Another look at the Big Picture

In almost a perfect follow-up to my recent post on creating and examining the Big Picture, The Atlantic published this story by Norm Ornstein on the media narrative in this election season. When Conspiracy Theories Don't Fit the Media Narrative examines the maddening tendency of not just cable news, but our premier newspapers of record to report stories that conform to whatever theme for the election that surfaced arbitrarily along the way. This time around, The Washington Post and New York Times collectively determined that this season they would push the narrative that Republican establishment types have reclaimed the party for conventional nominees as opposed to wacko tea partiers. So things are just humming along nice and smoothly as the nomination process is back in the hands of campaign managers and national leaders, democracy be damned.

The subtle underpinnings that this whole concept is anti-democratic seems to be lost in the shuffle. As though the RNC and lavishly funded right wing operatives are saying "dear God, we can't let these people pick our nominees, they're friggin' crazy!" If we put aside for the moment that yes, they are, and so is your entire ideology it says to the objective observer that Republicans really do need to hide their real intentions in order to win office. Ornstein points out that the major newspapers, whose reporting and facts we are supposed to accept as honest, even true, are in fact dependent on someone else's preconceived narrative. Facts, like belief in conspiracy theories by these supposed establishment, civilized Republicans, that do not fit the frame are ignored. But boy do we here about the trivial gaffes from Democratic nominees.

So, does this critique undermine my recent support of big picture thinking? Am I hopelessly biased in favor of independent and occasionally dissident analysts like Thomas Frank or AlterNet? Maybe, but there is a crucial element missing in the narrative examined by Ornstein, empiricism. Generalizations that lead to narratives must first be drawn from actually existing evidence. Examining the primary sources, which unfortunately often includes newspaper articles that may or may not be suffering from the very cart-before-the horse thinking presented by Ornstein, is the first step in an historian's trade. Some evidence may support your hypothesis about the past, other evidence may not but it is the evidence that drives the narrative not the other way around.

Empiricism should be a self-evident basis for trying to understand who we are and where we come from but those two things are also based on the fact that we are human. And humans are erratic, unpredictable, and sometimes downright irrational. It takes years of training and experience to overcome these tendencies, and often more to locate the in others. Then there are problems of identifying agendas, which can be as benign as meeting a deadline or as insidious as deliberate deception of your audience to further some other goal. In the case Ornstein examines it is the former, time constraints or even simple laziness can lead a reporter to depend on what was written yesterday to inform his or her findings.

We hope that Ornstein is correct when he concludes:

Of course, this does not mean that the press has a Republican bias, any more than it had an inherent Democratic bias in 2012 when Akin, Angle, and Mourdock led the coverage. What it suggests is how deeply the eagerness to pick a narrative and stick with it, and to resist stories that contradict the narrative, is embedded in the culture of campaign journalism. The alternative theory, that the Republican establishment won by surrendering its ground to its more ideologically extreme faction, picking candidates who are folksy and have great resumes but whose issue stances are much the same as their radical Tea Party rivals, goes mostly ignored. Meanwhile, there was plenty of coverage of the admittedly bonehead refusal by Kentucky Democratic Senate candidate Alison Lundergan [sic] Grimes to say she had voted for Obama—dozens of press references to NBC’s Chuck Todd saying it was “disqualifying”—but no stories saying that references to Agenda 21 or talking about terrorists and drug lords out to kill Arkansans were disqualifying.

 If you would like to read more about the latter effect of deliberate deception on our polarized political system, I would suggest Ornstein's book co-authored with Thomas Mann. It is a fairly objective look at how dysfunctional a government based on compromise and pragmatism becomes when extremism is the norm.