Ross Douthat writes:
A month ago, a U.C.L.A. graduate student named Emily Ekins spent hours roaming a Tea Party rally on the Washington Mall, photographing every sign she saw.
Ekins, a former CATO Institute intern, was examining the liberal conceit that Tea Party marches are rife with racism and conspiracy theorizing. Last week, The Washington Post reported on her findings: just 5 percent of the 250 signs referenced Barack Obama’s race or religion, and 1 percent brought up his birth certificate. The majority focused on bailouts, deficits and spending — exactly the issues the Tea Partiers claim inspired their movement in the first place.
On one level, as Douthat points out, this is a lesson about desperate liberals making up comforting myths. (“The Democrats are weeks away from a midterm thumping that wasn’t supposed to happen, and the liberal mind is desperate for a narrative, a storyline, something to ease the pain of losing to a ragtag band of right-wing populists.”) But it is also a cautionary tale about the willful ineptitude and outright laziness of the mainstream media.
A single intern did what not a single mainstream outlet, with collectively thousands of cameramen and reporters, refused to do: get the facts. The mainstream media eagerly recited false accounts of racial epithets but could not be bothered to do a systematic report on the Tea Partiers’ actual message.
The media and elected liberals reinforce their own contrived narrative. Liberal leaders proclaim that the Tea Partiers are racists. The media dutifully report the accusations and search out the isolated Obama = Hitler signs. The liberals breathe a sigh of relief as they read the New York Times or watch MSNBC, which confirms that, yes, these people are wackos and racists. The cycle repeats. The only thing missing are facts.
While the mainstream media’s bias rankles conservatives, the latter should be pleased that the willful indifference to reality repeatedly deprives liberal officialdom of warning signals and essential feedback on the public reaction to their agenda. It is maddening for conservatives, but it is dangerous for liberals to operate in a world of fabrication.
Maybe Al Gore Is Right
Conservatives like to think of themselves as hard-headed, flinty-eyed realists who draw conclusions based on the way the world actually works, not on the way they would prefer it to work. They deride liberals as sentimentalists who never let facts interfere with their preferred policy prescriptions, whether in favor of the minimum wage or arms control. Yet there are some issues on which conservatives will not let any amount of evidence shake their own faith-based politics. Global warming is a prime example.
Last week the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change released its fourth Summary for Policymakers, a publication representing the consensus view of hundreds of scientists from around the world. The experts found with “very high confidence” (meaning 90 percent certainty) that human activity is responsible for a substantial increase in greenhouse gases, and they warn that if left unchecked, these trends could have catastrophic ecological consequences within our lifetime. Similar reports have been issued by other expert bodies such as the National Academy of Sciences and the American Meteorological Society.
I’ve always been skeptical of global-warming arguments, but as a scientific illiterate, it’s hard for me to argue with the consensus of the scientific community. Many of my fellow conservatives, by contrast, refuse to concede the possibility that Al Gore may be right after all. Check out, among others: George Will, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Senator James Inhofe, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and even Kevin Shapiro in the September 2006 issue of COMMENTARY.
I am sympathetic to some of their arguments, in particular when they point out the problems with the Kyoto Protocol, which mandates major emissions reductions by the U.S. and other rich nations while allowing growing pollution by developing nations such as China and India. In fact, some of the most effective answers to global warming may be politically incorrect—for instance, substituting nuclear energy for oil or coal.
But too many on the Right still refuse to acknowledge the basic reality that the climate is changing in potentially dangerous ways due to human activity, and that we need to reduce carbon emissions to address this looming crisis. Skeptics can always dredge up a rogue scientist or two to buttress their case, just as liberals can always find an economist or two to make the case for raising the minimum wage. But why should a few fringe figures dictate governmental policy?
I would think supporters of the invasion of Iraq would be more sympathetic to arguments for preventative action based on the best available intelligence.