THESE REACTIONS THREE

1) The Curmudgeonly Clerk has some thoughtful things to say about my post on Brit Hume.

2) My good friend P. writes to chide me for quoting Glenn Reynolds out of context, and for putting words in his mouth (or the online equivalent):

Reynolds had talked about prosecution for sedition after publication of print media, and of libel law. So your example wasn't responsive to the examples he was holding up, and to the point he was making about the media not about spoken speech elsewhere. You avoided the conflict by the convenient expedient of not including Reynolds' main points (perhaps unintentionally) in your excerpt. But the moral is: this is what comes of quoting little snippets and leaving out context.

And:

Since when does "Maybe. Maybe not" = "must"? If one of your students had asserted such an equivalency, what would you have said? [Note: additional sentence here deleted. --BEM]

And:

[Y]ou inferred a sinister import to Reynolds' statement, linking it to the guy who said Bild-like efforts were "the attempt to root out internal enemies." [How] would [you] respond to a student who drew such a parallel between 'root[ing] out internal enemies" and Reynolds' ambivalence?

I'm not sure that my post does all of the things that P. claims. First, I wrote the post assuming that readers would take the time to follow the link to the original post by Reynolds, which is very short, almost elusively so, as is typical (and P. suggests that I criticize Stephen Den Beste instead, since his comments are meatier). That's the point of the link. Click through! It won't hurt!

Second, I don't say* that Reynolds is definite in his causal account (and he does cite Brandenburg v. Ohio, a case that has nothing to do with the press, so his argument is meant to be broader than a discussion of press freedoms alone). But Reynolds does provide a causal account, and as far as I can tell, bases his conclusion on the assumption that the causal account is true.

(P. points out that I write "patriotic," in quotes, and that is misleading; Reynolds uses the term "un-American," and I took the terms ["unpatriotic" and "un-American"] to be equivalent. They might not be. [And at any rate I shouldn't have put "patriotic" in quotes.])

My broad claims are simple: a) contra Reynolds's causal account (or causal hunch?), press and speech protections flourished because the press and radical groups were organized and not arise because of public support for the press or of radical groups (thus, public perceptions of the press and of unpopular groups can fluctuate safely), and b) Reynolds is veering dangerously close to asking the press to join the bandwagon in proving its "Americanness."

Reynolds is certainly ambivalent in his post, as P. notes, but in my view this is not a subject about which one should be ambivalent. Let's imagine that the FOX poll that Reynolds relies upon is not flawed, methodologically. In other words, let's imagine that FOX did a different poll that had two characteristics: it rotated the responses about the source of problems in Iraq (just as it rotated the responses about attitudes toward candidates), and it didn't prompt subjects to blame the press for problems in Iraq. (As I note here, the FOX poll in question did in fact do both of these things, but apparently no one is interested in pointing that out; in my view, spreading the results of a misleading poll makes you complicit in the deception that the poll is trying to spread, but I suppose that's a bit severe.) Let's imagine that people really do believe that pressrooms are filled with the "un-American." What should one say about those public perceptions? Should one encourage them, perhaps? Should one warn the press that they should try to appear less "un-American" lest they suffer the consequences?

I'd prefer to ask some more questions, namely: do we in fact have a press that is "un-American"? What are the incentives for incumbents to blame the supposedly "un-American" press for current policy failures? And how does the branding effort of FOX news play into all of this? After all, if people believe that the press is un-American, then clearly FOX has potential market share to conquer!

3) And finally, reader J. writes:

I'm sure you realize that your limited efforts [to quantify media bias] don't prove [anything] one way or another. Perhaps this is only anecdotal but I was watching on PBS friday night, hot date night, let me tell you, [a man after my own heart! --BEM] their Washington Weekly program and Gloria Borger was discussing a recently postponed Senate Judiciary Cmte hearing on Same Sex marriage in a larger discussion of the issue on Capital Hill. She said that it seems that the postponement was because "perhaps they [Republicans] feel they don't have the support they thought they had." The unfortunate statement is actually wrong. It was common knowledge that Gov. Romney decided he needed to be in Mass rather than Washington, D.C. when the marriage liscenses started being issued last week. That said, I don't automatically presume she is biased in a liberal way, I do think that she didn't do her fact checking on the reason why the hearing was delayed. The assumption that she made, and was presumed to be fact, was where I think bias comes from whether it is from the left or the right. Fox news does the same thing. They don't fact check everything and get things wrong, leaving the assertion that x is true when perhaps the answer is D.

I'll let J.'s thoughts speak for themselves, and I won't even check them. I'm not a journalist. Well, not now, at any rate.



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* To be precise, I write:

he seems to view public support for press freedom as connected -- causally -- to public views on the press itself, and in particular, public views on the trustworthiness and patriotism of the press.

So I should write now: "for the purposes of the post, Reynolds argues that public support" etc.