Media > Politics

The Clinton era marked a transition period in modern politics, marking the inflexion point between the printing press and the modern mass media-industrial complex. CNN was born under Reagen and had struggled to it's feet by Tiananmen in 1989 with enough vim to coin the term the CNN Effect. 24-hour infotainment and the internet has redefined journalism and news in ways we still don't quite get.

Douthat now suggests that now Fox News has actually contributed to the decline of the right. Riffing off a Jonah Goldberg quote that the popularity of Fox and talk shows is evidence of the right's strength, Douthat suggests that the right has mistook the forest for the trees, counterpointing conservative popularity against liberal policy. Douthat makes a strong case that the ever-increasing market share of conservative media outlets (I still snicker when I hear Fox News, the most popular cable news channel, deride the mainstream media) is not only a misplaced metric, but actually counterproductive to the conservative movement. Where once the journal of elite intellectualism guided the spirit of conservatism, today's reliance on popular media has degraded both the quality of the intellectual foundations for contemporary conservatism, and the quality of the interlocutors to parse the differences between liberalism and conservatism.

The Tea Parties make for an interesting case study of this struggle, as they've come to dominate the cutting edge of conservative thought. Lind reminds us that as much as establishment Republicans have attempted to co-opt the Tea Party movement, it was birthed as a mass movement. It lacked(s) ideologies, manifestos, or recognizable leaders. Glenn Beck gave it an enormous profile last summer, and it's as much the child of Fox as anything institutional or formal, hailed as a bellweather of both common American opinion and the future of Republican politics. The irony is that both are almost institutionally impaired from serving as intellectual pioneers.

Journalism is hardly the place to develop extended discourse. An editor or owner might produce a general perspective, filter a bias into the overall coverage, but a prolonged, rigorous development of philosophy and ideology just isn't possible in a media environment. The media can shape or guide or affect policy sure, but by journalism is about reporting, telling what happened. Obviously, plenty of journalists have been extremely influential in creating coherent ideology, but as authors, not journos, 1200 words at a time. Columnists at WSJ or WP or NYT comment. And bloggers are almost prisoners of echo chambers of their own devising.

Likewise, the Tea Parties are like hydras without heads. Vaguely libertarian, vaguely fiscally conservative, vaguely racist, wholly diffused. It isn't even cellular, with little mini-hierarchies that report to bigger hierarchies. It's as much a group of people defined by what they're not than by what they are, and that's not an environment conducive to producing manifestos. Even if regional organizations produce intellectual coherence, there's no reason their beliefs will translate to the next community or a reason it should. Vox populi, vox deus might eventually produce social changes, warp the fabric of American culture, but those changes take generations, centuries. Not the mechanism I'd trust to experiment with future policy.