Intellectual honesty mostly dead — but few partisans even care

For a political partisan, there are only two positions. His own position — parroting the party line of his group — is absolutely correct. Everybody else is lumped together. Anybody who dares to point out something which is outside of his group’s talking points must be shouted down.

Public discourse is a disgrace in this country, mostly because few people care about anything other than their side winning. Almost nobody is interested in another point of view, much less learning something which hadn’t occurred to him before — and which falls outside the bounds of his group’s talking points.

The faux controversy over an editorial delivered by close to 200 local TV stations owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group is a case in point. For instance, New York magazine had this headline: “News Anchors Reciting Sinclair Propaganda Is Even More Terrifying in Unison.” All the other news networks have had similar stories, mostly with headlines darkly reporting that TV anchors at those stations were “forced” to “recite Sinclair propaganda.”

What actually happened?

Sinclair owns or operates close to 200 local television stations around the country. (For the sake of full disclosure, my ex-wife worked as a news producer for a Sinclair station years ago, but I have no opinion about the company.) The ownership of the company holds views that lean in the conservative direction. Every now and then, the company sends scripts to its local stations which they are required to run as editorials.

Here’s one example of local anchors delivering the editorial. It’s pretty tame by modern political standards, but because it points out — correctly — that some media outlets are too quick to report things that aren’t true in order to push an agenda, the political left has jumped all over this. Because the editorial complains about media pushing agendas with “facts” that turn out to be false, the progressive left went ballistic and complained that this is simply propaganda for Donald Trump.

So what exactly is “propaganda”? By the definition being used here, it seems to mean “something which the left doesn’t agree with.”

Why are headlines consistently saying that anchors were “forced” to deliver this message? Do these people understand that news anchors at every station are reading scripts? Do they understand that the news readers rarely write their own copy? Do they understand that these are highly paid television performers to compete for these jobs — for the right to read other people’s words?

When I owned newspapers in the distant past, my newspapers’ editorials were my opinion. Our news stories were shaped by my idea of fairness. When I edited newspapers for other people, there were times when a publisher dictated what our opinion or position would be about a particular subject.

This is exactly as it should be.

If you own a media outlet, you have every right to dictate the messages promoted by your stations or newspapers or magazines. In the same way, I have the right to write whatever I want here. Because I own my own site, you know my words represent my own beliefs, not someone else’s.

Television networks and stations all over this country express politically biased beliefs every day. CNN and some other networks have become the PR arm of the Democratic Party and the anti-gun lobby. Why is one media owner’s conservative opinion “propaganda” and another media owner’s progressive left-leaning opinions are simply brave journalism?

When I’ve pointed out this double standard a few times on sites where the Sinclair editorial was being vilified, I have been shouted down by people pretending this “propaganda” is unprecedented. They don’t know what they’re talking about, but they have no interest in facts. They care only about repeating the talking points of the left.

Nobody could accuse me of being sympathetic to Donald Trump, but I have great sympathy for truth and fairness. For intellectual honesty. And for the right of media owners to deliver whatever message they want to deliver — whether I agree with it or not.

This selective blindness isn’t just a problem of the left. It’s a problem across the board. It’s a very human problem. In a world where people are more interested in lobbing “memes” at each other than in doing serious thinking, public discourse is pretty much dead.

Note: If you have any interest in why public discourse is so shallow and insipid today, I strongly suggest you start with a 1985 book by Neil Postman called “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.” Postman was writing about how television had changed everything by the early ’80s, but what he has to say is even more true in the age of social media.