Comments on: A Closed Theory Case Study

By: Julian Sanchez

Julian Sanchez — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:46:48 +0000

Oh, yeah, ditto to Tybalt: The idea that the mainstream media have given even a fraction as much attention to weird theories about Trig’s paternity as Ayers or Wright is just bizarre. I don’t think I’ve seen the former anywhere but at Sullivan’s and a few progressive blogs. Ayers and Wright have both been subject to plenty of coverage from the “liberal” media — just not as much as some McCain supporters think they merit. But if there’s a bias at work there, it seems to be toward fresh stories — they talked about Wright and Ayers for a while, and then they move on unless there’s some new hook.

By: Tybalt

Tybalt — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 04:11:35 +0000

“Obama has all sorts of dubious associations, yet we hear far more about Trig Palin’s paternity than what Obama was doing on a board with Ayers or how he managed to not hear Wright’s Afro-racism for 20 years.”

Do we really? The Trig Palin stuff – which is genuinely nutzoid – I don’t think I’d have heard at all if it weren’t for reading Andrew Sullivan, who is hardly the “mainstream media”. The Ayers/Wright stuff I hear several times every day on cable news, which is unavoidable because for a while every McCain surrogate in the country mentioned it several times per interview.

I think your preconceived notions of the mainstream media are making you hear things in the coverage that aren’t there.

By: Julian Sanchez

Julian Sanchez — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 04:23:08 +0000

If you find the Iraq war remotely defensible at this late date, I’m not going to bother arguing that point with you. Some of the other points are fair—the average journalist’s personal preference for Obama likely is shaping coverage. Some less so. Obama actually never said Ayers was “just” a guy who lived in my neighborhood — that shows up in quotation marks a lot, but it’s wrong. He said Ayers was “a guy who lived in my neighborhood who…” and then went on to mention some of the organizations they’d both worked with. In some of the other cases, I think they probably took a look and decided there was nothing very interesting there — though certainly you could argue that their view of what’s “interesting” is part of the bias. I’m certainly not going to deny there is a net media preference for Obama that shapes coverage, but in a perverse way, I think the effect of this has been in part to persuade some people there must be dark secrets lurking in the stories “the MSM won’t cover” (enough), even if the reason is there isn’t that much story there. Every time Stan Kurtz whines about how the MSM has failed to shower attention on his latest earthshattering investigative report, I go and look and find myself thinking: “Really? That’s all you’ve got? Why *would* anyone pay attention?”

By: Craig

Craig — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 03:04:08 +0000

I partly agree – there is a dangerous anti-elitism in republican circles; and it is magnified by the ‘don’t trust the MSM meme’.

But at the same time any reasonably fair observer of this election would have to conclude that the MSM is biased in Obama’s favor.

To take just one example – Obama has all sorts of dubious associations, yet we hear far more about Trig Palin’s paternity than what Obama was doing on a board with Ayers or how he managed to not hear Wright’s Afro-racism for 20 years. Nor has the MSM pushed him on why his story of his connection to Ayers has changed several times – first he was ‘a guy I knew in the neighbourhood’ etc.

In contrast to this disinterest in Obama’s past, the MSM has given Joe the plumber a rectal exam; hyped the alleged craziness of those who got to Republican rallies (while ignoring the vile things said about Palin by the o-bots); and covered Cindy McCain’s use of prescription drugs in detail but refused to release a tape which may tell us where the next President stands on the Israel-Palestine question.

I am a sceptical libertarian but watching the media coverage has made me more sympathetic to McCain than I otherwise would be.

And as for your despair at Republican “militarism” – would that be the same blood-thirstiness that removed two brutal dictatorships from power in recent years. We definitely need to stop doing that! Better to elect Obama so he can go and negotiate with a Holocaust denier who wants nukes.

By: Lester Hunt

Lester Hunt — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 22:28:06 +0000

Julian, Excellent piece as usual. The most frightening question of all, as you suggest, is whether the Republicans will draw the right conclusions during their richly deserved time out. The fact that, after eight years of a warmongering “moderate” they saw fit to nominate another one does not bode well. It is, as they say on Wall Street, bearish, very bearish.

By: Will

Will — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:08:19 +0000

“. . . inadvertently attracts . . .”

By: Will

Will — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:07:41 +0000

I realize that conspiracism isn’t the exclusive provenance of the Right, but perhaps an ideology that is generally suspicious of centralized power inadvertently attract a disproportionate number of conspiracy theorists? Wasn’t that part of Richard Hofstadter’s thesis in “The Paranoid Style in American Politics?”

By: digamma

digamma — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 19:27:58 +0000

Atlas Shrugs is now alleging that Barack Obama’s biological father is actually Malcolm X.

No, really.

By: Melly

Melly — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:58:26 +0000

Loved the piece. I, too, have been following this “story” with the same morbid fascination, even posting a few times. Personally, I hope the election does marginalize the type of people I see on that site. Their ignorance, fear-mongering, thinly-veiled racism, and narrow world view do not represent (I hope) the majority. Did you see the guy who posted about not letting his kids play with other “liberal athiest” kids? That was classic.

By: Michael B Sullivan

Michael B Sullivan — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 06:59:17 +0000

Jeez, could I have used the word “worry” any more in that last post?

I agree, of course, that to the extent that people on, say, Matthew Yglesias’ site are falling into an echo chamber, it’s one that’s considerably more sane than the various Obama conspiracy theories. I guess what I’m saying is that for all that the more centrist/less insane homophily traps are, indeed, far more realistic, that doesn’t necessarily make them less pernicious or less inclined to discard reasonable criticism. Indeed, I think that you could argue that an echo chamber that doesn’t spiral into wild insanity is more troublesome in that it has more of a chance of being big and getting things done, while being equally incapable of recognizing the limits of its world-view.

(I also don’t mean to single out the progressives like they are particularly prone to this. I just happen to visit those sites, so examples are fresh on my mind. I imagine that these dynamics are at play in almost every online community right now, and I’ve seen arguments that it’s actually happening in physical space as well.)