I think it’s right that this situation is horrible and toxic and destroying the country, and it’s really good that someone has pointed this out and framed it this clearly. However biased and crappy you think CNN and mainstream academia are, FOX and the conservative academic bubble are working on a different level (though note that as a liberal, I would say this, and you should interpret it with the same grain of salt that you would any other “my side is better than yours” claim). I think it’s right that the conservative side is worse than the neutral side. Nor is there a liberal version of FOX that lacks that pretense of neutrality. Yes, CNN leans liberal, but it’s not as liberal as FOX is conservative, and it’s not as open about it – it has a pretense of neutrality that FOX doesn’t, and although we can disagree about how realistic that pretense is I think few people would disagree that the pretense is there. I think it’s right to consider the situation asymmetrical. I think it’s right the Republicans unilaterally seceded from those shared gatekeeper institutions, so that now we’re in the weird position of having two sets of institutions: one labeling itself “neutral” and the other labeling itself “conservative”. I think it’s right that the two parties used to have much more in common, and be able to appeal to shared gatekeeper institutions that both trusted. Let me start by saying what this article gets right.
They must fight to keep some core principles and commitments inviolate, outside the sphere of normal political dispute, against an administration that wants to drag them in…that’s a humdinger of a problem. They must figure out a way to play a dual role: to be fair and consistent referees of policy and ideological disputes within the public square - while also acting to defend the institutional integrity of the square itself from what is, at present, a highly asymmetrical threat. To its credit, it admits this is kind of contradictory: It concludes that “the press cannot be neutral”, although it also “cannot afford to be, or be seen as primarily instruments of the Democrats”. But conservatives didn’t like the stuff it found – whether about global warming or trickle-down economics or whatever – so they seceded into their own world of alternative facts where some weird physicist presents his case that global warming is a lie, or a Breitbart journalist is considered an expert on how cultural Marxism explains everything about post-WWII American history. Or: everyone used to trust academia as a shared and impartial arbitrator of truth.
But Republicans didn’t like having to deal with facts, so they formed their own alternative media – FOX and Rush Limbaugh and everyone in that sphere – where only conservatives would have a say and their fake facts would never get challenged. So for example, there used to be a relatively fair media in which both liberals and conservatives got their say. It’s got a long and complicated argument which I can’t really do justice to here, but the thesis seems to be that the US Right is defecting against the country’s shared institutions in favor of forming its own echo chambers. Vox’s David Roberts writes about Donald Trump and the rise of tribal epistemology.