Politics: Hunting the Gray Lady

I was chatting with some people yesterday, and I realized why the Jayson Blair story is resonating so well on both sides of the ideological spectrum. It speaks back to the big question about how the left doesn't play hardball in the same way. Some people believe it's the reason we lose sometimes, but I tend to think that it is part of a swinging pendulum situation.

We don't play the dirtiest pool right now, they do. Some think we need to play much dirtier, but we wear this like an ill-fitting suit of clothes. Something about the audacity of Tom DeLay's scummy behavior just makes us hate him tremendously while it inspires his partisans to love him and his side even harder. If a person on the left stooped to the DeLay level, the right would scream and point, but we wouldn't embrace the stooper. We still have standards.

The right will eat up the New York Times like it's eating up Jayson Blair, like it ate up CNN, like it ate up MSNBC, like it ate up the Washington Post. I never really thought of it this way before, but all the boo-hooing about the liberal media wasn't just a skewed point of view, or even an outright lie. It was a plan. We're the gullible left, and we still have a shred of soul left, and that's why these plans always work on us.

Like Alterman says, call the press liberal, again and again, until it believes that you must be right because you keep saying it. The press will then move to the right, because it's constantly being accused of being liberal. They move to the right, and the right wingers say, "Liberal media, you're still liberal!" And the media moves to the right some more.

Stand on principle, ignoring some big lie that everyone else is adopting as true, and you're a liberal bastion spitting in the wind. So you function as if that lie is true, just that one at first, and then one more. Finally, some big tree falls in the forest. The Washington Post editorial page suddenly starts reading like the Wall Street Journal. And still the right wing echo chamber says, "Liberal media, you're still liberal!"

MSNBC, inexplicably still in existence, hears the doleful cry, "liberal media!" and fires Phil Donahue just like that. They don't want to be the liberal media poster network. Hire Michael Savage and Joe Scarborough, quick. Think the right wing echo chamber will stop with the screeching calls of "Liberal media!"?

It doesn't matter how far to the right the media shifts. It isn't a relative test of whether a newspaper is moving to the right of some mythic center. It's a test of whether you are "with us or against us." You can't hire a couple assholes and fix your liberal media problems, apparently, you've got to go through the shift. "You've got to clean out your newsroom, clean out your editorial page, stifle the viewpoints that we don't like and for God's sake show the flag more!" No, it isn't easy to stop being the liberal media.

This is a process that the New York Times has undergone just as much as other papers, except for the last big shift. The editorial page hasn't fallen yet, like the Post's has in the last half-dozen years. But the New York Times reporters give the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt just as much as Posties or any other major papers' folks (and sometimes more than one Postie who hasn't lost the will to think, Dana Milbank). Times Editor (and then editorial page editor) Howell Raines was relentless and vicious during much of the second Clinton administration, and Nicholas Kristof has jiggled on the edge of left-right conversion so many times, I'm tired of writing letters to the editor about that wishy-washy waste. And don't get me started on Tom Friedman.

Now, the right wing echo chamber is gearing up for a perfect opportunity to execute a deathblow on the so-called liberal New York Times. The sound will be deafening, and if the right is successful, the changes in the paper will seem subtle at first. Krugman's columns will sound more shrill, and maybe he'll bolt the paper altogether. People will start talking about how the local coverage is getting better; that's code for how they don't want to talk about how the national coverage sounds a lot like Fox News.

Jayson Blair will spend the rest of his life apologizing for his lies. Here are two he can start with: sorry for opening the door for the right wing to attack affirmative action unjustly by my stupid actions; sorry for leaving the door open for the right wing to kill the last marginally progressive major media voice in America.

I'm sure you're sorry Jayson. But you're not as sorry as us.