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Contributors
Bruce S. Thornton - Contributor
Bruce Thornton
is a professor of Classics at Cal State Fresno and co-author
of Bonfire
of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished
Age and author of Greek
Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization (Encounter
Books). His most recent book is Searching
for Joaquin: Myth, Murieta, and History in California (Encounter
Books). [go to Thornton index]
 South
Park Conservatives
Review of Brian Anderson's book on liberal media bias…
[Bruce S. Thornton] 6/28/05
In the sixties, many
of us were pulled to the left because we thought it was the
ideology of liberty. Duped by a false caricature
of the conformist fifties as a neo-Puritan, repressed enemy of
the individual, we were attracted by the spontaneous, exuberant
celebration of individual freedom we thought characterized that
decade. Those of us with intellectual pretensions further asserted
that the sixties sensibility was squarely in the American tradition
of autonomous individualism. Surely, as the movie Easy Rider suggested, the hippy was the new mountain man, the new Huck Finn,
the new frontiersman-- and so, more quintessentially American
than that conformist, buttoned-down "company man" worried
that he'd get fired for folding, spindling, or mutilating something.
Well, we were wrong
for many reasons. We ignored the confusion of license and liberty,
ignored the destructive consequences
of liberating the appetites from social restraints, and most
of all, ignored the simple fact that the hippy "if it feels
good, do it" creed had been appropriated by a totalitarian
ideology that has been history's greatest enemy of freedom and
the individual. By the early seventies it was clear that the
New Left's hijacking of the hippy movement had resulted in a
new conformity, one more sinister and destructive than what we
thought was so oppressive in the fifties.
As time passed an
odd transformation occurred: the Puritans were now all on the
left. Dour, humorless, self-righteous, eager
to use the coercive power of the state to impose ideological
orthodoxy, so-called "liberals" and "progressives" had
become enemies of freedom. These days the humorless, repressed
enforcers of rigid standards of behavior are the politically
correct professors and media pundits, the dour feminists ("That's
not funny!"), the race-tribunes, and the identity-politics
hacks that monitor the media and popular culture for any deviations
from the party line of liberal dogma, multiculturalism, and victim-politics.
The champions of freedom, in contrast, today are more likely
to be found on the right, where one can find diversity of thought,
freewheeling discussion, impatience with orthodoxy, a commitment
to individual freedom, and anarchic humor. And, as Brian Anderson
documents in his fast-paced, entertaining analysis of how conservatism
has flourished in recent years, the result has been the weakening
of the liberal dominance over the media and popular culture.
Anderson starts with
a quick survey of "the old media regime," as
he calls it, and its propensity for selecting and shaping news
to suit its liberal biases. In the Reagan years, for example,
the media depictions of what they called a "homeless" person "looked
like your hard-working family-man neighbor, suddenly, catastrophically
down on his luck because of a bad economy and a lack of 'affordable
housing,' not the drug-addled, gibberish-spouting, fist-waving
deinstitutionalized lunatic he was likely to be in the real world." So
too with abortion: supporters are rarely called "liberal," but
opponents are regularly tagged as "conservative." Pro-life
protests get scant coverage, even though a 2003 survey found
51% of women either don't support abortion at all or do so only
in cases of incest and rape.
More recently, the
coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with its emphasis
on civilian and U.S. casualties and setbacks,
has reflected the media's liberal prejudices. At the same time
the U.S. army was achieving one of the swiftest victories in
military history, "the elite press proclaimed imminent U.S.
defeat, trumpeted every purported injustice or error committed
by our troops, and, Cold War-style, even sympathized with the
enemy." Coverage of antiwar protests, most of which have
been coordinated by leftist if not outright-Communist organizations,
was as "indulgent and celebratory" as coverage of the
war was grim and critical. Worse, the coverage implied a greater
support for the protests than actually existed: "In thirty-eight
different stories on antiwar street demonstrations, CNN noted
only once that most Americans did not support the protestors'
views." And of course, popular culture has been as biased
liberally as the media, demonizing businessmen, Christians, and
conservatives even as it celebrates and approves sexual deviancy
and heathenism.
The liberal-leftist
monopoly over media and popular culture has fostered as well
what Anderson calls "illiberal liberalism," "an
ugly habit of left-liberal political argument to dismiss conservative
ideas as if they don't deserve a hearing, and to redefine mainstream
conservative views as extremism and bigotry." Many liberals
and leftists are enabled in this addiction by a media that seldom
calls them on their use of question-begging epithets like "racist," "sexist," "homophobic," and "insensitive" in
order to avoid serious debate and defense of their ideas. Thus
reasoned debate, the lifeblood of participatory government, is
excluded from much of the public square, and politics degenerates
into a quasi-religious obeisance to ideas and values no matter
how worn out or pernicious.
Anderson argues that
this liberal dominance and the hypocritical denial of it, though
both have long been undergoing erosion,
were exposed in the last presidential election. That the mainstream
media had opted for Kerry was obvious in CBS's eagerness to attack
President Bush's National Guard service based on a patently forged
document. At the same time, nearly all the big media shamefully
ignored the Swift Boat Vets' allegations of irregularities in
Kerry's war record. Add outrages like the ABC memo counseling
reporters to be tougher on Bush than on Kerry, and it's no wonder
that nearly half of Americans in several polls believe the press
tilts left. As Anderson points out, "The old-media regime
long made it hard for the Right to get a fair hearing for its
ideas and beliefs." The bulk of his book tells the tale
of how this stranglehold was broken and the conservative resurgence
that followed.
Anderson tells the
story of how Rush Limbaugh and conservative talk radio began
the reclaiming of the public square for conservative
ideas by outflanking the liberal media monopoly. The creation
of cable's FOX news channel kept the momentum going: by June
of 2003, "FOX was winning a whopping 51 percent of the prime-time
cable-news audience--more than CNN, CNN Headline News, and MSNBC
combined. During the second ratings quarter of 2004, FOX owned
nine of the top ten highest-rated cable shows," including
powerhouses like the O'Reilly Factor. And FOX is strong with
the demographic Holy Grail, the 25-54-year-old viewers. If nothing
else, the hysteria FOX induces in liberal pundits and media dons
makes it the best thing to happen to television news in years.
Anderson also recognizes
and discusses the important role conservative presses like
Regnery, ISI Books, Encounter Books, and Spence
Publishing have played in providing a wider forum for conservative
ideas. And of course the "blogosphere" has created
a democratic forum for ideas and critiques that taps into the
expertise and brains--and sometimes the lunacy--of millions of
average people no longer beholden to the ideology and prejudices
of a few media corporations: as Anderson puts it, the blogosphere
is "samizdat multiplied by orders of magnitude." Blogs
may be on occasion be "unfounded gossip, misinformed venting,
or just plain trivial," as Anderson admits, but the power
to discern and correct is now put into the hands of citizens,
who no longer have to rely on the selective decisions and judgments
of a tiny elite of self-selected media "watchdogs" and "experts."
For me the best part
of the book is the chapter on "South
Park Anti-Liberals." The raunchy, foul-mouthed, frequently
vulgar show on cable television's Comedy Central provides some
of the most devastating puncturing of liberal pretensions and
smug self-satisfaction. Liberal sacred cows such as the environment,
sex ed, and the normalization of homosexuality are slaughtered
right and left-- as are many conservative ideals as well. Along
with other cable shows such as Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn and
comedians like Nick Di Paolo, South Park uses obscenity and vulgarity
much in the way Aristophanes did in ancient Athens: in the service
of satiric humor. Such humor is a powerful weapon for sweeping
away the lies and evasions those in power use to protect their
ideologies from scrutiny, and for opening up space for a more
wide-ranging and inclusive discussion of political issues.
The popularity of
such shows among the young has contributed to what Anderson
calls in his last chapter "campus conservatives
rising." From being non-existent or nearly invisible on
college campuses a decade ago, conservative students have increased
their numbers and become much bolder at challenging their professors
and college administrators on hot-button issues such as affirmative
action and abortion. College Republican groups, for example,
have tripled in just six years, with 120,000 members (compared
to 100,00 College Democrats). And surveys of student attitudes
find a corresponding increase in conservative and libertarian
views among college students, a change reflected as well in the
increasing numbers of conservative college newspapers. Anderson
also rightly credits organizations such as the Intercollegiate
Studies Institute, which since 1953 has fostered and supported
conservative ideas in higher education. Thanks to ISI and other
groups such as the Students for Academic Freedom and the Foundation
for Individual Rights in Education, "the Left's hold on
academe is beginning to loosen," as Anderson writes. The
consequence will be the creation of the intellectual diversity
that universities are supposed to promote, but have sacrificed
in the last few decades to a rigid ideological conformity harmful
both to democratic politics and to the development of a critical
mind.
Anderson ends with
some salutary caution about thinking that the culture war is
over and the left has lost. Yet all the trends
are in the right direction. Mainstream media can no longer get
away with partial or biased reporting, now that cable news alternatives
and Internet blogs are around to monitor them. And the fact that
these days liberal dogma is the elite authority in schools means
that the rebellious and populist inclinations of young people
will be focused precisely on the those smug and sanctimonious
authorities. The net result will be to compel the liberal-left "to
reexamine, argue, and refine its positions, so many of which
have proved disastrously wrong, and stop living off the past.
It's hard to imagine that this development won't result in a
broader, richer, deeper national debate." And in a greater
scope for the liberating power of truth. tOR
copyright
2005 Bruce S. Thornton
Searching for Joaquin
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Greek Ways
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Bonfire of the Humanities
by Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, Bruce S. Thornton |
Plagues of the Mind
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek
Sexuality
by Bruce S. Thornton |
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