David Roberts of Vox has penned a tale of two media, dealing first with how a profusion of conservative outlets has pulled the Republican party to the right -- the subject of a recent Harvard study -- then pivoting to analyze the mainstream media’s belated (and still incomplete) awakening to the GOP’s “radicalism.”
“One of the longstanding critiques of mainstream media on the left,” wrote Roberts in a Thursday article, “was that reporters in the Beltway ‘Village’ failed to grasp modern conservatism and wrote about it in such a way as to sand down and mute its extremity…[T]here are still plenty of mainstream political reporters who cling to the both-sides illusion to this day…But as the far right sends the Republican Party through an ever-more-absurd series of showdowns and tantrums, the illusion is fading.”
Media coverage aside, Roberts contended that today’s hard-right GOP “is trapped in a downward spiral…and only something truly catastrophic to the party's fortunes could break it out. For now, thanks to an idiosyncratic combination of (old, white) voter intensity, gerrymandering, and billionaire funding, radicalism still works for Republicans, perhaps not at the presidential level, but certainly in Congress. That's likely to continue for quite some time, rendering American democracy dysfunctional at a time when it desperately needs to act.”
From Roberts’s piece (bolding added):
There's been dedicated conservative media since the post–World War II years…but for most of that time, it simply [wasn’t] big, well-funded, or stable enough to serve as conservatives' only media. It existed as a hectoring presence on the periphery of the Republican Party…
…There are now hundreds of conservative media outlets, not only the national ones you've heard of but regional, local, and niche outlets…It's a full media ecosystem; there's no longer any need for conservatives to stray outside it to stay informed, or "informed"…
Populist right-wing media has become the primary channel through which conservatives are educated, organized, and activated…
The party establishment encouraged the rise of the right-wing media and exploited the Tea Party for electoral advantage, but now it has awakened a monster it can't control…
The radicalization of the right, driven by big-donor money and conservative media, is the defining feature of US politics today.
One of the longstanding critiques of mainstream media on the left, from the very beginning of the blogosphere, was that reporters in the Beltway "Village" failed to grasp modern conservatism and wrote about it in such a way as to sand down and mute its extremity. Their attachment to a certain mental model of politics — "both sides" with their mirror-image extremes and centers — made them blind to "asymmetrical polarization"…
…[T]here are still plenty of mainstream political reporters who cling to the both-sides illusion to this day, imagining politics as a sober business conducted by Very Serious People in suits, premised on a shared set of facts and assumptions. But as the far right sends the Republican Party through an ever-more-absurd series of showdowns and tantrums, the illusion is fading. Now lots of established journalists seem to have moved on to the bargaining stage of grief, holding out hope that the Adults will once again take charge.
But that train has left the station. The GOP is trapped in a downward spiral now, and only something truly catastrophic to the party's fortunes could break it out. For now, thanks to an idiosyncratic combination of (old, white) voter intensity, gerrymandering, and billionaire funding, radicalism still works for Republicans, perhaps not at the presidential level, but certainly in Congress. That's likely to continue for quite some time, rendering American democracy dysfunctional at a time when it desperately needs to act. That's depressing to lots of journalists (and to me), but getting past it begins with identifying and describing it clearly, without nostalgia or false hope.
Last November, Roberts, then with the environmentalist magazine Grist, tweeted a series of thirty-six thoughts on the state of conservatism. The collated tweets received considerable attention on lefty outlets such as Democratic Underground. Among Roberts’s musings: “[T]he very nature of global, interconnected, complex modern life rubs conservatives the wrong way (& will more & more)…So there will only be increasing impetus for cons[ervatives] to retreat into fantasy, into simple morality tales & ideological truisms.”
