The Unseemliness of Conservative Paranoia

In a post entitled "Quantifying the Bias," John Hinderaker of Powerline makes the following "argument":

Network coverage has been over-
whelmingly pessimistic. More than half
of all stories (848, or 61%) focused on
negative topics or presented a pessimistic
analysis of the situation, four times as many
as featured U.S. or Iraqi achievements or
offered an optimistic assessment (just 211
stories, or 15%).

News about the war has grown
increasingly negative. In January and
February, about a fifth of all network stories
(21%) struck a hopeful note, while just over
half presented a negative slant on the situation.
By August and September, positive stories
had fallen to a measly seven percent and the
percentage of bad news stories swelled to 73
percent of all Iraq news, a ten-to-one disparity.

Interesting. That coincides with the Democrats'
"Bush lied!" attack, and with the President's
precipitous fall in the polls.

That is interesting. Clearly the simplest explanation is the existence of a vast media conspiracy aimed at convincing the American people that the Iraq War is going badly. Coverage of the war couldn't possibly have anything to do with the actual facts on the ground.

You know, the capacity for insane paranoia among the wingnut crowd never ceases to amaze me. I know, I know, paranoia is rampant on the Left as well. But that's to be expected. Paranoia goes hand in hand with lack of power. With all the branches of our government under the control of conservatives, it's not surprising that many on the Left have succumb to the paranoid desperation that so often afflicts the powerless. But what excuse do conservatives have? It was one thing when they were sitting around discussing Vince Foster's murder during the height of the Clinton years. But now conservatives control both chambers of Congress, the Presidency, and an increasingly disproportionate swath of the judiciary. And conservative talking heads now dominate television and radio. Yet none of this has done anything to alleviate the persecution complexes from which so many conservatives appear to suffer. All Republican political problems are still best explained by pointing to some vast conspiracy of liberal elites.

Are conservatives really this paranoid, or is this merely a cynical and calculated political strategy? As with all things, the answer depends on the person. For Powertools like John Hinderaker, the paranoia may well be genuine. But for many others, this type of argument is simply the continuation of a long-running GOP political strategy: killing the referees. As I wrote a while back:

Over the last two decades, the Republican
political machine has engaged in a relentless
and systematic assault on all of the institutions
in our society that have traditionally served as
checks on excessive partisanship. They have
attacked the press, the judiciary, academia,
even the very concepts of science and
empiricism. Their goal is to discredit and
disable the referees, to politicize, marginalize,
and co-opt any and all non-political institutions,
and thereby eliminate any meaningful policing
of political discourse.

Jacob Weisberg makes a similar point in a column today at Slate.

If the Clintonites were inveterate spinners, the
Bushies have proved themselves to be
thoroughgoing propagandists. Though
propaganda and spin exist on a continuum,
they are different in essence. To spin is to
offer a contention, usually specious, in
response to a critical argument or a negative
news story. It does not necessarily involve
lying or misleading anyone about factual
matters. Habitual spin is irksome, especially
to the journalists upon whom it is practiced,
but it does not threaten democracy.
Propaganda is far more malignant. A
calculated and systematic effort to manage
public opinion, it transcends mere lying and
routine political dishonesty. When the Bush
administration manufactures fake "news,"
suppresses real news, disguises the former as
the latter, and challenges the legitimacy of the
independent press, it corrodes trust in leaders,
institutions, and, to the rest of the world, the
United States as a whole.

Weisberg concludes his column with the following observation:

In a way, what's most troubling about the
Bush administration's information war is not
its cynicism but its naivete. At phony town
hall meetings, Bush's audiences are hand-
picked to prevent any possibility of
spontaneous challenge. At fake forums, invited
guests ask the president to pursue his
previously announced policies. New initiatives
are unveiled on platforms festooned with
meaningless slogans, mindlessly repeated
("Plan for Victory"). Anyone on the inside who
doubts the party line is shown the door. In
this environment, where the truth is not
spoken privately or publicly, the suspicion
grows that Bush, in his righteous cocoon, has
committed the final, fatal sin of the
propagandist. He is not just spreading BS but
has come to believe it himself.

You have to wonder whether the same is true of the folks at Powerline. How else could you quote statistics about the increasingly pessimistic tone of media coverage of the Iraq War and conclude, without hesitation, that the most obvious explanation is not that the war is going badly, but that our independent media institutions have conspired, at the behest of Democrats, to provide the American people with a false assessment of our success?