market, but the market for news shouldn't be determined by the electoral college and the parties, but by viewer demand. We want more centrist politics--that will require more centrist media outlets. And only consumer demand and support can bring that about.

BK and Tully,

I did not mean to say that we should not strive for objectivity in journalism. But we have to define what objectivity means. In my view, it means more than simply reporting both sides of an issue and trying to run down whether a particular fact is "true" or not. In some cases, whether a fact is true depends on the assumptions you make in the first place. Professor Andy Cline on Rhetorica.Net, which I think is an excellent site, has a definition of objectivity as a process rather than a particular stance. His point is that objectivity requires journalists to get past the he said-she said business that gives equal weight to all statements.

"Good journalism must operate with a discipline of verification, according to Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel. Part of what this should mean is that reporters follow the objective process of reporting as they verify the facts and report the results of that verification as news."

http://rhetorica.net/archives/002521.html

Cline writes a lot about the professional standards of journalists and why he does not think that systematic political bias is a problem. IMO, it's not bias if a journalist makes a conclusion based on his or her analysis of the evidence, even if the story supports one side or the other.

With respect to the quality of candidates, I would certainly like to see better candidates. But many of our best presidents were considered lightweights or hack politicians when they were running (e.g., Lincoln, FDR). American democracy has always tended toward the lowest common denominator--in part because voters aren't, for the most part, interested in a candidate's abstract virtues but rather in how this candidate will affect their lives. Yet, the system has produced some exceptional (and a lot of not-so-exceptional) leaders.