Don't Blame Us, We Just Parrot The Bullshit

Syndicated columnist Gene Lyons gives a concise description of Republican media effectiveness:

BloggerMatt Yglesias fears that such tactics do nothing but work. "True or false," he writes, "the overwhelming evidence is that the media gets bored with these fact checks very quickly and that if you just put your head down and charge forward, you come out a couple of weeks later back into 'he said, she said' territory. The only real test for whether or not lying works is whether or not you can bring your ideological fellow travelers along. Will Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck echo your line? Will the Weekly Standard and National Review? Will the bulk of your legislative caucus? The answers are yes, yes, and yes."

Actually, we're already there. Just watch. Virtually every TV report on the financial-regulation bill you see will feature a sound bite from McConnell, who'll continue to shill for Citibank and Goldman Sachs while pretending to defend the little guy. Bailout, bailout, bailout. The fact that he's engaging in pure doublespeak is highly unlikely to be mentioned. Instead, you'll likely see a snippet from a Democrat making the opposite claim. For an awful lot of viewers, that's like flipping a coin.

For Fox News viewers and Limbaugh listeners, it's actually easier than that. Conditioned by decades of propaganda about liberal media bias, many react with overt hostility to any and all information from other sources. I must get 50 angry e-mails a week calling me a liar for citing some easily verifiable fact at odds with right-wing doctrine.

This is the "false equivalency" problem, and the blame doesn't lay with viewers, necessarily: there's no shame in believing the arguments made by the party whose platform or ideologies you agree with; the problem is a media that only cares to present claims as equally grounded in truth, solely because they seek a "he said, she said" narrative to feed their daily "scorekeeping" type of entertainment. Of course this begs the question, why is this the current media paradigm? Why does it work? Who does it serve?

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