“I’m not paranoid! Why are youse all out to get me?”

–Archie Bunker,
All in the Family

Recently, in response to the piece I wrote about criticizing the news, I got a comment from Dave that I thought was worth mentioning. He began with this:

I think you have a hard time evaluating what the news does without making it personal. You’re involved with it and you’re a good guy. I’m sure most the people you work with a great people. Unfortunately, as Marx pointed out, you are what you do.If you work for any major media news outlet than your primary job is to confuse and scare the American people. The same news media that “doesn’t have the time” to cover the growing impeachment movement has all the time in the world to cover the Anna Nicole Smith nonsense.

I guess that’s another reason to find disagreement with Marx!

So I’m simultaneously a “good guy” and someone who sets out to confuse and scare people on a regular basis? I guess I’m tall and short and skinny and fat at the same time as well.

There are people who only see the world — or only want to see the world — in absolutes. You’re either all good or all bad. And if you don’t happen to side with someone else’s viewpoint, you’re either the “enemy” or “uneducated” when it comes to the truth.

I’ve never said that the media doesn’t have its failures. It does. But I also maintain that a lot of the people who go around looking for such failures sometimes invent them where they don’t exist out of their own zeal to make a point.

Think that doesn’t happen? Here’s an example:

I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine the other day who turned out to be a lot more conservative than I had realized. I said something about a health story I had seen on the Today show.

“I don’t watch NBC News,” he replied. “They’re biased.”

“Biased how?” I thought perhaps he felt that they had some kind of bias against certain medical procedures. I quickly found out that he was referring to Iraq and not to anything related to the story I was talking about.

“NBC was the first one to say ‘civil war.’”

I sat there for a moment, waiting for an explanation. When he didn’t give one, I asked what he meant.

It turns out that because NBC News had called the situation in Iraq a “civil war,” this person took that to be a specific attack on the Bush administration and conservatives everywhere.

But let’s think about this for a second. When I look up civil war in a dictionary, I find this as its primary definition:

n. A war between factions or regions of the same country.

It is a fact, not opinion, not commentary, not propoganda, that the Shi’ites and Sunnis, two factions within Iraq, are at each other’s throats. By definition, their conflict is a civil war. In labeling their ongoing battles with that term, there’s nothing inherently biased there. Saying that Iraq is suffering the effects of a civil war doesn’t, in and of itself, point blame at anyone — unless it’s the Shi’ites and Sunnis themselves.

The Bush administration didn’t cause their conflict; the Prophet Muhammad did. To put it more correctly, his death, back in the year 632, is where their hostilities began. They couldn’t agree on a successor, and they haven’t been able to settle their growing disputes that sparked from that one after all these years.

I need hardly mention that even the first Bush administration wasn’t even a wild fantasy 1400 years ago.

But this person’s perception was that using the words civil war and Iraq in the same sentence had to have been intended as an attack on his political beliefs. In his mind, therefore, NBC News is biased. Therefore, as far as he is concerned, he isn’t interested in anything they have to say about any story.

There’s something wrong, very wrong, with that kind of thinking.

The thing is, we all bring our own preconceived notions to the table. I work in the media, so I carry my own experiences when it comes to what that means. Dave suggests that I should visit other sites (that happen to side, coincedentally, with his opinion) to “learn what I really do for a living.”

That strikes me as a quite presumptuous statement for someone who doesn’t work in the media to make to someone who does.

Am I in denial? I don’t deny that there are problems in the media. I agree that there are warped priorities in terms of stories that get too much attention. But I also believe — and have stated before — that there is a cause-effect relationship that’s behind this. If the news media even thought that it could get ratings as high as they get covering celebrity “non-news” by covering things like Dave’s “growing impeachment movement,” don’t you think that’s what they’d be covering?

I can visit websites criticizing the media every day for a year. I’ll agree with the criticisms that seem reasonable, and I’ll disagree with those which depend on sweeping generalizations and paranoia, the same kinds of unreasonable debate that Dave despises when it is used against his beliefs.

I know what I do for a living, thank you very much. I don’t need you to tell me what that is, just as you don’t need me to tell you what it is that you “really” do for a living. I don’t have your knowledge or life experience. I don’t know your bosses and their goals. I don’t know what’s on your agenda.

I know the people that I work with. And even if it’s true that in only my newsroom, there isn’t a “conspiracy” to confuse and mislead, then, logically, is is therefore untrue to claim that all media people have this as their goal. That statement is invalid.

But I’ll play devil’s advocate for a second as well: if I can’t be trusted to be reasonable when it comes to the media because I’m part of it, I wonder why it doesn’t occur to Dave that he should butt out of all discussions about the labor movement since he is a union supporter. I wonder why Dave doesn’t realize that his opinions and “research” with respect to Iraq and the Bush administration could be suspect simply because he’s part of that “growing impeachment movement.”

Good luck selling him on that! And good luck with suggesting sites where he can “educate” himself about what is “really” going on, particularly when, for all of us, what is “really” going on completely depends on how paranoid you are.

Sometimes, people who fail in their job not because of conspiracy, but because of other, equally realistic reasons. Sometimes, they have personal problems that distract them from doing their best work. Sometimes, they’re just lazy and let other people do their thinking for them. And sometimes, it’s as simple as a genuine lack of talent. You can’t build conspiracy theories on that.