“News media bias is real. It reduces the quality of journalism, and fosters distrust among readers and viewers. This is bad for democracy.” So says Timothy P. Carney in an op-ed in the New York Times back in 2015 as the Republican presidential primary season was heating up. If it was true in 2015, the presence of Donald Trump has etched it into granite as Moses’s missing eleventh commandment.
My window into this state of affairs in the broader media is National Geographic Magazine. Under the generalship of Susan Goldberg, the magazine never fails to put on full display its Left bonafides. I’d say “liberal”, but in today’s America “liberal” ropes in “Left”, “socialist”, and “progressive”. These folks aren’t about “freedom” – the old and forgotten Latin root of the word – since they can’t resist feeding more power to the state. If they can’t tax it, they want to control or ban it, and sometimes own it – and, more likely, all of the above. For them, the only solution for life’s troubles, real or imagined, is another dollop of the state in the form of a New-Deal-This-Or-That. It’s their go-to fix.
But I digress. As is my habit of reading the magazine cover-to-cover, the August 2018 issue (I’ve fallen behind) had right out of the gate what would have been an old-fashioned newspaper op-ed in more bucolic times. Augustin Fuentes’s “Are We as Awful as We Act Online?” raises a poignant question. He’s right for asking the question if he means that much online conversation takes a detour into the sewer. The only problem is that his answer to the question is “No”.
How does he get to “no” when he could have gotten to “yes”? Maybe a clue is found in the postscript bio at the end of the article. Leveraging his credential as a Notre Dame anthropology professor, he authored Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You: Busting Myths About Human Nature. It seems that he’s determined to set the record straight on “human nature” lest the rubes (of which he might consider me one) continue to think it’s real. In the land of the unawares where we find Mr. Fuentes – the GPS setting is a college faculty lounge – human beings are as fungible as Playdough. The ideologically partisan notion is cemented in his head as Jimmy Hoffa’s cement gollashes were to his feet. There is a fixedness (“hard-wired”, his words) to us in the form of cooperation, but that evolved. The whole thing is contingent on physical and social circumstances. So, it really isn’t fixed. It’s forever fungible.
The counterpoint to the Fuentes weltanschauung is two thousand years older. Humans are flawed … by nature. Christians call it original sin. And those failings apply to Mr. Fuentes and his colleagues at Notre Dame. It applies to the civil-service protected and unionized government employees who will be increased and empowered to manage more of life according to the preferences of Mr. Fuentes, et al. A paper credential or government office doorway don’t magically confer a free pass from our defects, be it ignorance, prejudices, emotional excesses, or the Peter Principle. To think otherwise is to channel Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, the National Socialist goons, and every other utopian despot who has soiled our recent times.
The “nurture” bias in the age-old nature/nurture debate is a ruling banality in ed schools and the host of the other soft sciences, with emphasis on “soft”. It’s become the favorite weapon for the politicized professoriate. The target is anyone who dares to challenge the hokum. Take a look at Mr. Fuentes’s screed in NGM.
When mentioning the trolls, he chronicles only examples of the crazies on the “right”, from the Twitter abuse of a feminist professor to the glorification of Martin Luther King’s assassin. Of course, he couldn’t leave Pres. Trump out of the deplorables file. When it came to his prescription for the proper response to the brutes, his models for proper comportment, not surprisingly, were #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and gun-controlling high school students in Florida. They were praised by Fuentes because they “acted to collectively to punish and shame … bullying and abuse”. Translation: they hounded opposing viewpoints into silence.
Apparently, the fact that legions of trolls inhabit the environs of his favorite causes never crossed his mind. Nicholas Sandmann and his fellow Covington students were slandered in the media and Twitter. Self-proclaimed Muslim activist Reza Aslan alluded to Sandmann, “Honest question. Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s?”. Comedian Ben Isaac Hoffman expounded, “I know I have fans in Paris Hills, Ky. If you know this little s????, punch him in the nuts and send me the video of it and I’ll send you all my albums on vinyl, autographed.” StreetCorner Music owner Uncle Shoes tweeted, “IF WE COULD WIPE THESE FAMILIES OUT WE WOULD BE IN A MUCH BETTER PLACE. F??? THIS S???”, followed by “LOCK THE KIDS IN THE SCHOOL AND BURN THAT B???? TO THE GROUND”. The Twitter universe is littered with lefty trolls, and many have super-rich/coastal zip codes.
Lest we forget, what about Judge Kavanaugh’s treatment in the Left’s production of Orwell’s “The Two Minutes Hate”? Wild and unsubstantiated stories of gang rape were leveraged into more than Twitter incontinence. Mobs roamed the streets and hallways of DC. “We Believe [the women]” became the rallying cry for the Left’s version of vigilante justice. The digital form of the hate was bad enough, but the zealots went in for the physical form as well. Talk to Jeff Flake, Susan Collins, and Joe Manchin. Fuentes found it easy to ignore the Left because he’s a man of the Left.
I maintain my National Geographic Magazine subscription for many reasons, and none have to do with aboriginal nudity. Honest. For one, I do so to monitor the intellectual bankruptcy that afflicts our media. Some sectors can no longer be trusted. After a while, people begin to turn them off. That’ll hit them in a sensitive spot: their pocketbook. For the time being, I’ll continue to monitor National Geographic‘s mimicking of Mother Jones.
RogerG