Moyers Discovers Right-Wing Relativism

In this last NOW, Bill Moyers, an intelligent left-wing journalist at PBS, demonstrates all that is wrong with traditional progressivism's conception of the media and of journalism. His expose on the right-wing media is well-encapsulated by this supposedly damning quote by Richard Viguerie, right-wing propagandist: "That’s what journalism is, Bill. It’s all just opinion. Just opinion."

We are given a pregnant pause with which to absorb the statement, as if Moyers and his editors believe it speaks for itself, that it testifies to the moral bankruptcy of the American right, and that it finally draws a big dark line between journalism that has integrity and journalism that does not. We are meant, I suppose, to yearn for Huntley and Brinkley, for Cronkite, for an illusory era of fair and informative journalism which never existed and never will. What did exist was a time when leftists felt they could legitimately "believe" in such a system, and it made them feel warm and fuzzy. But as with most religious faiths, this particular belief system concealed basic contradictions and was preserved primarily because it had its own kind of utility to the power structure. There is a class of people who are motivated by the ego that comes from feeling they are "good and right". And those people were motivated and still are motivated by the idea that journalism is or can be "fair and balanced".

But it isn't and it cannot be. And so Viguerie is absolutely 100 percent correct. What's really very ironic is that Viguerie, either because of simple ethical convenience or because he reads theory or because it filtered down to him through the culture, has picked up a core tenet of post-structuralist critical thought. He is, in effect, a practicing relativist - someone who has come to accept that there is no truth, that evidence is always the result of some human being's very biased process of hypothesis-formation and observation, that statistics are always intrinsically unreliable, and that even if facts could be "purified" of their non-objectivity (many statistical "controls" are meant to remove bias), they must always be selected for presentation. And this selection itself is always fraught with bias. What's more, human cognitive processes determine how and when and why a person or a group of people will be receptive to arguments and facts - and so the same argument made with the same facts can be constructed so that different people perceive and draw distinct conclusions. Viguerie also understands that this does not make "facts" unimportant. Quite the contrary, it means that a good news producer will "seize the means of fact production", so to speak, and make sure the facts that get manufactured and filtered are the "right" facts.

In other words, leftist theorists preach relativism. Right-wing propagandist/newsmen practice it. Yet another irony in this ever-twisting debate over journalistic integrity is that the christian right claims to be so appalled by the notion of "relativism". Perhaps this is a revealing bit of false consciousness, however. Murdoch, Ailes, Rove, and yes, Jerry Falwell, well know (or it is beginning to dawn on them) that the real reason for the objectivity meme is that in a system where reporters and information consumers both believe in objectivity - that is, take it as an article of faith - a journal can more easily sell its "truth" to people and be perceived as credible. Hence FOX News' mocking slogan "Fair and Balanced". Yes, in this particular moment, the right has the most to gain by undermining the "objectivity" meme - so as to destroy the credibility of lazy, complacent, milque-toast liberal papers like the New York Times.

But what liberals need to realize is that the Times and the Post and their brethren and all their "objectivity" and all their "fairness" - do not and cannot help progressivism in an era in which the power of the objectivity meme has been eroded. What's more, we should not mourn it's passing, as we are better off without it anyway. Leaving "objectivity" behind will ultimately make us more ethical and more flexible. Like any dogma, devoted adherents cling to it as the only guarrantor of their moral superiority. Objectivity has been a journalist's anchor for a very long time, so it is to be expected that many will not let it go. But in reality, the ideal of objectivity has never guarranteed anything, and even as it inspires some, it gives others a false sense of their own ethical position.

A new era has dawned, and here are the facts, so to speak, of this new era:

1. It is one in which we must accept diversity. We cannot deliver the same progressivism to all peoples and expect them to all go along. We must know our information consumers and market a different progressivism to each of them, not different fundamentally, but different in style and in tone and in some cases, the kind of content filtered or emphasized. The conservative "news" machine has failed to recognize this, and they still speak primarily to their admittedly powerful and influential angry white male demographic. But how does their message come off to new hispanic immigrants, to gays, to soccer moms? O'Reilly's shouting and Hannity's snarky self-satisfaction alienates these groups. What if there were radio hosts who were delivering a tweaked message in a different style for each demographic profile? Well, I'll tell you what would happen: the democrats would REALLY be in trouble. The right wing is on the cusp of understanding these techniques, thanks to their study of marketing, but they have yet to really embrace them.

2. We must leverage the insights of semiotics, cognitive science, and psychology to learn about how people receive and dissect messages, in visual media, in text, in audio. We must know intimately how people "hear" us, and therefore how we may better "speak" to them. The new era in communication will be an era of "usable information". If consumers can't "use" the information to make meanings, we are wasting our time delivering it to them. By "use", I should be clear what I intend: people "use" information to construct a coherent and positive picture of an often incoherent and negative world. They "use" information to affirm themselves, their identities, their life choices, and their relationships. This is the sense in which all progressive information must be "usable" in the future. It must fit like a comfortable glove on the hand that is the psyche of the information consumer.

3. You can sell anyone on any platform, so long as you understand the way to hook them, to use the right memes and the right slant on your message, and to filter out noise. We must not let our own understanding of what our policies actually are discourage us from expending the resources required to deliver our message to particular groups. Why would a gun-owning neo-nazi vote for Kerry? In the future, with the right techniques, this will seem highly plausible. Remember, every election cycle Republicans get poor people to vote against their own self-interest by producing a cultural stageplay whose heroes and villains are fictive. The play features "limousine liberals" and "political correctness cops" and lots of other people who want to cramp the style of the poor and ignorant person. The stageplay appeals by painting its viewer as basically correct and painting those who would educate and elevate that person's situation, socially, intellectually, financially - as elitist snobs. It is easy to look down upon the ignorant for how easily they are manipulated. It is easy to say "shame" on the Republicans who play on their ignorance and vanity in such a calculating manner. But the truth is that far smarter, far wealthier people are just as vain and ignorant. And though it may seem counter-intuitive, we must begin to imagine a role in the progressive cause of the beneficent manipulator, someone whose job is to create imaginative spaces in which it is possible again for all the ignorant people - from Nascar dads to bourgeois bohemians, from proles to professors to executives - to believe again in values that are actually in their economic and psycho-social interests.

4. Delivering a message that is as nuanced and difficult as the real issues in the real world is not possible, even assuming your consumer is educated, with a sky-high IQ. Most people can't even begin to digest the daily paper - which itself is an unfocused and clumsy instrument of expression. Even academics and other highly educated people are specialists, with knowledge limited to particular subject areas. Nobody knows it all. Most of us know very little about the realities that underly the legislative and regulatory process. We are little qualified to render opinions on such complex issues; if we were working in the organizations that are actually on the frontlines of international politics, education, or social welfare, our ignorance would quickly be made clear to each of us. No matter how articulate or expressive a journalist's approach, no matter which medium used, when one tries to deliver nuanced and detailed information, one message is clearer to the reader than any other: "you, the info-consumer, are too busy and too ignorant to understand this issue". That message is basically alienating and troubling for all classes of people. Of course, this, doesn't mean it is a bad idea to deliver different messages to relatively informed readers and relatively uninformed ones. But both messages must, of course, affirm the consumers' tight grasp of the issues, confirm to them that they are good, effective, and insightful consumers of the data. By aligning themselves with the cause of progressivism, they must feel they are demonstrating this fact. (Of course, most left-targeted journals already do this subconsciously. Just go read Harper's and you'll see how much winking ego-stroking they do for their self-satisfied leftist readership. And yet, this message is often mixed with a healthy dose of disdain and condescension, sporadically targeted, and therefore likely to offend some of their readers.) But in the new era, we must do this in a more rigorous and discplined manner for a greater variety of types of info-consumers.

5. We must limit message inteference or noise as much as possible. In other words, we want to drive information consumers to the right progressive media. This means driving them away from FOXNews, but it also means keeping them away from progressive channels that aren't right for their profile. We want our soccer moms to receive the soccer mom message, and we want our homosexual constituents to receive their message, and we want to limit the interference as much as possible, while simultaneously limiting the damage it does. In a media era defined primarily by networked systems and large databases of profile information on media consumers, this model will be extremely possible. The good news is that most people already do a great deal of self-selection in terms of the media they choose - picking outlets that affirm their pre-conceived notions over those that don't. However, we must know more about how and why this occurs, and increase the positive feedback effects of the phenomenon.

In short, we must remake the news-scape, the simu-reality, the ficto-actual mediated world of all information consumers, in a way that does not judge them and in a way that does not shy away from manipulating them. The wisest among us know that we must manipulate ourselves for our own good - because none of us is omniscient or free from susceptibility to the sophisticated techniques of psychological manipulation. Quite the contrary - we are all too predictably susceptible - every last one of us. And we cannot fight it; call it propaganda if you wish. Imagine Huxley's or Orwell's dystopias if you wish. Be naive and draw a snobbish line between the educated and the uneducated. Imagine yourself impervious to "control". Imagine yourself as infinitely authentic and strong. They've already created a category for you, and you are already being manipulated.

But every second people like Moyers spend moralizing, every second we spend thinking of ourselves as heroes of mental resistance, the marketers and their right wing clients are refining their techniques and gaining the upper hand in this information war. I would rather be winning it . . . for all our sakes.