By Rick Perlstein
New York Times, Sept. 10, 2010
The problem is not the Web. Anti-JFK rallies "revealing" to every school child in Orange County, California that Communists planned to colonize the United States by the year 1970 drew bigger crowds than Tea Parties today, with nary a blogger among them.
The problem is that elite media gatekeepers have abandoned their moral mandate to stigmatize uncivil discourse. Instead, too many outlets reward it. In fact, it is an ironic token of the ideological confusions of our age that they do so in the service of upholding what they understand to be a cornerstone of civility: the notion that every public question must be framed in terms of two equal and opposite positions, the "liberal" one and the "conservative" one, each to be afforded equal dignity, respect — and (the more crucial currency) equal space. This has made the most mainstream of media outlets comically easy marks for those actively working to push public discourse to extremes.
Don't blame the minister and his bait-and-switch bonfire either. Once upon a time anticommunist book burnings and threats of book burnings were not unheard of. The difference is that Associated Press reporters did not feel obliged to show up. That shift in news values, not the rise of the Internet, is the most profound way that times have changed.
In 1961 Time magazine called these "Ultras" alien and strange, and pronounced, "Wherever [they] arise, they cause domestic acrimony," and judged they should be "wooed back into normal channels of political expression." That last clause was perhaps a bit too much editorializing.
But by 1995, however, any hint of stigma had devolved into slack perplexity: "Is Rush Limbaugh Good for America?" was a cover headline that year. Fifteen years later a bedazzled Time dropped the skepticism, crowning Glenn Beck as "the hottest thing in the political-rant racket….A gifted entrepreneur of angst….tireless, funny, self-deprecating," who "has lit up the 5PM slot in a way never thought possible by industry watchers." Such treatment of people who distort things for a living cannot but push the bounds of permissible ideological performance art in ever more extreme directions.
There are responsible news stories to be written about people like this. On February 24, 2009, President Obama delivered the speech unveiling his economic stimulus package, renewing his promise for middle class tax cuts. The next day Rush Limbaugh reviewed it, introducing his now-frequent proposition that whatever the president says he "means the opposite in most cases." Rush Limbaugh has 20 million listeners every day, many of whom call themselves Limbaugh's "dittoheads." He teaches one of every 10 adult Americans to automatically disbelieve anything their nation's chief Constitutional officer says, as an axiom. This is news, maybe front page news.
Likewise, just the other day, talker Steve Malzberg of WOR — a 50,000 watt heritage station with a weekly program hosted by Mayor Bloomberg — carried out a sympathetic interview with the book-burning pastor himself, with callers chiming in with approval for the spirit of his proposed act. That broadcast in itself is more newsworthy than whatever it is the minister's 50 followers did or didn't end up doing down in Gainesville — even if presented, as the AP promised to its client papers, "in a clear and balanced context."
The coverage is already the context -- and was a priori unbalanced. The genie is of course already out of the bottle; after a certain point, news is news. Editors should reflect, though, for the future. "We're sick and tired of being ignored," a Beck follower was quoted in a cover story in Time magazine. Yet a Time/CNN poll found only 5 percent of a nationwide sample had participated in Tea Party events. This is not balanced coverage. It is coverage distorted grotesquely beyond measure.
Rick Perlstein is the author of "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America" and "Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus."
