Did conservatives kill accountability?
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Responding to my “death of accountability” post, Shoq says I don’t lay enough blame on the conservative establishment of think tanks and media operations, which exploit traditional media customs of fairness and “objectivity” to advance ideological and/or Republican Party agendas:
I have been railing about the collapse of accountability for years. This article sniffs around the edges of the problem, and makes some important points, but it completely misses the role that right wing think tanks like Heritage, Media Research Center, and of course, Fox News and the broader corporate media have played in the deliberate deconstruction of accountability and social responsibility.
When the public is convinced that there are no empirical facts, and that one version of events is as valid as any other, they become desensitized to the reality of most crimes and their consequences, and are far more compliant and forgiving of those accused of abusing a trust, principle, law, company, office, nation, and population.
The cynical and professional manipulation of the public by the right wing can be seen in this one short video, where @CNN’s Alex Castellanos, a professional PR professional presented as a pundit, is dispatched to proclaim Obama as “divisive” for trying to reform wall street, and that the “rehabilitation of George Bush is well underway.”
I agree that this is a key element of what’s going on. As traditional media have seen both their monopolies and credibility steadily erode, conservative media have stepped in with alternative – and often ridiculous – explanations of current events that serve their interests. They’ve adopted the forms but not the goals of traditional journalism. And too often, traditional journalists either don’t call them on it or simply buy into it. You know the story – the political process, the news cycle – all increasingly consumed by stupid. And the public split into camps with mutually exclusive takes on reality.
To have accountability, you need not just good journalism (though that helps a lot) but institutions that work and a public that cares that they work. Where conservative politicians, Fox et al go most awry is in cynically cultivating contempt at the very idea of a functioning government. It’s one long anti-civics lesson. In theory, you can be a conservative and still want government agencies to work (even if you wish they were smaller, or set up differently). But there’s not much of a market for that these days.
This is corrosive, but I think that this is more of a symptom of what’s going on than the cause. It’s not clear, for instance, how much these media trends are undermining the political process: election results, the passage of legislation, et al. Obama won pretty handily in 2008, in spite of unified opposition from conservative party and media organizations. The Tea Party movement is nothing new in American history. Probable Democratic losses this fall will likely correlate to the state of the economy, as they always do. And the conservosphere is now increasingly marginalizing itself, disengaging from substantive political debate – you know, the whole “epistemic closure” thing.
What I think is going on is a bigger kind of crackup, in which mechanisms of accountability stop working as problems and political paralysis mount and institutions falter because objective conditions change radically (environmental, social, political.) Some collapse outright (maybe that’s what we’re seeing with traditional media organizations). Some soldier on dysfunctionally. Some successfully adapt. My point of view is shaped in part by Hurricane Katrina, a gigantic systems and accountability failure if their ever was one. I think we’re going to see more giant environmental-institutional-political snafus of this nature.
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Mr. McQuaid,
Without necessarily disagreeing with anything that you have written, I think are missing the forest for the trees. There is plenty of accountability for ordinary Americans. If you run a red light, if a cop sees you, you will probably be held accountable. The police have sufficient power and will to hold you and I accountable for our actions. Accountability does not exist in the abstract but through specific channels and organs of society which some operates. Accountability does not just happen, someone makes it happen.
The tools for holding say Wall Street or the Bush Administration accountable certainly exist, they have for decades. However no one has the will or power to make them work. Taking Wall Street as an example, the necessary statutes, regulations, and oversight bodies had been in place since the 1930’s to hold someone like Goldman-Sachs accountable. However, those were slowly gutted by both Republicans and Democrats over the years. Why? Because Wall Street had the power to influence the political process and there were no counter-balance forces to oppose them.
Now that those actions have been shown to be disastrous, who is interested in going back holding anyone accountable? The same folks, both Democrats and Republicans, who created the problem by deregulating Wall Street, are pretty much the same people in power now. They sure don’t what to be held accountable or how those they assisted accountable.
There has been a profound shift in political power the in United States. With the US economy becoming less and less industrialized, with fewer and fewer unions, with a smaller and smaller middle class, there are fewer alternative centers of political power. Wall Street exerts the power that it does not so much because it has become more powerful in any absolute sense, but because those who might oppose them have become much weaker.
This is the true basis for the raise of conservative political power. Right-wing news outlets like Fox and the WSJ have arisen because of this political and economic shift. They can tell the lies that they tell because their is no one with the power to hold them accountable for them and there are very powerful interests who want those lies told.
With more and more economic and political power concentrated in fewer hands, there fewer and fewer political forces out there to make accountability happen. It does not happen on its own.
[...] Did conservatives kill accountability? – John McQuaid – Edge of … [...]
i think the “environmental-institutional-political snafu” can be traced directly back to greed; the greed of oil and energy companies who don’t care what happens to either the environment, or their employees (read: the W Virginia mine disaster 2 weeks ago); the greed of banks like Goldman, Sachs/ Chase/ Wells Fargo who care more about getting rich by screwing their clients out of money; and health insurance companies who cancel someone’s insurance the minute they really need it. And finally, there are all those fine, upstanding politicians who campaigned on the idea that ‘we’ (the American citizen) were their employers — yeah, I know: how can you tell when a politician is lying? His lips are moving. The truth is that no politician since Lincoln has run for office because they thought they could make a difference for their constituents; ergo, politicians run for office because they are greedy and they see an opportunity to add to their coffers (and Wall St and United Healthcare are only too eager to do just that).
I will not for a minute clain that any of the news organizations are trustworthy sources for accutate and pulic-interest based journalism that serves the purpose of greater accountability. The nationwide TV news shows is akin to watching WWE smackdowns. The best media in the world will not stop politicians feom whoring their offices to special interests group lobbies. Obama told the world he was going to keep all of his filthy Goldman Sachs money and within 48 hours the discussion was over. The idea that organizations and institutions on a region of the political spectrum afar from your belief system is to blame for a lack of accountability misses the point. The real problem with accountability is that our representative government no longer works for the electorate. The fact that all media could care less makes it worse, but that is not the root cause o0f the problem.