So now, it seems, we have rather a good test for the elite media. We know how reporters and commentators would be reacting to this story on the arrest of an Occupy Wall Street protestor and his girlfriend if the people arrested were (or were thought to be) tea party activists, do we not?
So how will they react now?
I predict that the story will be covered by Fox News and some conservative journalists (the link I provided is to the report in the conservative-leaning New York Post ) and largely ignored by most of the mainstream media—-print, broadcast, and on-line. I hope I’m wrong about that. In any event, the folks at the New York Times , NBC, CNN, etc. will certainly not use the story to blacken Occupy Wall Street or the political left. They will not do what they almost certainly would be doing if the persons arrested had been tea party people. Of course, we’ve all more or less gotten used to this double standard; at this point even most conservatives have resigned themselves to it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a problem. The common good of a democratic polity does not require a pristinely unbiased media, but it requires far more evenhandedness than ours gives us. Especially in circumstances of pluralism such as ours, groupthink in the media is not a good thing. It is even worse than groupthink in academia, though that too is bad—-for everyone.
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