Just Round Up the Usual Suspects

This won't get much national mainstream news coverage.

It's nothing new, of course.

It would be natural for those on the right to view it as a left-wing conspiracy. It happens too much to be chance. But while some in the business surely act consciously (and sometimes they publicly state this, if you'll recall how one editor said the media would be worth many percentage points of voters for Kerry in the 2004 presidential election), making it easier to believe all of them do it, a conspiracy is too hard to maintain for so long. Only a natural way of looking at things can explain the breadth and duration of the bias. It's group think. Since they all do it, they think it is normal and even middle of the road.

And this group think leads reporters and their editors to view acts by conservatives or those on the right differently than acts by liberals or those on the left. We can see this when you get an occasional report about some communist group in America. How quaint, the reporter thinks! How idealistic of them to still believe in the perfectibility of man and that equality talk! Never mind the oppression, gulags, and body count of actual communists. The communists want what we on the left want. Sure, they may get out of control in their enthusiasm to do good, and we can't approve of that nasty business. But still, their hearts are in the right place. Besides, Senator McCarthy didn't like Communists and threw out wild accusations. And McCarthyism is bad.

Nazis would never get the cute and cuddly treatment from the reporters. And they shouldn't, of course. Nazis did evil things. But neither should their Communist counter-parts get friendly treatment. But it is worse than that for those on the modern right when the media casts their gaze on them. Conservatives, who are alien to the media, are automatically under suspicion of being one step from Nazism (which is evil!). Never mind that National Socialists thought they were pursuing good goals just as Communists did--they just didn't get the body count as high as the Communists.

So when some terrible act takes place, the media looks for the usual suspects--right wingers who are the tip of the iceberg of rightist tyranny and mass murder tendencies. They'll connect any dots they find to place the guilt on the right. If they can't, or their effort is blatantly and shamelessly wrong, the story goes away. And if the guilty party is on the left? Well, there's obviously no story there, our media knows. The shooter or violent person is obviously an aberration and not a symptom of the whole (which has only good motives, as we discuss at all our gatherings).

A conspiracy of the media would be too difficult to carry out with the breadth and depth that we see. Only a common viewpoint that automatically screens out conflicting explanations could do the job. It's just who they are.

UPDATE: Shortly thereafter, this seems relevant.