"Group Think"

Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode CCXVIII

A spot-on John Podhoretz column from last week.

WARNING: Most of the analysis and reporting you are now reading, watching and hearing about the presidential race is wrong — and it will continue to be wrong.

On the three major issues of year — the War on Terror, the economy and now gay marriage — the political press in the United States is opposed to President Bush's stances and opinions. Not just opposed, but passionately opposed in almost every particular and with lock-step unanimity. That opposition is leaching into the coverage of the race and making it almost impossible for readers and viewers to draw an accurate picture of the current state of political play.

Let's start with gay marriage. Reporters and editors and producers don't just favor gay marriage; they don't work with or socialize with anybody who opposes gay marriage. They might have a relative or two who does, but who listens to relatives?

This means there is, in all likelihood, not a single senior official in a major news organization (save perhaps our sister organization here at The Post, the Fox News Channel) who believes there should be a constitutional amendment affirming that marriage is between a man and a woman.

There's not a single person in a position of authority in these organizations who thinks that the Supreme Court of the state of Massachusetts has radically overreached itself and its authority by finding the Bay State's Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional.

No one there believes the mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, has conducted himself in a bizarre and lawless fashion by marrying gay couples — whom he has no legal right to marry.

Tens of millions of Americans — indeed, it may be more like hundreds of millions of Americans — think differently. Reporters, editors and producers know this intellectually, because they read polls and they see how politicians behave when the issue arises. But they don't know it instinctively. Their personal experience tells them something different, and it is very difficult to transcend their own experience.

For example, reporters across the country are trying to tell us that suburban women voters are not only supportive of gay marriage, but so wildly enthusiastic about it that they may actually cast their vote on it.

This is — there is no other word for it — delusional. Polls show no such thing. There are no such things as polls of suburban women voters. When pollsters slice and dice the results of a national survey enough to select out the results among suburban women, they are talking about responses from maybe 90 or 95 people in the entire country. There is no principle of public-opinion research that would argue that such a sample is representative in any way.

But the results conform with the hopes, wishes and beliefs in the newsrooms of the United States. And so the delusion is reported as fact.

There is a precedent for the media's blinders about gay marriage. Throughout the 1990s, we were told by journalists that there was a revolution in consciousness on the matter of gun ownership — that Americans were turning against Second Amendment rights because of school shootings and the like.

This, too, was a delusion. Second Amendment rights continue to be a potent issue for Republican politicians almost everywhere outside the Washington-to-Boston corridor. Journalists cannot gauge just how supportive American voters were and are about gun ownership because they really don't know anybody who believes in it.

Right now, media types are convinced that the issue poses great dangers for Bush and the Republicans. But why, if this is so, are the Democratic candidates for president fleeing in terror from it and devising all manner of sophistic positions that are neither pro nor con?

The same distortion field is in place, but to a lesser degree, when it comes to national economic news and about the War on Terror. Journalists tend to believe Bush's tax cuts are reckless, that they favor the rich and do not connect them to economic growth. The political press endlessly parrots the Democratic talking point about 2 million lost jobs without noting that another government survey shows a growth of 2 million jobs.

And when it comes to the War on Terror, the vast majority of working journalists thinks that the behavior of the United States since the end of the war in Afghanistan is an overreaction at best — that the Patriot Act is bad, that the war in Iraq was unnecessary and that there could not possibly be any ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

So what I'm saying is this: Don't believe what you read. Don't accept the analysis you hear on television. The inability of the political press to take the full measure of the 2004 election and the American electorate is already one of the biggest stories of the year, and the failure is only going to deepen.

John Podhoretz's new book is "Bush Country: How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane" (bush-country.com).

The Blog from the Core asserts Fair Use for non-commercial, non-profit educational purposes.

Podhoretz's column is a handy description of the situation that I wrote about, Faithful Reader, last year:

.... Come next year's general election, the Democratic Establishment — politicos, pundits, academics, and the editorial staff at innumerable mainstream media publications — is going to be genuinely shocked when George W. Bush is re-elected. You see, they believe their own propaganda, and they hardly ever get out of their professional circles to see that (golly gee) lots of folks actually do not think that George W. Bush is Satan Incarnate....

In short, Podhoretz defends Core's Law of Old Media.

Thanks, John! :-)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 03/09/04 06:10:57 PM
Categorized as Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode & Media.