The Official Difference

The flip side of consensus is the Official Difference.  The frustrating thing about the American news media isn't that they present only one position as acceptable but that they present two, and pretend that there's never a third position.

Consider CNN's former talk show Crossfire.  They'd present an aggressive conservative as "on the right," and some apologetic milquetoast liberal as "on the left." While conservatives like Robert Novak or Pat Buchanan were predictably uncompromising, the show's liberals were forever showing how balanced they were! (The show's first liberal, Tom Braden, had a CIA background...)

Crossfire liberal Michael Kinsley was always saying, "I voted against Carter in 1980 and against Reagan in 1984." Crossfire liberal Bill Press would say, "When I was chairman of the California Democratic Party, we used to talk about 'kamikaze liberals.'" (Well, he was a kamikaze moderate!) And it's clear that this was the official intention:  Christopher Hitchens recalls that before he came on the show, the producer pressured him to go easy on Novak if he wanted to get on the show again.

I recall a show they did back in 1991 on the movie JFK.  Now, I've never seen that movie and don't want to:  I'm quite confident that even if there was a conspiracy it wouldn't have happened the way Oliver Stone imagines it!  For me, the only interesting thing about it was watching the Washington establishment get hot and bothered about it.  Consider the Crossfire treatment:  the show's two conservatives said "It's nonsense!" while the two liberals said "Of course it's nonsense, but Oliver Stone has the right to free speech!" Free speech was really a straw man here, since I hadn't noticed anyone calling for the movie to be banned.  What we have here is essentially four people taking the same position but putting a different spin on it, which insults the audience. The bottom line is that the show didn't want to be accused of avoiding the issue, but wouldn't have anyone on who actually defended the movie, so they tried to have it both ways with a sham "debate."

This wasn't just with Crossfire.  Consider the liberals on another CNN show, The Capitol Gang.  Remember when George Bush Sr. made an issue of Michael Dukakis vetoing a blatantly unconstitutional law making the Pledge of Allegiance mandatory?  TCG liberal Mark Shields was the sort who insisted that this was a "legitimate" issue. (So what's illegitimate, exactly?) The show would have all the panelists give their "Outrage of the Week," and on one occasion TCG liberal Al Hunt cited the Senate's decision to actually have a hearing before confirming the renewal of Alan Greenspan's chairmanship of the Federal Reserve, instead of just making it automatic!  Alan Greenspan isn't exactly a liberal hero...

I also recall Jack Germond, one of the liberals on the PBS show The McLaughlin Group. (John McLaughlin was the sort of host whose response to something he couldn't answer was to repeat his original point, loudly.  But I digress, of course.) Germond co-wrote a book about the 1988 presidential campaign where the aforementioned Pledge of Allegiance issue arose and got interviewed on some morning talk show.  He talked about the shortcomings in the Bush and Dukakis campaigns and said about the press coverage, "They were both allowed to get away with it." My grandmother!  Bush may indeed have got away with a great deal, but nobody who actually followed the press coverage could reasonably claim that Dukakis got away with anything!  But of course, if he actually admitted the obvious truth that Bush got away with more, that would look "unbalanced." Balanced spin trumps truth, of course.

You may say that all this is in the past.  But I haven't noticed any significant change since then.  I guess there's the emergence of Fox News, which I've never been able to watch at all.  But at least their one-sidedness is blatant.