A Father, A Daughter, and Politics

As this fledgling project has begun to evolve, I have come to understand that it cannot be linear in structure, that while its entries must certainly display a coherent relationship to each other, a non-linear approach is, within limits, actually the best organizational strategy.

So today’s entry shifts direction a bit.

To be sure, I had already decided to publish the present entry, but in a week or two rather than now. My reason for accelerating the timing of publication stems from my respect for a reader who offered a comment below the link to the latest installment of NBC’s “Meet the Press;” a comment demonstrating that he had actually followed my strong suggestion that all my readers should watch that installment in its entirety.

As I have already said in my introduction to the installment, it departed from the program’s usual format to focus exclusively on exploring “our post truth society, and how a changing media landscape has created chaos out of order.” In my introduction I endorsed the show as having been “superbly well done—I would even venture to say stunningly well done—and absolutely worth the investment of time required to watch it.”

The reader, as far as I was concerned, had honored me by following my suggestion.

The episode focused almost entirely on right wing examples illustrating the contours of this “post truth society.” My reader opined that although he accepted the examples as being on target, the show would have been “much stronger if he [host Chuck Todd] had used some examples from other politicians and networks. He presented this as if only Trump uses the tactics in coordination with Fox News.”

If I understand this criticism correctly, the reader was arguing in favor of the position that the mainstream media and left-leaning officials also offered proof, just as much as did Donald Trump and the right wing media, of the existence of this “post truth society.”

In my response to his comment, I said first off that I appreciated the fact that he had watched the show, that I also appreciated his taking time to write a comment, but that I rejected his tacit assertion of an equivalence between the mainstream media (which most conservatives regard as snugly in bed with the political left) and right wing outlets such as Fox News and Breitbart.

But I concluded my response with the statement that he deserved a detailed, evidence-based explanation for my opinion.

Herewith is the first installment of that explanation.

It's possible I may have misapprehended what his comment was actually driving at, but I shall write this essay as if I understood him aright.

I do not know the actual political views of my reader, but for the sake of this essay I will assume that they are conservative. And the conviction of conservatives, by the most charitable view they can muster, is that the mainstream media and the conservative media are equally biased.

This, however, is a minority view. With most conservatives it is an article of faith that the mainstream media is blatantly biased and thus should not be trusted at all: that, as the president insists, the mainstream media is really in the business of manufacturing and distributing “fake news.” Rush Limbaugh calls the mainstream media the drive-by media. My personal choice of tagline would be Fake News, Inc.

I shall devote the next several entries to this phenomenon, because it drives the widespread belief that “objective reporting” is as mythical as a unicorn.

This ever expanding belief is assuredly the main engine driving the hyper partisanship that I fear may be on the verge of pushing the republic straight off a cliff into the abyss below.

The origin of the hyper partisan demon we have conjured, initially innocent of the idea that we were doing so, is generally assumed to track back to the emergence of Rush Limbaugh and his inspired invention of a radio talk show that was fun-filled, compulsively interesting, and unabashedly, fearlessly conservative in its commentary.

As usual, the conventional wisdom is incorrect.

The real origin was a rather obscure political movement, not at all malicious in its intentions, which first emerged in the 1930’s.

To explain what I mean, my account will lean heavily upon a recent, carefully researched, and accessibly written book by Nicole Hemmer, entitled “Messengers on the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics,” published in 2016 by University of Pennsylvania. That is because, expert though I am on other subjects, on this one I can count myself as merely an intelligent layman.

In fact, the best I can do will be to give you a detailed summary of Hemmer’s book. And since I have already written some 725 words, for today I will limit myself to the vignette with which she opens it….

It is a warm June day in 2004 and a youthful Nicole Hemmer is on a pleasant car trip—pleasant because seated at the wheel of the car is her father, with whom she shares the kind of affectionate relationship I hope to sustain with my 8-year old daughter, now blissfully asleep on the rather tired love seat in our den, a few feet removed from her father, who is tapping away at his laptop at precisely 5:22 in the morning, with gusts of wind buffeting the modest 50-year old split level we call home.

Nicole is old enough to have left the nest, and so the moment is made even more pleasant because it is taking place during her annual visit home.

Seemingly out of nowhere, Nicole’s father announces: “My project this summer is to get you to vote for George Bush.”

Well, seemingly out of nowhere to the aging historian seated, in imagination, in the car’s back seat.

But scarcely out of nowhere to Nicole, because a prominent feature of the relationship with her father are frequent, earnest, but loving exchanges about politics. Her father is staunchly conservative. Once upon a time Nicole had shared his conservatism, but over the years she had slowly shifted to the left, while her father had done just the opposite.

Let the aging historian shut up for a bit, and permit Nicole to speak for herself:

“The divergence of [political] opinion ended up drawing us closer together. Political debate became the secret language of our relationship, the way we conveyed love, respect, disagreement, and admiration. So there was nothing extraordinary about an afternoon spent debating politics.”

Nothing extraordinary, that is, except that on this particular afternoon, as the bland Indiana countryside rolled by, her father did something that would embark Nicole upon a years-long intellectual journey:

He turned on the radio.