BY WILLIAM F. GAVIN
Reading the New York Times on Sunday always reminds me what a technical and professional wonder that newspaper is. For breadth and depth of coverage, good writing, and cultural news, it has few if any real challengers. But it is so afflicted with obvious left/liberal bias in its news coverage (or, often, lack of coverage), and especially in its doctrinaire editorials, it has become a tragic case of ideological rigidity.
It is as if someone created an automobile that was a miracle of design, performance, and style, with one fatal flaw–it could only turn left.
But how can this be? How can highly educated, articulate, bright, professionally competent, ambitious people who run and staff the Times not realize the blatant prejudice that so often distorts news coverage in what they print and what they fail to print? These are people who worship at the shrine of reason and science, proclaim their own fairness, and believe, as most left/liberals do, that they are simply smarter than everyone else, especially conservatives.
The answer to that might lie in a question once asked by some historian (I forget who): How would you know you were living in a dark age?
Good question. If indeed you were living in a dark age, where knowledge of the past is lost, you would have no way of knowing this because it is only knowledge of the past that would provide you with the criteria to judge the state of knowledge in your own time.
A similar problem, I believe, afflicts the left/liberal academics, intelligentsia, and journalists. They judge conservative ideas solely on the views of their own in-group, accepting unquestioningly pious platitudes and dogmatic certainties (e.g., political correctness in all its forms, “diversity,” and faith in the practically unlimited power of government to ameliorate social, economic, and educational evils). They have no other source of knowledge because their own viewpoint is seen by them as the one that God (if She existed) would hold if She had access to all the facts.
They are bright as hell, but they live in a kind of dark age and do not have a clue this is the case because their world-view precludes the idea that there can be real knowledge outside the scientific/secular, liberal/left pieties. Thus, to accuse them of prejudice, as we conservatives do, makes no sense to them–how, in their view, can highly educated, affluent, literate, cultured, rational people filled with compassion be wrong?
This is why we have no true intellectual debate in the United States.
The New York Times has long since adopted the usual view of all ideological absolutists: I never debate those who disagree with me—I simply dismiss them. President Obama is the master of this tactic. Courteous, civil, reasonable, and articulate–this is how he sees himself and this is how he is perceived by his cultists.
There is much to be said about this viewpoint The President is a man of many gifts. But beneath the veneer of civility, he cannot always hide the cold contempt in which he holds those who disagree with him. Remember when he told a San Francisco audience during the 2008 campaign that conservatives “cling to their guns and religion” and are xenophobic? Well, he really believes that, because that is the conceptual framework in which he has operated all of his adult life. His contempt is the hallmark of his presidency and of his cultists.
No wonder the IRS went after conservative groups–I mean who the hell do these conservatives believe they are–real citizens?
Editor’s Note: William F. Gavin was a speech writer for President Richard Nixon and long-time aide to former House Republican Leader Bob Michel. Among his books is his latest, Speechwright, published by Michigan State University Press.