The ‘lamestream media’ are biased, but not in the way Sarah Palin thinks.
Charges of media bias are shorthand for bias along the left-right political axis. Some watchdogs of the press believe that journalists pretend to be objective while advancing an overt political agenda by slanting their coverage of the news. Others believe that journalists try to be objective but simply cannot help but report sympathetically about people and policies they agree with and report unsympathetically about people and policies they disagree with.
Both views are off the mark. The overt-bias people ignore the fact that most people who become journalists actually buy into the role of journalism in democratic life, which is to tell the public what their leaders and would-be leaders are saying and doing, not to signal who they agree or disagree with. The covert-bias people would have you believe that journalists – and their editors — are both oblivious to the fact that the bias police are combing through their stories for evidence of bias, and incapable of detecting that bias themselves before the stories go to press.
In fact, political bias is fairly easy to detect and then correct, which is why I would call it a shallow bias. The question “am I being fair?” takes care of most shallow biases. At the level of deep biases – assumptions about the world that are so deeply ingrained that we don’t recognize them as assumptions – we are like the son in the Passover seder who does not know enough to even ask a question.
In our ethnocentrism, we humans tend to think that whatever we do is The Way Things Should Be Done. What other people do is weird, which is to say, unnatural.
Our eating habits are a great example. Ask somebody how she feels about calamari for breakfast and you’ll probably see a wrinkled nose. But there’s nothing unnatural about eating seafood for breakfast, just as there is nothing natural about eating eggs-cereal-pancakes for breakfast.
Or take homophobia. When people say homosexuality is against nature what they really mean is that it’s against culture. There’s ample evidence that homosexuality is natural; it’s cultures that have deemed it taboo.
Among the deep biases that show up in the news are our culture’s ideas about what constitutes the good life. Here’s an example:
Last week the New York Times, published a story about the economic decline of Japan. The basic question the story considers is whether our economic doldrums are going to be as deep or long-lasting as theirs.
The story introduces us to a middle-class guy who once owned ‘a $500,000 condominium, vacationed in Hawaii and drove a late-model Mercedes.’ He sold the condo for $185,000, still owes the bank $110,000, swapped the Benz for a cheaper Japanese car, no longer goes abroad and is considering declaring bankruptcy.
These days, the experts quoted in the story tell us, instead of buying ‘big-ticket items like cars or televisions,” or paying $500 for a seat at the ‘glittering gold’ bar in one of Osaka’s swankiest nightclubs, or taking ‘flashy shopping trips to Manhattan and Paris,’ the Japanese are shopping at discount stores, making their own lunches, ‘using their cash to pay down debt instead of borrowing and spending’ and ‘saving their money for an uncertain future.’
Young Japanese have become ‘consumption-haters,’ one of the experts tells us. ‘These guys think it’s stupid to spend.’
This ‘new frugality,’ the Times reporter writes, amounts to ‘a startling loss of vitality.’
What I found startling about the story, though, was all its unquestioned consumerist assumptions. To live well is to spend, the story suggests, even to live beyond one’s means. Frugality, once considered a virtue, has become a vice. Saving is akin to hoarding. Borrowing is better than paying down debt.
Nowhere in the story does anyone suggest that the hyper-consumption of the ‘80s and ‘90s didn’t necessarily make the Japanese happier, or that the current lean times are causing them to discover simpler pleasures.
Though I’m no economist, I understand that depressed demand for goods and services leads to job losses, which makes for real hardship. But amid all the doom and gloom, a 24-year-old exemplar of the new Japanese frugality acknowledges that her generation ‘lived comfortably.’ So we’re not talking about widespread hunger and homelessness here.
That being the case, one of the lessons of capitalism’s boom-bust cycles might be that we would be better off moving toward an economic system that is not so predicated on people spending money they do not have on things they do not need – something, let us say, more environmentally and spiritually sustainable. At the very least, such possibilities should be discussed and such voices should be heard.
This is what I mean by deep biases. In journalism they yield stories that uncritically, even unthinkingly, uphold the status quo.
