Frank Rich is a former theater critic and not a former “serious” journalist, so it’s not surprising that he is almost alone (add Paul Krugman) among the mainstream media writers who can’t quite understand why the Beltway elite insists on giving folks like John McCain almost unlimited exposure. The bloggers have beaten this drum forever, but of course, no one listens. Being wrong is never fatal in our modern media culture; in fact it’s almost a prerequisite for success, as oxymoronic as that may sound. The particular instance is Afghanistan, where the pundits and politicians who were wrong before debate among themselves about what’s to be done to fix the mess they created. This is a function of the media’s habit of allowing the debate to exist only within a narrow range of opinion; only in Washington could the “centrist” position on health care exclude the public option supported by the vast majority of people or the “centrist” position on Afghanistan be a doubling down that the American people instinctively know (and they are correct) will be a disaster. Not only do they consider business as usual the centrist position, they call exponents of that position centrists. Far be it from me to pick up the challenge and differentiate between the “centrist” position and the conservative position, since they appear to differ not much of a whit. On health cre, one insists on enriching the insurance companies, and the other insists that any bill that passes must enrich the insurance companies, but they will pass on voting for it, thank you very much.
But while this is a problem in the media, it is not necessarily of modern vintage.
I am currently reading Henry David Thoreau’s journal, and today I came across this passage, which might (though perhaps far less elegantly) have been written by any modern blogger. It was written on the occasion of the issuance of the first issue of the Atlantic:
There is no need of a law to check the license of the press. It is law enough, and more than enough, to itself. Virtually, the community have come together and agreed what things shall be uttered, have agreed on a platform and to excommunicate him who departs from it, and not one in a thousand dare utter anything else.
He went on to observe that the self censorship in his day applied to discussion about religion, so maybe things are a bit different. Not only is any challenge to religion off the table, but any challenge to “centrism”, as that term is defined by a curious amalgam of people in Washington who seem to know it when they see it, no matter what the public may think. The “centrist” position may always steer us wrong, whether it be economic policy or foreign policy, but if it is within their self-defined middle it will remain the only respectable game in town.
By the way, and pretty much totally off the point, the immediate cause of Thoreau’s rant was the fact that the editor of the Atlantic deleted a sentence from an article that Thoreau had submitted for publication. He was writing about a towering pine tree, and he wrote this:
It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower over me still.
Blasphemy apparently, but pretty weak tea today. IThe incident shows, I suppose, that despite the narrow mindedness of those that control our discourse, new ideas have a way of seeping in.