It dawned on me yesterday as I walked into the office that despite my indie pretensions, I’m just a mouthpiece for The Man. That is The Establishment — something vitally important to society because it gives somebody something to be against.
I was thinking about that because I’ve been obsessing again over allegations of liberal bias in the press. Every time I hear these allegations I get beside myself with indignation: It’s not liberal bias, you idiots! It’s the result of covering history in a hurry, I insist. It’s Messy! Mistakes happen, I say.
I can’t remember anybody being the least bit persuaded by these and other defenses. Which could mean they were ignoring anything that differed from their preconceived notions, or that I wasn’t much of a debater, or both, or something else entirely.
In any case, I’ve decided that it’s OK to be workin’ for The Man every night and day, it’s OK to have these liberal leanings that I acquired in college, that I have nothing to apologize for, because as long as my colleagues and I are fulfilling our roles as unpatriotic stooges of labor, feminazis, peaceniks and pregnant illegal aliens, we are providing vital nutrients to the hungry maw of rightwing punditry. There are exceptions, of course, like when we nurture the need of unions, feminazis, peaceniks and pregnant illegal aliens to believe we’re not reporting their side of the story.
I see now that nobody with an ax to grind will ever be happy with my cut-it-down-the-middle notions of news. And to them, I feel like asking: Why should I change, when I’m doing you so much good the way I am? You need me and my Democratic-voting co-workers to explain why Rush has 20 million listeners instead of 200 million. It’s me, The Man, standing in your way. It must be, because the next-most plausible explanation is that everybody not listening to Rush has plausible reasons to disagree with him. Maybe we put some of those ideas in their heads, but maybe they just don’t have much taste for the medicine he’s peddling.
I’m picking on the rightwingers because it’s fun and they need to be under attack to feel good about themselves (is The Man aloof and condescending? You betcha!), but the rest of you with your political bones-to-pick shouldn’t look to me for comfort. See, I do have one fundamental bias: That ideology provides a useful way to ignore convincing counterarguments. I’ve talked guns with gun people, religion with religion people, society with society people, and there’s one thing I’ve figured out: Everybody has a good point. So if you come to me complaining about how we didn’t cover the news as you would’ve preferred, I can point you to the 5 billion other people whose preferred version of the story went unreported, too.
I’m not saying The Man’s has no responsibilities, and that nobody has good cause to Stick it To Me. We have to take into account the ravings of ideologues because they didn’t get infected by some virus from a Martian meteorite. Ideology responds to the stuff earthlings get wrong. The ideological answer hardly ever gets it right, but the ideology came from somewhere, and that’s what The Man has to be paying attention to.