Call for Pragmatism

Reynolds has it about right in a 25 May post, I think, but the question he ends with is the tough one: How do we get there from here? The media are extremely important for that question, and to focus on its role seems to me precisely correct. Today's major media have no difficulty marginalizing the wacko fringe of the religious right, but it does the job poorly in two respects. First, the media repeatedly patronize and slander ordinary religious people, who don't deserve it, right along with the wackos, who do. Second, because the elite media are in basic agreement with the secular left, the corresponding wacko fringe on that side of the spectrum enjoys a virtual immunity from searching analysis and criticism. Both of these failures are a direct result of the elite media's cultural isolation, something it continues to show little or no inclination to recognize and address. We can only expect that the elite media will therefore continue to see the left lane marker and think it's the center stripe.

The media's inability to recognize where the fringe begins on both sides, and its unwillingness to treat both extremes with equal opprobrium, is what makes the media a participant and contributor to the culture war, rather than a force for tolerance, balance, and pragmatism. The elite media really has lost its cultural bearings, and I think that is a predictable result of hiring practices during the last twenty years or so. I doubt that is a problem that can be easily solved internally; more likely it will only yield to executive action by ownership. Declining readership/viewership and falling profits may eventually drive those reforms.

Byron