Op-Ed Column: The Illusion of Red/Blue Blog Parity

The following is a response to "The Illusion of a Nation Divided" by Mark Buchanan, his inaugural post in The New York Times blog Our Lives as Atoms. This began as a simple comment over there. Then snowballed.

Mark, while I appreciate your genuine intellectual curiosity and agree that - as countless, though not well publicized, polls like the one you mentioned have proved - this country is much less polarized than we are made to feel, your argument is riddled with reductive propositions and conclusions about politics, media and blogs.

From the start, you overlook the two biggest promoters of the red state/blue state great divide: the establishment media and the Bush administration. The greatest benefactors of this received notion.

Without such a construct (or frame) and the knowledge that major U.S. news outlets operate within it, the Bush administration would have much greater difficulty defending such actions as, say, torture. Basic democratic principles, our Constitution and the Geneva Conventions were all on the extreme periphery during the White House and media-framed “torture debate” (debating what in America would once seem unthinkable). Instead, the principal frame was: Are Democrats and liberals too weak on terrorists and terrorism? So the American public saw, read and listened to conservatives who vociferously defended the right to torture (oftentimes invoking the quaint Orwellian legal language “interrogation techniques”), parroting daily administration talking points on this. Their views were in the forefront of this “debate” even though they represented a minority of Americans.

(Incidentally, the majority of Republicans in this country may not support torture. But we do know for a fact that this administration and the overwhelming majority of the former Republican-led Congress did and still do. That’s not partisan rhetoric; it’s stipulated in legislation where abuses like water-boarding – a known torture technique born of the Spanish Inquisition and practiced by the Nazis – are sanctioned by law.)

Mainstream news outlets, believing this kind of extreme contrast (as disingenuous as it is) makes for good TV, have milked the red state/blue state, he said/she said, Crossfire-style faux balance for years. Numerous studies and venerable journalists, including Bill Moyers, have documented just how stacked news talk shows are in favor of conservatives. (And during the Bush years especially, extremist ones at that.) It’s the dirty little secret that’s regularly discussed in media watchdog circles, but those in the establishment media are loathe to admit this, let alone discuss it. This, too, engenders the false appearance of a stark political divide in the country.

Moreover, relying so heavily on the Adamic and Glance study, you fail to draw a distinction between “red and blue bloggers” that is crucial to the validity of your argument. Yes, red bloggers tend to link more to red bloggers and blue bloggers to blue bloggers. But you don’t consider why. The answer is directly related to the disingenuous Great Divide to which your argument is intending to debunk: the predominance of red state bloggers, much like right-wing radio hosts and members of this undeniably extremist administration, are far from moderate or even conservative. Most are on the very same right-wing fringe as those aforementioned pundits who led the charge to allow the administration to “legally” torture. In genuine stark contrast, the majority of blue state bloggers were compelled to begin their sites to combat not run-of-the-mill partisanship, but the kind of relentless mendacity and anti-democratic views coming from this White House that the predominance of red state blogs, along with their extremist counterparts on radio and TV and in print, tend to promote.

Thus, in attempting to debunk one Great Divide, the political views of the American populace, you foster the myth of another, that there is a parity of vitriol and mindless partisanship between red and blue bloggers. It’s no accident that establishment media, this administration and even Democratic hawks like Joe Lieberman have all led the charge to perpetuate this received notion, too.

Comments

[MediaBloodhound]

The Illusion of Red/Blue Blog Parity

[vanessa]

It's about time we stick a fork in this blog parity myth. My guess is it causes many people to avoid the political blogosphere altogether, thinking that both sides are drooling partisan flamethrowers. Unfortunately this myth seems pretty well entrenched.