Written and cover art by Brian Wood.
Above, Chris Matthews beats up some random conservative blowhard (Kevin James. Does radio. I have no idea who he is). I have to give credit to Matthews for turning up the heat on this guy, but, at the same time, I have to agree with dday over at Hullabaloo: Asking someone to define the words coming out of his mouth is hardly all that hard of a ball--so to speak.
Even as I wrote that last sentence, I knew it was a bad idea.
Say what you want about Chris Matthews (and I've said plenty), this is fun to watch.
Of course, dday has something a bit more sobering to say than I do. He writes:
The worst thing the conservative movement has foisted on the country is a collapse of historical memory. Our civic education here is not so robust, and our civic knowledge of history is worse. This has given wide latitude for conservatives to create their own reality, and jabber away with "facts" that consist of shibboleths and catch phrases, which by now have been ripped of all meaning outside the Manichean "good" and "bad." That's what we saw with that shameful appearance on Hardball.
I agree, inasmuch as there is a tendency to reduce complex and nuanced policies to "shibboleths and catch phrases," but I'd go further and pin blame our culture's Kuhnian approach to facts. And, this, is something quite beyond our education system. This is embedded in the norms of a twenty-first century society.
I know that some aspects of the conservative movement have embraced a kind of epistemic nihilism--the ID movement comes to mind. But, frankly, I think this guy is just a blowhard. What's dismaying to me is not that there are people out there willing to listen to him; it's that they'd let him on the mainstream news.
Not that the news' giving people like Kevin James airtime is anything new. But the news is meant to be--or at least, should be--the people who put their foot down and call for some kind of core level of reason in our political discourse. They are the ones who are supposed to keep the politics tied to some kind of epistemic base.
All of this brings me to the latest issue of Brian Wood's DMZ. Our protagonist and intrepid reporter, Matty Roth, beats up on Liberty News, the corporate news channel for the USA. What impressed me most about this issue (31, if you care), is the way Wood managed to show how journalism can be both extremely personal and still retain an epistemic core.
Matty argues quite passionately that he hasn't been compromised by his close relationship to a controversial DMZ politician--Delgado. In fact, it his unique perspective on the race that allows him to cut through the Liberty News narrative.
When it comes to philosophy, I am unsympathetic to the (mostly) Marxist and Feminist standpoint that oppressed groups have better epistemic standing than non-oppressed groups, and, furthermore, you have to be a member of that group to really get it. This smacks of a sort of insular, unfalsifiable way of thinking (not that that is in any way surprising coming from Marxists...). But when it comes to journalism, I might be swayed by the idea that people who come from diverse perspectives and narratives might have better journalistic standing. After all, when we're dealing with something like politics, the narratives and models are far more fluid--by necessity--than they are in, say, science. And, as such, in order for the media to make an informed narrative choice, they must have access to as great a number of narratives as possible.
All of this may seem like I've distanced myself from position in the first section. After all, I've now described a very Kuhn-informed model of journalism and made the case that diverse viewpoints should be respected in the media. Let me bring this all together.
Diverse viewpoints should be respected, provided they fit the norms of good knowledge-gathering activities. This is to say, they must be accurate; they must be good explanations; they must demonstrate progressive and synthetic growth; and they must be--at least somewhat--network unifying. Kevin James did none of these things.
Furthermore, as evidenced from the list above, I believe in the power of cognitive values. I don't think there's some kind of irrational incommensurablity at work here. So, suck it, Kuhn.
Lastly, if someone more responsible than Matthews had this joker on her show and took him apart, then that would be an entirely different matter. I think the media should pick people apart when they don't make sense. The problem here is that Matthews is entirely irresponsible. And, as such, he doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt on this one.
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