So, at any rate, you might think. But I’m afraid it’s not true anymore. Not in the media anyway. There, ideology has been winning every battle with reality.
To Silverman, even the existence of a labor shortage is a self-evident falsehood, as The New Republic indicates by putting scare-quotes around “shortage.” Why? Because the media narrative about the stimulus, as about everything that President Biden does, does not recognize the possibility of error, or even of unintended consequences.
Always Right, Right Now
But ideologues are not fair-minded people. Indeed, the whole appeal of ideology to a certain kind of mind—the kind that is now predominant in the media—is that it insulates you from the possibility of ever being wrong.In other words, since your ideology is, by definition, always right, so are you if you stick loyally to it, no matter how absurd, or how much in conflict with reality, it may seem to be. And, by the same definition, everybody who is not an adherent of the ideology, no matter how plausible he may seem, is necessarily wrong.
What makes an idea into an ideology is just this compulsion to believe in it as the only possible way of being right. Science itself—or, rather, “the science”—has lately been turned into an ideology by the media.
And if “the science”—whether of climate change or of the pandemic—is assumed always to be right, it only remains for the media consensus to decide what scientific opinion, no matter how far-fetched, is worthy of the label of “the science” for that consensus, too, always to be right.
Ideological truth, you see, has no history. This is what Orwell recognized when he wrote in “Nineteen-Eighty-Four” that “The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”
Explaining Away
This is something always to be borne in mind when you hear the words “truth” or “lies” today—in the media or out of them, since the media have in effect enfranchised all of us to be equally proprietorial with our own chosen ideological truths.The clash of such truths with reality is a problem that the kind of “explanatory journalism” pioneered by the Vox website was invented to solve. Silverman in the article mentioned above is engaged in just such an explanation of why what, in reality, appears to be a labor shortage is, ideologically speaking only a “shortage,” and thus not a shortage at all.
The obvious purpose of all such obfuscation is not so much to explain as to explain away the effect of the $300 weekly unemployment benefit included in the Biden stimulus package.
Yet they hardly mention, apart from a vague allusion to “the social unrest related to policing,” the rhetorical and literal assaults on the police in the last year by the Black Lives Matter movement with the support of local and national Democratic officials.
“In the aftermath [of George Floyd’s death],” wrote reporter Neil MacFarquhar for the Times, “some criminologists attributed the spike in homicides to hesitancy among residents to turn to the police for help. Others argued that it was the police who held back. The debate, frequent after any crime wave, remains unresolved.”
The problem for all such media explainers is that they must now continue to uphold the fiction that Joe Biden and the Democrats can never be wrong (except by not being radical enough) with equal fervency to that by which they have always upheld and continue to uphold the fiction that Donald Trump and the Republicans (except for those who repudiate him) could never be right.
It will be interesting to see what contortions of logic and sense they will be reduced to as both these fictions come more and more into conflict with reality.
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