This Is the Liberal Media?

If you haven't seen Bill Maher's critique this past week of Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity/Stephen Colbert's Rally to Keep Fear Alive, here's a link to it, but it looks like HBO is being very diligent in getting all copies of it removed from the Internet. So, that link may not work for much longer after I post this. Try, though, to find it if you can. It's about a six minute clip, and it is very good at indicating the problem with suggesting that U.S. politics features an extremist left and an extremist right that are equally empowered and problematic.

Maher's reation echoes much of my own reaction to Stewart's rally. While fundamentally this sounds like a cool idea that can both make a political point and provide comic relief at the same time (and there certainly appear to have been times that it did this), Stewart lost me most on two accounts. First, in the days leading up to the rally, he argued that this was not political. Simply put, that's pretty impossible at this point, and it is just as preposterous a statement as Glenn Beck's argument that his rally a couple months ago was not political. Based on their public personas, which are highly built in political discourse, neither Beck nor Stewart can construct public events that can be divorced from those political identities. Both, at least in their public life, have already been defined as political. So, the claim of being not political is disingenuous from either. Indeed, in both instances, this is a rhetorical ploy to try to persuade people that what they have to say transcends politics because if people believe you are not politically motivated, they might be more likely to be willing to listen to and consider your message. Additionally, as my political communication class can tell you, the statement that one is not political in and of itself is a political statement.

Typically, Stewart is, as Jeffrey P. Jones has written, more real than the "real" news because, among other things, he acknowledges his own constructedness in ways that other news programs don't. However, with this case, he's given up some of the credibility by not acknowledgeing his event as political.

Secondly, amid his summary of what the rally was all about, Stewart stated, "Not being able to distinguish between real racists and Tea Partiers, or real bigots and Juan Williams or Rick Sanchez, is an insult, not only to those people, but to the racists themselves who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate." Now, I think I get his point. While talking about how the media overdramatize everything, he's using this among other examples of how discourse in the United States focuses on these extreme and sweeping characterizations and categorizations. As he says just before this, "If we amplify everything, we hear nothing." In other words, it would be nice to have more nuanced, articulate, and reasoned accounts of things than the screaming drama that we get in the news. When it comes, then, to the specific issue of racism, he appears to be suggesting that if we lump out-and-out bigoted people with people who say or do things that are racially insensitive, we are making an error in judgment and statement. I suppose this is not a bad sentiment, but it misses the boat where racism is concerned. There already is the more precise language for discussing racism for which Stewart appears to long. Namely, it's what are called overt racism and inferential racism. Overt racism is when something is out-and-out racist, like the Ku Klux Klan or over-the-top stereotypes of racial and ethnic groups. Inferential racism is when the things one does are not explicitly about marginalizing or excluding based on race, but these things ultimately reinforce a system that maintains those kinds marginalizations and exclusions. (For more on these concepts, see Michael Omi's essay "In Living Color: Race and American Culture." For the example that I usually use in class to show inferential racism, see the case of Thomas Benya, where the school board, in deep ethnocentric fashion, failed to recognize that the style of dress they were imposing on Benya is a cultural heritage that they are assuming to be superior to Benya's Native American heritage.) Stewart's statement fails to reflect a deep representation of what racism is. Racism is not simply prejudice against or even exclusion based on race. Rather, it's a system that exists in society whereby power relations based on race are developed, maintained, and reinforced. It's not enough simply to call out the out-and-out racists. Really fighting against racism also asks us to look at how the very structures of society, the very ways we do things, and the very ways that people think reinforce racial oppression, exclusion, and marginalization. The kinds of things Stewart says are not racist actually do perpetuate racism. When this is not acknowledged, racism is reinforced and more fully entrenched. To get what I think Stewart wants, one needs to recognize the different forms of racism, not dismiss many instances of racism as not involving racism.

On a related note, the other day I watched the first couple of episodes of the new NBC show Outlaw, which stars Jimmy Smits as conservative judge Cyrus Garza, who, after some political and personal soul searching, resigns from the Supreme Court to pursue a law practice that takes on controversial cases, often with a sense of expressing some kind of moderate perspective that balances the right-wing ideologies he has practiced with the left-wing ideologies for which his father fought. The show has already been cancelled, and probably rightfully so. While not without merit as a premise, the first episode seemed really contrived (i. e., that a case made it to the Supreme Court without anyone finding particular evidence that was not that hard to uncover), the attempts at building romantic relationships are very weakly developed, and the characters themselves are not as multidimensional and well developed as they need to be for the series to succeed.

The second episode of the series involves SB 1070, the controversial immigration law passed in Arizona this year. In this case, Smits' character's firm agrees to defend a police officer who shot and severely wounded a man whom the officer believed may be an illegal immigrant. The episode offers what could be a very engaging and useful legal, ethical, and philosophical dialogue in that it asks the question of whether the police officer himself should be held responsible in a court of law for injuring this man when the officer was following what the law mandates for him to do by inquiring about the man's citizenship status. At one point, the case hinges on questions of racism (particularly racial profiling), and in the end Smits' character argues that the white police officer believing that the Latino victim walking around late at night may be an illegal immigrant was not racism, but "common sense." This occurs after Smits has, against his co-counsel and to the delight of the prosecution, stacked the jury with a group of people who come from demographics that would be seen as sympathetic to the injured man, not the police officer (e.g., Latino/a individuals, individuals of other ethnic and racial minorities, not middle and upper-class white folks). In the end, the jury decides, based on Smits' argument, that the police officer is not guilty. The idea here is that a "common sense" argument like that offered by Smits can persuade even the most potentially unsympathic jury.

The problem with this episode, though, is that it fails to acknowledge the link between racism and common sense. What is "common sense" is made of what has been accepted within a culture as basic knowledge about and understandings of the world that can be taken for granted as unquestionable. Yet, what is common sense in one culture is not common sense in another, and what has developed as common sense in a culture is highly influenced by the power relations in that culture. More specifically in terms of race, ideas about common sense in the United States--like the style of dress imposed by the school board on Thomas Benya--have been heavily based in white European cultural understandings and traditions, including beliefs about who constitutes a U.S. American person and who does not. As the show relies on this culturally constructed, nebulous idea of "common sense," it fails to recognize the inferential racism that that common sense already involves and, in the process, perpetuates the very racism it suggests we need to be cautious about identifying.

In the end, both Stewart's statement on racism and Outlaw's depiction of what constitutes racism reflect and reinforce rather conservative agendas. They both accept a status quo idea of what constitutes "common sense" and "sanity" that fails to acknowledge or even effectively engage with recognition of the power relations that influence what gets defined as "common sense" and "sanity." As Maher indicates, among other things, in his response to Stewart, "the big mistake of modern media has been this notion of balance for balance's sake--that the left is just as violent and cruel as the right, that unions are just as powerful as corporations, that 'reverse racism' is just as damaging as racism." In the end, you can't equate the effects and meanings of things when there are clear power differences between them. Stewart and Outlaw have both done just that, yet Stewart is generally acknowledged as ideologically tied to the political left; NBC, with its co-network MSNBC, is generally viewed as the most politically left-leaning major network; and as the account at this link and some of the response to it on its discussion board illustrate, Outlaw is apparently considered a show that is over the top in promoting left-wing propaganda.

Unfortunately, if Stewart and Outlaw count as "liberal media," then the real political left has little, if any, media representation. (Perhaps Maher is among the best hopes ...) On the other hand, Stewart and Outlaw help demonstrate just how baseless (and base) the "liberal media bias" idea is. As I've said before, I believe there is a "liberal" media bias, but it's already within a conservative frame, which makes it a moderately conservative bias. As Maher notes, when the right keeps staking a claim further to the right and then demanding to be met "in the middle," the middle is no longer the middle; it's the right. And, in the process, the "liberal" side of the media keeps reinforcing power relations rather than really making progress toward a fuller, more equitable and more functioning democracy.