Larry Summers' Scandal and the Biases of the Media

Some years ago I started taking up the subject of media bias in my working papers in a serious way. The ground, of course, had already been covered by a great many observers--I myself mentioning Thorstein Veblen's discussion about the matter way back in his Theory of Business Enterprise , and later reviewing Upton Sinclair's seminal The Brass Check, the latter of which seems to me fairly describable as a prototype of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's famous "propaganda model" of the news, in which market forces and the broadly prevalent ideology together quite suffice to keep the media business pushing the elites' preferred line, even without, as we so often see, the bosses' direct interference in the matter on particular points of concern to them. Still, it did seem there was something to be said about the matter of ideology here, and how its assumptions filter the content that reaches the public, such that I wrote about how centrist politics--long the politics of the American mainstream, and especially its educated elite--determined journalistic practice. I specifically held that this centrism's conservatism, and especially its hostility to dissent, its epistemological pessimism, and its elitism had its reflection in its views of the bounds of the legitimate discourse (extending much further right than left) and exclusion of what it did not see as legitimate; the combination of a complexity-shy aversion to "connecting the dots" with respect for "established" knowledge that on most issues translates to the treatment of elite opinion as authoritative rather than helping the public attain a deep comprehension of matters--in the main "one sideism," with "both sideism" apt to be a case of either minor differences among elites, or an attempt to, reflecting a greater respect for power than for expertise, push into the conversation elite positions flying in the face of the facts and any rigorous interpretation of them (as seen with climate change); and their extreme attention to politics, as against policy.

These tendencies--which the critically-minded do not hesitate to characterize as failings on the part of the media evident in their coverage of every significant story, with their treatment of scandal apt to be exemplary, and recently their coverage of Larry Summers' connections with his "wingman" Jeffrey Epstein no exception. That media, which on the whole treated Summers a lot more gently than it might have done, did not consider whether Summers' conduct in public life was perhaps not so very far removed from his conduct in the private life of which he confessed himself "deeply ashamed"; or what his conduct suggested about the elite layer from which he hails more generally. Instead it was content to retail a piece of seedy gossip, never mind what it and the other revelations about the "friends of Jeffrey Epstein" suggested about the "big picture," precisely because that is exactly what the center never discusses before the broad public, and at every turn discourages that public from ever considering--those who get into trouble apt to be Great Men who erred and are not to be judged too harshly for it, whom we are enjoined to consider empathetically the way they are never asked to do with the Little People--or at worst bad apples whose badness says absolutely nothing about the "very fine people" who are their colleagues. The obvious fact that the Great Men are anything but Great, just mediocrities who got all the breaks and made the most of them in advancing themselves to very high places, and certainly any suggestion that the problem is not a few bad apples but a barrel itself rotten, is never to be breathed, such thinking instead the mark of an insane "ideologue" and "extremist" of the kind not to be countenanced for a moment by right-thinking people--all the better, of course, to facilitate the inevitable rehabilitation of such figures who remind us that what the great Scythian philosopher Anacharsis said of written laws most certainly applies to "cancellation" in our time. Like cobwebs, anything small that gets into them will be hopelessly entangled and unable to escape, but anything large and weighty will go right through--and this reality all too consistent with the glaring distinction between the bound but unprotected, the protected but unbound, staring us in the face every time we look at the news.