Dumbing the liberal world way down!

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2014

This really can’t yield good outcomes: If you want a taste of the heinous, we’ll suggest that you read this whole post.

In our years at this site, we’ve done a lot of work on the way the press corps has covered presidential campaigns. Dating to 1972, the track record is heinous, especially for Democrats, a point we expect to explore in the next few weeks.

(For forty-two years, the liberal world has just sat there and tolerated this nonsense.)

We’ve also covered the coverage, or the non-coverage, of certain policy issues. For example:

Why do you never hear the most basic facts about American kids’ rising test scores? Why do you hear so little about the mammoth costs of American health care, as opposed to the cost of health care in other developed nations?

Why do you never hear about that corporate looting on MSNBC? That innocent question leads to our third point of emphasis:

At some point, we began to focus on a third area—the development of allegedly liberal/progressive news sites like MSNBC and the new Salon. In our view, this is still the most fascinating topic in current American media.

Understandably, we liberals want to believe in those sites. We want to believe in the people we see at those sites.

We want to believe in their savvy, their smarts. We want to believe in their honesty, their sincerity.

More broadly, we want to believe that Our Tribe, the liberal tribe, is good and smart. We want to believe that Their Tribe, the conservative tribe, is stupid, bad and vile.

Throughout human history, we the people have wanted to believe the best about our own particular tribes. At present, we suspect that this impulse will yield bad results for progressive interests.

Yesterday, we really saw the liberal world getting itself dumbed down. For starters, we read a piece by Amanda Marcotte which sat beneath these headlines at Salon:

Why conservatives prefer propaganda to reality
A new Pew study on America's media consumption offers a window into the right's collective mindset

To a distressing extent, the piece was pure propaganda—low-IQ propaganda designed to be pleasing to us.

Not much later, we clicked three links in a piece by Joan Walsh, who was once such a mainstream squish. It ran beneath these banners:

America’s modern political nightmare: Two electorates, separate and unequal
The glee with which the GOP relies on Obama-hate to turn out its base shows the disturbing racial reality of 2014

Silly us! We clicked all three links in the fourth paragraph. In all three cases, the source materials didn’t support the pleasing claims Walsh was making.

We were impressed by the low quality of those pieces at Salon. Then we watched last night’s Maddow program.

Most horrible was the closing segment, in which Maddow, for the second straight Friday, basically told us the viewers that she thinks we’re dumb. That said, we thought the whole program involved the type of feckless overstatement Maddow was loudly condemning on the part of The Other Tribe.

Many liberals want to believe in the people we meet at our new liberal sites. We think that isn’t a great idea. We’ll explore that topic next week.

Understandably, some readers don’t like it when we state such concerns. In this matter, we think their instincts are wrong.

In our view, the liberal world is being dumbed down in ways which are likely to do it harm. With that inappropriate thought in mind:

If you want to support the work of this site, you can just click here.

To watch that segment: For the second straight Friday, Maddow ended her program with a kitschy game show segment, The Friday Night News Dump.

To watch her hype the segment, click this. Warning! You’ll find yourselves being talked down to, in a fairly obvious way.

To watch the full game show segment, click here. Warning! Brain cells dying!

Presumably, this is a ratings move. It reads like defeat to us.