For some time, we have been examining why Republicans look at things so differently from Democrats. Much has been written about the Republican brain including a book by that title by journalist and author Chris Mooney. Mooney has been described as “one of the few journalists in the country who specializes in the now dangerous intersection of and politics.” His findings include evidence …. that among other things, many Republicans are not particularly concerned with evidence when it is not convenient to their arguments. Mooney also posits that Republicans are not as open to new information and experiences as others. They also seem to be lacking in empathy, as compared to others.

I recently adapted Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs of an individual to a comparable hierarchy of public citizen needs.

Being successful in caring about the first four levels (self, family, community, country & religion) is challenging enough for most people. Very few get to the fifth and highest level; caring about the “common good.” This may be in part because the demands of the previous four are so intense. But unlike many progressives, Republicans frequently have a sense of disdain towards the “common good.” This explains in part why they are so resistant to strengthening the safety net that the government has put in place to help care for those among us who are most in need.

What has been most frustrating and stifling to me is how journalists so willingly accept conservative ideas as equivalent to progressive ones. If the issue is what to do about gun violence in the United States, most in the media see two equally valid positions lined up against one another: protecting the Second Amendment and saving over 30,000 lives a year. If the issue is funding for school lunches, it’s the presumed equality of saving money by having kids go hungry vs. spending more money to keep children from starving.

It’s baffling to me how journalists can simply accept these false equivalencies. After all, most journalists are college-educated and took courses that required deductive reasoning and logic. It had been my impression, perhaps mistaken, that many students who went into the field of journalism did so because they wanted to uncover inequities and dysfunctions in our society. I thought that if they were to choose to not enter journalism, they might choose to go into fields such as sociology, psychology or international relations to try to be part of making a better world.

Fields like sociology, psychology and international relations focus on the dynamics of meeting the needs of individuals as well as serving the common good. Indeed, many individuals who enter those fields are able to look beyond their personal needs and consider what is best for all.

In fact, very few journalists seem to place much value in trying to be part of an effort to improve the common good. They may think that they are helping the world because they disclose information that can be beneficial to all of us. But disclosure without a sense of priorities is assembling a building without knowing which parts need to be put in place first. When the press reports on the total amount of campaign funds that a political candidate has raised, without providing information on who were the donors, and more importantly, what these donors might want in exchange, it is incomplete reporting.

It strikes me that there are two primary reasons why so few journalists factor the common good into their reporting.

1. Media outlets are now strapped for cash. The industry has become much more competitive, and public loyalty to brands is much more fleeting than it used to be. So many media outlets, and this is particularly so in local news coverage, pander to a strange combination of “blood and guts” and civic boosterism.
2. The field of journalism, like virtually all other professions, has a strong sense of clan. No matter how sleazy the output from a media source might be, the powers that be are always quick to point out that they are adhering to journalist ethics. This self-policing code references a number of factors, such as reliability of sources and providing accurate quotes. These are clearly important, but they do not necessarily touch on the “greater good” for the society in which they report. Loyalty to clan, or profession, is somewhat like “caring about one’s religion and country” in the public citizen hierarchy.

Item 4 could be something like:

Primary loyalty to profession is not unique to journalism. It’s certainly the case in education, the law, health care, and most other professions. But in journalism, parochial loyalty carries a special downside. Since journalists are reporting about “the world around us,” their purview should be broader than journalistic ethics. Ideally, they can give us the 30,000-foot, bird’s-eye view as well as the “up close and personal.” The means that with issues of state, they must be able to put happenings into context. When it comes to reporting many Republican talking points, this is where so many journalists seem to fail miserably.

Very few television journalists place the common good above all other concerns. Those who come to mind include Bill Moyers, Mark Shields and yes, David Brooks. Other than PBS, the perspective of other mainstream television journalists seems devoid of concern about the common good. Fox News obviously has a biased axe to grind. CNN uses hype as the path to higher ratings, so their concerns are primarily “what’s happening now” and what will bring us more viewers. MSNBC preaches a progressive agenda, but prefers to take cheap shots at conservatives rather than helping to explain the progressive perspective to those who may not be familiar with it. The process that they practice in presenting news rarely serves the common good.

As a society, we need more people to look at the broader issues that we face, rather than just what our professions teach us to be important. Professional practices, coupled with the pressures of raising revenue and cutting costs, make it difficult for journalists, attorneys, educators and others to place the common good as their first priority. Maybe what we need to do is the exact opposite of the current trend of training more people in the STEM fields. We need more philosophers who can help us sort this all out.

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In their book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism,” authors Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein address the mistaken notion that we have about political gridlock. They assert that gridlock implies that both sides of a disagreement have equal validity or an equivalency, and in our current situation, that simply is not the case.

To quote them directly:

The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” Coming from a liberal columnist or blogger, those words would have been unremarkable. But as political scientists working in Washington for over four decades, we had earned reputations as straight shooters who don’t traffic in partisan or ideological spin and who have worked comfortably with Democrats and Republicans alike in trying to improve the institutional workings of Congress. Many other nonpartisan analysts shared our views but were reluctant to go public, because it seemed to violate professional norms or make them vulnerable to charges of partisan bias, or they thought it would make bipartisan agreement even more difficult.

Ornstein in a member of the American Enterprise Institute, so he has sound bone fides for not being a liberal partisan. Having worked for forty years as a non-partisan political scientist inside the beltway, he has reputation to maintain. What has happened to him and Mann is that, in the words of Malcolm Gladwell, they have reached a tipping point. They can no longer accept the premise that bi-partisan means bi-equal. The Republicans have undermined American democracy in unprecedented ways. The de facto rules have changed because so many of the previously accepted rules have been broken or twisted out of shape by Republicans.

That is problem number one, but problem number two is what makes it so difficult to loosen the Republicans’ stranglehold on democracy. As they say,

We also stirred a hornet’s nest by taking on the mainstream media for failing to do its job of reporting the news in a straightforward fashion, even if that meant in an “unbalanced” way.

These outlets have surely contributed to partisan polarization. Instead, many in the traditional media— commercial (and even sometimes public) broadcasting and national and regional newspapers—took issue with our criticism of their even-handed treatment of the decidedly uneven behavior of the two major parties. Just as in the case of our treatment of the extreme attitudes and behavior of Republicans, we were far from the first to point out the pattern of false equivalence that characterizes much news reporting. James Fallows of The Atlantic has had a “false equivalency watch” for years, and a number of his colleagues in columns and blogs have contributed a stream of examples of the press giving balanced treatment to clearly true and false assertions by advocates. But as two scholars on whom reporters have relied for years for objective analysis and commentary, we had some advantage in elevating this critique and specifically linking it to the inability of the public to understand a major source of our dysfunctional government.

For media producers and writers to (a) recognize that they are giving Republicans undue legitimacy and (b) change their “news” to reflect this new reality is indeed a tough task. The way in which media presented the differences between to two major political parties in the 1950s and 1960s no longer works. One party often considers the well-being of the American people; the other party seems to be blind to that. One party believes in trickle-down economics; the other party sees it as a sham that has widened the income gap in America. But what’s really wrong with that picture is how it’s reported. Many in the media seem to be immune to the facts that show that the Republican position has been empirically found to be false.

Local news seems to handle the complexities of issues by rarely covering them. The local outlets have more and more become civic boosters rather than outlets for conveying important information. If we are going to help the American people see what’s really going on in their country, we must join Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein by recognizing how the Republican Party has brought the mainstream media in as a co-collaborator with their faulty vision of American. As is so often the case, what we as citizens can do is on the grassroots level by talking with our friends and acquaintances. This time it will be about the false equivalencies which hopefully can help the public gain better insight into the depth of our dysfunction.

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