Who you calling “moderate”?

posted at 8:28 pm on December 21, 2009 by Steven Den Beste

“Name that party!” It’s a game (of sorts) that Glenn Reynolds sometimes plays in watching news reports. What it’s really about is the way that the MSM has taken to explicitly referring to politicians as being Republican, if they are, but tends to omit the party designation for Democrats.

They particularly do this in cases of reporting about scandals, and that’s what Glenn is trying to point out. He thinks they’re using it to try to tar the Republican party. I think there’s an element of that going on, but I think there’s a deeper message, more subtle and a lot more dangerous.

What the MSM is trying to do is to make “being a Democrat” seem as if it’s the norm. To that end, they omit mention of Democratic party affiliation because that’s dog-bites-man. It’s usual to be a Democrat. It’s what you expect. It isn’t noteworthy. Being a Democrat is the default.

They include mention of Republican affiliation because that’s man-bites-dog. Republicans are rare, unusual, strange folks. No one you know or like is a Republican, of course.

I have run into that a priori assumption that “of course all of us are Democrats.” But that was when I lived in Massachusetts, where D’s outnumber R’s by something like 7:1, so when the woman I was talking to said “Democrats like us” to me, she had good reason for that generalization. (Once when I went to vote, one of the women working at the precinct saw the “R” after my name and said, “A Republican! We don’t get many of those!” I took a glance at her list, and she was right.)

What the MSM wants to do is to marginalize conservatives and Republicans and make them appear to be extreme. In fact, you see the word “moderate” applied more often in MSM reports to Democrats and the word “extremist” more often to Republicans. It’s part of the same effort, though less subtle.

Do I think this is an organized plot? In fact, I do not, for the most part. The MSM is doing their reporting in that way because it’s how they really see the world. They are nearly all Democrats.
And it’s a truism that nearly everyone thinks of themself as being centrist. If the Democrats in the MSM subconsciously define “moderate” as being congruent to their own political position, then in fact most Republicans really would seem to be extremist.

Still, whether this is a conscious or unconscious act by them, it is more dangerous than it first appears. It’s part of how the MSM sold Obama to us as a “moderate”.

[I was having trouble with WordPress earlier and posted a couple of times with empty article bodies. Sorry about that.]

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