All Opinions Are Not Equally Valid

[oselle]

From time to time, I've been called out by commenters regarding my intolerance of Republican and conservative ideology and the people who support them. And one thing that's often said is that even if I can't agree with those positions, I should "at least" respect the opinions of others.

I think we've gotten to a place where people think their opinions are sort of like babies -- darling creatures that should be universally cooed over merely by virtue of being babies. Just as no decent person would ever tell someone their baby is ugly or even funny-looking, no decent person should ever call out someone's opinion as being misguided or bigoted or just completely nuts. Every opinion has become equally valid merely by virtue of being someone's darling opinion.

This problem of course didn't start online or among the everyday public -- it was created and nurtured by our mainstream media and our press. Within the last couple of decades, it has somehow become mandatory for the media to cover "all sides" of a debate -- even when some or at least one of those sides may be absolutely deranged. This is called "fair and balanced" reporting and not what it really is -- giving a national platform, and thereby lending credibility, to hidden-agenda idealogues, corporate shills, religious fanatics, and in some cases, flat-out lunatics. In the mainstream media's case, I don't think it has much to do with "respecting" opinions and more to do with ratings, sensationalism, and the fact that we don't have a free press -- we have a press that is essentially controlled by huge corporations that lean heavily right. This nonsense has become so entrenched that many of us now believe that the polite thing to do is to have -- or at least, to express -- respect for all opinions.

It wasn't always like this. There was certainly a time when the press did a better job of reporting reality instead of giving a voice to blathering idiocy in the name of "balance." Rick Perlstein has a great piece about it in The Washington Post:

"It used to be different. You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to "debunk" claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president's program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn't adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of "conservative claims" to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as "extremist" -- out of bounds.

The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest."

Read the whole article here.

We need to abandon the fallacy that all opinions are equally valid and that every crack-brained theory, manufactured paranoia and demonstrable lie somehow deserves thoughtful, respectful public debate in our largest media channels. All this fairness and balance is killing the country.

Comments

[oselle.livejournal.com]

Our news reporting has been reduced to nothing but sound bites. I was reading something about the Depression and about how Roosevelt's "fireside chats" really inspired the nation and drew people together and if you read the text of Roosevelt's speeches they were elegant and nuanced in a way that at least half of the country today would not even be able to understand -- and yet I'm sure we have far more formally educated people in America now than we did in the 1930s. It's just that we've lost the ability to absorb anything that isn't a slogan. So "death panels" capture the American consciousness while sensible, well thought-out discussion on healthcare reform flies right over everyone's head.