Progressives: Stop Being Suckers

You can watch me, Digby, Paul Krugman, and Atrios yap about how the media learned to bend over backward to please the right here.

I told one of my favorite stories from the book: the media's trauma after the Chicago Democratic convention in 1968, when they believed themselves to have revealed to the nation a moral outrage—cops indiscriminately beating up both defenseless anti-war protesters and defenseless reporters and cameramen—then watched, helplessly, as the nation side with the police. It brought on a bout of morbid self-obsession among the media, as its mandarins tied themselves in knots wondering if they were showing contempt for "the heartland," and displaying "liberal bias," if they reported accurately about police abuses. Here was Joseph Kraft in 1969, whom I described as the David Broder of 1969 (then I corrected myself: David Broder was the David Broder of 1969, too):

...Are we merely neutral observers, seekers after truth in the public interest? Or do we, as the supporters of Mayor Daley and his Chicago police have charged, have a prejudice of our own?...

The answer, I think, is that Mayor Daley and his supporters have a point. Most of us in what is called the communication field are not rooted in the great mass of ordinary Americans--in Middle America. And the results show up not merely in occasional episodes such as the Chicago violence but more importantly in the systematic bias toward young people, minority groups, and the kind of presidential candidate who appeals to them.

To get a feel of this bias it is first necessary to understand the antagonism that divides the middle class of this country. On the one hand there are highly educated upper-income whites sure of themselves and brimming with ideas for doing things differently. On the other hand, there is Middle America, the large majority of low-income whites, traditional in their values and on the defensive against innovation.... those of us in the media need to make a special effort to understand Middle America.

One of the ways he resolved to do that was to be nicer to Richard Nixon. In fact, he had already begun, writing of his inaugural speech," The ground has been prepared for an era of better feeling."

Reading Digby today, I realized, to my regret, the part of the story I forget. Digby writes about her trip to the airport in Austin with a cab driver, a devout Christian, who seems to hate Republicans and all their works, is thrilled about Barack Obama, but is "afraid that if he gets in he's going to put Hillary Clinton on the Supreme Court and she's going to outlaw everything I believe in." She notes this in the context of yesterday's New York Times Magazine article about, well, Democrats bending over backward to please the religious right—for instance, embracing a preacher who mocks those who prefer medical science to faith healing:

Dancing down front, in an aisle between pews, was a woman in an elaborate dress with a lace corsage whose breast cancer had been eradicated, Daughtry had said, through the prayers of her church sisters: “The eggheads will say her chemotherapy worked, but everyone who uses chemotherapy isn’t cured.”

Clearly the pander isn't working : millions of Americans still insist that, if the Democrats get in the White House, the eggheads will ban religion.

Such "outreach," in fact, never works. In 1947 President Truman bent over backward to accommodate the most hysterical "anti-Communists" by passing the most thorough "loyalty-security" program in American history. The AFL-CIO bent over backward by purging former Communists from their ranks. Conservatives rewarded them with...the McCarthy Era.

In 1969, Joseph Kraft raised a full-throated cry for his fellow "Eastern establishment liberal journalists" to bend over backward to be nice to conservatives, and stroke Richard Nixon. Do you know how he was rewarded? Reader, Nixon bugged him. From NIXONLAND:

The President wanted to monitor Henry Kissinger. So John Ehrlichman called on John Caulfield, a new addition to the White House staff, a former detective on New York's version of the Red Squad who'd known Nixon since he'd protected him on the campaign trail in 1960. Caulfield called a friend, who'd worked sweeping Nixon's hotels for bugs during the 1968 campaign. Together, they cased the target's Georgetown townhouse and told Ehrlichman the job would be difficult. Ehrlichman insisted they try anyway, because national security was at stake. So they scrounged up some phone company credentials and shimmied up a pole to affix a bug to the writer's phone wire. He was Joseph Kraft, the same journalist who'd lectured his fellow media professionals to stop coddling liberals. But he also was Henry's favorite journalist friend...

Believe in what you believe because you believe it. Promote what you promote because you believe it. Don't promote something halfway between what you believe, and what you believe some mythic conservative "middle America" wants you to believe. You just end up being played for the fool.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future