…but yelling a lot is still effective
Speaking of both baseless Republican shouting, and triangulation…
I guess this NPR.org story is a little good news, bad news. On the one hand, the whole thing leads off with a Chicago Tribune column which declared the death of facts based on a recent egregious, yet still entirely typical, Republican absurdity. And then for good measure spends a little time on the “truthiness” concept, which is of course an outgrowth of Stephen Colbert’s ongoing satire of American conservatism. Short of actually coming out and reporting “Republicans have fully retreated into their own completely imaginary bullshit pseudo-reality and issued a fatwa condemning any challenges to its validity,” this isn’t too bad.
But, of course, even and perhaps especially in a story veering so close to recognizing the nature of this phenomenon, we’ve got to have “balance” of some sort. Since there’s no direct “Democrat statement” overtly blaming Republicans, there’s no direct “Republican rebuttal” in this case. There is, however, the inevitable invocation of “polarization” which achieves much the same “both sides share blame equally, same as it ever was” cop-out.
And there is also a little help from Bill Adair, whose Politifact service exemplifies just the sort of artificially-imposed “balance” which has, whoops, in fact done so much to suck the lifeblood from facts. That would be the same Politifact which awarded its “lie of the year” to Democrat claims that Republican efforts to end Medicare were, y’know, efforts to end Medicare. Presumably because they felt that consistently highlighting Republican lies would look like bias, and that their status as “referee” was more important than communicating the fact that Republicans consistently lie. Adair seems quite open about giving priority to “balance” at his alleged “fact” site, as well as the triangulator’s perennial sense of righteousness derived from hearing complaints from “both sides.”
Adair often gets emails accusing them of being biased, but he says he’s not sure who they’re supposed to be biased in favor of because they get criticized a lot by both sides. [...] “We are in a time when there’s more political discourse than ever … and when you hear somebody say your team is wrong, almost like a referee, you’re going to argue with the ref. You’re going to say the ref is biased.” Increasingly, people don’t just say the referee is biased, they say the referee is outright lying.