Another excellent piece (what else is new):

I spent the morning retweaking a column on the weekend antiwar rallies. I didn’t write anything about that here, because A) everyone else was talking about it and B) all I could bring to the table was the same plate of canapés everyone else was serving, so never mind. I did have one idea I didn’t see elsewhere, but I decided to save it for the national column. As it turns out, I didn’t use it, so I’ll bore you with it now.



It has to do with the Stalin-flavored character of the rally’s organizers, the ANSWER / Action / Workers World Party crew. When I read the accounts over the weekend, I wondered why no reporter mentioned that the folks behind these events were FLAMING COMMIES, to put it bluntly. I asked a friend who holds the media in genial contempt why he thought the issue wasn’t raised, and he said the reporters knew, but didn’t want to cripple the antiwar movement by pointing out uncomfortable facts.

He’s wrong. There is a liberal bias in the media, but in most cases it’s not the willful contortion of events to fit an predefined agenda; editors don’t have a Play-Doh Fun Factory with a special Pinko Template so they can squeeze the raw data into pleasing shapes. Not to say that papers don’t embark on crusades for liberal matters; they do. But my paper also just did a big series on hideous waste of taxpayer money at the Department of Transportation, and gave it as much play as any Enron story. Probably more. We ran Enron-related wire copy, but this MnDOT story was spread over three days, consumed vast tracks of the news hole, and had custom graphics. We went to town.

People forget these stories when they accuse the entire enterprise of bias; those who are convinced that we wake every day wondering how we can stuff another thick choking wad of Democratic goodness down the reader’s windpipe give us no credit for exposing the perfidy of the state, because we ran an photo of Bush in hooting-chimp mode six months ago. We also get angry calls from people who think we’re in the pay of Sharon. The hard left hates us as much as the hard right, and sure that counts for something.

Anyway. The bias isn’t a sin of commission; it's a sin of omission. There are things some people in the news-gathering business just don’t see. We all have blind spots, and perhaps for reporters in the mainstream media one of those blind spots is the unsavory nature of some of their coreligionists. They don’t know, because they haven’t bothered to look. The idea of investigating who’s behind a peace rally doesn’t occur to them because they’re not inclined to think there might be anything unsavory about the organizers.

How could there be? They’re for peace. And most people in most newsrooms know someone who’s involved in the peace movement - an old friend, a neighbor, someone from church. (Yes, reporters go to church.) Everyone in the paper has read a dozen stories of Spunky Grandmas going off to march for peace. Even if Peace in a specific instance might have perilous repercussions, Peace in General is surely a concept we can all uphold. There’s no more reason you'd investigate the advocates of peace than you’d investigate a food shelf.

And if the food shelf turned out to be run by anarchists who think grocery store workers should seize control, smash the cash registers and open the doors to the poor - well . . . it's a idealistic notion that means well, but it’s not typical of food shelves in general, and if we lead with that fact, people might not give to food shelves, so let's just call them "advocates for the co-op grocery movement."

You really want to lose the argument with these people? Point out that the peace-rally organizers are Communists. I’ve noted this odd phenomenon for years; you can be indifferent to Communism, you can be an actual Communist, and no one will really care, but opposition to Communism will really make some people suspicious.

It’s not that they support Communism - oh, heavens, no - but they’re suspicious of anyone who seemed particularly interested in confronting the Red Menace. Communism is like, well, chiropractic medicine. They might not believe in it, but they have a friend who did, and all in all what’s the harm, and besides, the doctors want to suppress it, and the doctors are a special-interest group interested in their own turf, so what are they trying to hide? I mean I knew this doctor who complained all the time about malpractice insurance costs, and you should have seen his house. Like he was hurting.

That’s how the argument goes. The argument is never about Communism, it’s about the reasons one might have for opposing it. The Fang’d and Hateful Shade of Reagan hangs over the conversation - in fact, now that I think of it, this is the adjunct to Godwin’s Law. Just as the invocation of Hitler in a usenet flamewar means the conversation has come to an end, the invocation of Reagan in defense of one’s anti-communism means you’ve just lost the case, because you’ve revealed yourself as an idiot from a strange alternate universe where Reagan is not a punchline.

Remember: some on the left in the 80s were seized with the Spirit of Nixon, and wanted nothing more than détente and rapprochement; they wanted endless negotiations that would codify the precise number, size, and destructive potential of the missiles aimed at our cities. If we all agreed to have 27,293 missiles apiece, and we swapped ballet companies once a year, everything would be fine. For us, anyway. For those living on the other side of the wall, well, they had our warmest personal regards and best wishes. We had our system; they had theirs.

Which is like saying we fed our dogs, and they beat them and put them in kennels, but since we both have dogs we must celebrate our common bond.

The Anti-Communists didn’t buy it; they wanted to confront Communism and defeat it. They kept pointing out the nature of the Communist regimes, and insisting that everything the nutball left said was metaphorically true of the West was factually true of the Communists, and more so. This was the debate in the 80s, and it’s mostly forgotten today. Those who have suspicions and antipathy towards Communism in 2003 are viewed with the same bemusement you’d extend towards someone who runs a website devoted to bringing back "WKRP in Cincinnati." They’re an intellectual Disco Stu.

Nowadays, if you point out that someone’s a Communist, you might well be accused of - dum dum DUMMMM - McCarthyism. The term has morphed from its original meaning. It no longer means falsely accusing someone of being a Communist. It now includes correctly identifying someone as a Communist, or ascribing a taint to someone because they don’t reject the Communists in their midst. (I’ll admit there’s a significant difference between the two.)

But let’s leave this increasingly insupportable series of generalizations, and return to the point. Do reporters suppress the nature of ANSWER / ACTION because they don’t want to embarrass the movement? No. Do they secretly admire the ANSWER / ACTION / WWP positions on China, North Korea, and other dictatorships? Of course not. (Cuba is another story.) Are they inclined to wonder who’s behind the rallies? No. NeoNazis, Klansmen, Separatists, Militias, the Promise Keepers - these words make reporters’ antennae quiver. “Communist” does not. It’s an institutional blindspot, and if you doubt it, consider this:

A fashion designer premiers a line of clothes emblazoned with the hammer-and-sickle. The story runs in the variety section; there are quotes from fashionistas about retro iconography, the kitschy appeal of Socialist Realist art, and nostalgia for the stability of a binary, pre-terrorist world. The story would have the tone of a worldly cultured person peering through a monocle at a butterfly whose wings were amusingly deformed.

Now imagine that a fashion designer splatters swastikas all over the Spring Line. Would the items be reviewed with the same bemused detachment?

The hammer and sickle don’t evoke the same reaction in the average journalist as the swastika - and that’s the problem. Bias isn’t a sin, if you ask me. But indifference is.



If I may add something here, this is pretty much the same situation as on the typical college campus, among other places. The high school kid who drives my daughter to school has a T-shirt on now and then with a hammer and sickle on it. I seriously doubt she wears it to support communism...I think it's some kind of clique thing. But nobody blinks an eye, and certainly nobody has sent her home to change it. Now imagine it was a swastika.