Shades of Purple - the Myth of the Red and the Blue America

In a now-infamous opinion piece titled "America at War", Andrew Sullivan wrote on 09/16/01:

The terrorists have done the rest. The middle part of the country - the great red zone that voted for Bush - is clearly ready for war. The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead - and may well mount a fifth column.

It is therefore necessary to replace that artificial red-blue map that was obtained by rounding 49% down to zero and 50% to one hundred by a more accurate map that reflects how the voters actually voted. I have created such a map by simply mixing red, blue and green for each state, with the ratios equal to the percentage that Bush, Gore and Nader received in the 2000 election.

The results speak for themselves. Sullivan's "great red zone" is nowhere to be seen and turns out to be a figment of an absurd rounding procedure. Most of the blue and the red are actually shades of purple, with the exception of only a handful of states that went decisively one way or another.

click on map to view full resolution version

Believing in freedom of speech, I do not mind that far-right viewpoints are presented on TV on a daily basis. What I strongly object to is that these viewpoints are not balanced by equally far-left viewpoints. Tune to CNN's Capital Gang, and you'll see a centrist TIME columnist (Margaret Carlson) and a socially liberal but economically conservative Wall Street Journal Editor (Al Hunt) debate two rabid right wingers, Kate O'Beirne and Robert Novak. Progressive voices are completely shut out from the program. Or tune to Fox News' Hannity & Colmes which is nothing but a thinly veiled solo show for far-right firebrand Sean Hannity who is so "balanced" by the tame Colmes that he might just as well be opposed by a scarecrow made to look like Colmes. College dropout Hannity does almost all of the talking; he introduces guests from the "Family Research" Council as "our good friend from the FRC", habitually refers to his own views and those of regular guest Jerry Falwell as "christian" without any qualifier (ignoring the fact that religious right views are not representative of mainstream christianity), and treats liberal guests as mere props to get his own point of view across, which usually involves interrupting and screaming. Fair and Balanced?

Hardly. But by Fox standards, Hannity & Colmes is about as fair and unbiased as it gets. Usually, Fox News' idea of fairness and balance involves having a center-right conservative disagree with a far-right conservative, and calling that travesty a debate, or letting a conservative (but never a liberal) have his own show altogether. How come that everytime Bill O'Reilly takes a break from The O'Reilly Factor, his substitute is someone from the far right of the political spectrum, such as former congressman and now syndicated radio host Bob Dornan or hard-right nitwit Michael Reagan (who left the GOP because it was not radical enough)? And why is it that 8 years of unrelenting, non-stop demonization of Clinton and his wife by these people is okay, but suggesting that Bush is illegitimate is "partisan rancor"? The answer is of course that Foxnews is a conservative news outlet, even though its on-air personel asserts the contrary ("fair and balanced") like a mantra.

But the situation is hardly any better on the other (supposedly liberal) cable news channels. Liberals or centrists may not be on unless their viewpoints are 'balanced' by conservative viewpoints (as in CNN's Capital Gang or Crossfire), while hard-right pundits such as Christ Matthews get their own shows. ABC's 20/20 regularly features the views of pro-corporate extremist John Stossel, but does not bother to balance those views by a progressive perspective. Commenting on a 1998 Stossel piece which made the case that greed is good, FAIR demanded "to see an equally outspoken progressive journalist given an hour to explain why greed is a serious problem in American society". Needless to say that that demand went unanswered. Stossel, despite a documented history of using deceptive statistics, one-sided witness testimony, distortions and outright lies to promote an extremist agenda is still on the job at ABC.

To make matters worse, it is not just the conservative punditocracy which is less than fair and impartial. The mass media as a whole are seriously biased - the conservative way. It was the mass media that have co-opted and thus legitimized the Republican code phrase "marriage penalty". There is no tax in the tax code that is called "The Marriage Penalty Tax", yet the media have been using this propagandistic phrase without any qualifiers, making "the marriage penality (tax)" an objective fact of life, just as they routinely report on "partial birth" (instead of "late term") abortion. Similarly, they have been using the right-wing codephrase "death tax" to con a significant fraction of the population into thinking that the inheritance tax concerns ordinary people (as opposed to the super-rich).

The mass media's coverage of the presidential race 2000 was slanted in favor of Bush from day one. As early as 1999, the media had picked their winner, George W. Bush, and started to tell the public that W's victory was a foregone conclusion. Throughout the campaign and the Florida aftermath, they stayed "on message": that Gore was a lier and exaggerator, while Bush was a "different kind of Republican", a likeable guy, and a real pal. They put every real or alleged inappropriate behavior, inaccuracy or exaggeration from Gore under the magnifying glass, and simultaneously ignored W's big lies and blunders: that he weaseled himself out of jury duty to cover up a DUI arrest, that he refused to admit to being a recreational drug user and that he went AWOL while in the national guard. All of it with impunity of course, thanks to Daddy's connections.

The mass media never found it worth mentioning that this man who in the debates prided himself on being a succesful businessman and Washington outsider had in fact driven several oil companies into bankruptcy, one after an other, and was bailed out every single time thanks to his family connections. As a son of wealth and privilege, Bush had never had to work for anything, and got away with acts that would have gotten anyone else into jail. Bush's dirty tricks, both against McCain and against Gore, were revolting even by Republican campaign standards, but the media never challenged Bush to explain himself. Only when Gore pointed these out, they blasted him for "negative campaigning".

As the campaign drew to a close, it became even more apparent that the mass media would go to any lengths to discredit Gore while giving Bush a free ride. In the presidential debate in Boston, on October 3, 2000, Bush had the audacity to claim that

"[Gore] has outspent me, the special interests are outspending me (..)"

while the truth is that Bush broke all spending records in US history and outspent everyone, including the Republicans who ran before him by a wide margin! It was a flat-out lie, but the "liberal" mass media let him get away with it. This hypocrisy of the mass media has been well documented by a FAIR article titled Serial Exaggerators: Media's double standard on political lying. I also recommend Rolling Stone Magazine's article The Press vs. Al Gore.

Then, on election night, Fox News dropped all pretense of being unbiased and let Bush's cousin John Ellis call Florida for Bush at 2:16 am, prompting the other four networks to do the same within minutes. From that point onward, Gore had to fight an uphill battle against the perception that Bush had won Florida, which we know today he has not.

After election day, the pro-Bush campaign of the media only intensified. Chris Matthews, who only days before the election had found the idea of Gore losing the popular vote but winning the electoral one wholly unpalatable, developed selective amnesia and was now arguing for Gore, the winner of the popular vote, to concede! The rest of the punditry joined into this rousing chorus of "concede, concede", ominously warning that simply counting the votes in Florida would create a constitutional crisis. They even rewrote history in the process, popularizing the myth that Nixon conceded gracefully in 1960 without putting up a legal fight (the opposite is true).

Naturally, the transparent hypocrisy of the GOP's position went unnoticed or was downplayed. Hand-counting, which is universally accepted as more accurate than machine-counting (even by Bush himself, and by his lawyers in New Mexico, who demanded a hand-recount at the same time that Baker was succesfully discrediting the method in Florida) now became unreliable. That House Majority Whip Tom DeLay was behind the GOP mob that shut down the Miami-Dade recount: hardly worth reporting. The paid republican rioters with their professionally made "Sore Loserman" signs and t-shirts: reported as grassroots protestors. That minority voters had been intimidated from voting by GOP operatives: not worth any headlines. That Katherine Harris had 12,000 predominantly black voters falsely removed from voter rolls as convicted fellons: reported in the British Newspaper Observer, but ignored by the US media.

The day after the GOP majority on the Supreme Court had installed Emperor Bush on the throne, the mass media started to echo conservative calls for "unity" and "healing". The good of the nation, we were told by the corporate media outlets, required us to support President "elect" Bush. How that healing is supposed to take place when the dagger is still firmly lodged in the wound, they did not say. John Gibson, guest-hosting the O'Reilly Factor on Fox News on 12/15/00, even suggested that the Florida ballots should be locked away for eight years or burned, because the legitimacy of George W. Bush's presidency is a higher good than the truth. Is it even conceivable that a Fox pundit would suggest that Clinton should not have been investigated, to preserve the public's respect for the office of president?

The sad and morally repugnant story of coup d'etat 2000 continues to this day. The truth - that Bush lost the election and has not one iota of legitimacy to push his far-right agenda - has become a non-fact for the mass media. That Bush jettisoned all pretense of being a "different kind of Republican" with his hard-right cabinet appointments was dismissed as slander from the usual liberal special interest groups and never examined in detail. Ashcroft and Norton got a free pass. They were dutifully referred to as "controversial", but the mass media were silent on exactly how and why these people are controversial. The protests against His Fraudulency's inauguration were downplayed and protestors marginalized as "fringe groups", while commentators were drooling over inauguration trivia.

As President Bush is preparing to ram his tax cut for the wealthy through congress, the mass media are silent on the fact that Governor Bush's tax cuts in Texas have left the state unable to pay its bills, leaving the republican state legislature and governor no choice but to raise taxes again. But try to call in on some of the political shows on the cable news channels and mention the inconvenient fact that the American people elected Al Gore to be their president, and you will be chided by the pundits for being a complete moron - get over it, will you?

On November 12, 2001, the pro-Bush bias of the mass media reached a level that can only be characterized as Orwellian. The media recount study had just shown that by the only legitimate standard (clear intent of the voter), the majority of legal votes in Florida had been cast for Gore, by a margin of tens of thousands of votes. But the headlines said the exact opposite! It was one of those "IBM commercial" moments - for the past 11 months, you had already gotten used to the mass media slanting their coverage in favor of Bush and the Republicans, but you were still clinging to the sentimental notion that they could not outright fabricate the news. And then it hit you - they can, and they do! The degree of deceptiveness varied depending on the outlet. While the Drudge Report - incredibly! - gave a completely objective assessment of the situation ("Gore topped Bush if all under/over votes counted; legal strategy destroyed chances"), the supposedly liberal New York Times and Washington Post both reported Bush as the recount winner in their headlines.

But it fell to supposedly leftist CNN to deliver the most brazen example of pro-Bush reporting. On the evening of Sunday, 11, 2001, CNN ran a report (click on video, then "Study suggests Bush still winner") by CNN's senior political correspondent Candy Crowley that made me want to vomit. She first discusses irrelevant hypothetical scenarios under all of which Bush would have won, then makes an oblique reference that Gore would have won if overvotes had been counted as well, but does not see fit to mention that those overvotes were legal votes because they left no doubt as to the intent of the voter. She then makes the following, incredible appeal to blind, mindless patriotism:

Now, try to remember the kind of September we just had. (pictures of World Trade Center ruins, then George W. Bush with his arm around a firefighter, people shouting "USA,USA") What consumed us last December is a paragraph for history now. A recent poll shows that if the election was held today, George Bush would beat Al Gore by 21 points. But the election cannot be held today, and we cannot, would not hold last year's election again. (video shows Al Gore speaking, "George W. Bush is my commander in chief") Maybe the best thing of all is that the messy feelings of the Florida ballot box have really only proven the strength of democracy.

To link the terrorist attacks to the 2000 election in this manner is not journalism, it is propaganda. The suggestion that the current office holder would beat a former opponent by a wide margin if the election was held just after a national disaster is a no-brainer, and does not prove anything. That CNN would run such transparantly partisan advocacy masquerading as journalism shows one thing - CNN's bias is not a liberal one.

But enough anecdotal evidence. Maybe I'm just suffering from selective perception of reality, seing what I expect to see? Objective data is required to substantiate the claim that the bias of the media is in fact a conservative one, and FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) has been compiling just that kind of data for 15 years now. FAIR has documented that conservative or right-leaning "think" tanks (like Heritage, Cato, RAND or our favourite, the "Family Research" council) received more than 50% of media citations in 1998 and 1999, while left-wing and progressive think tanks overally received less than 13%. FAIR's issue collection reveals, among other things, how the mass media

• have helped create the myth that social security is failing, paving the way for the realization of one of the right's political wet dreams: privatization of social security
• perpetuate conservative myths about wellfare and simultanously turn a blind eye to corporate wellfare
• sensationalize street crime and ignore corporate crime
• treat religious right groups such as the Promise Keepers with kid's gloves and thus help legitimize them in the public perception
• generally avoid reporting on the lunatic fringe of the right, such as militias, neo-Nazis and anti-abortion terrorists, and in particular, avoid examining the personal and ideological connections these groups have to the Republican party
• created the perception that there is widespread popular opposition to affirmative action when in fact most people support it
• all but ignore waste, mismanagment and corruption in the military-industrial complex, especially as it relates to the planned missile defense system
• downplayed protests against the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO by portraying protestors as leftist fringe groups, communists and anarchists
• report corporate PR as legitimate scientific research.

Given these facts, the claim of the liberal media bias is shaky enough as it relates to major newspapers and television networks. But when one admits radio stations into the picture, the claim becomes wholly preposterous. Conservative hate radio has been carpet bombing the nation with hard-right ideology, unbridled hatred towards liberals and Clinton, distortions, lies and bogus science for years. Hate radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Gordon Liddy, Michael Reagan and Oliver North are heard by millions of people every day, and they have no progressive counterparts of any significance. Not exactly surprising, considering that corporate sponsors have a vested interest in supporting pro-business voices, and suppressing progressive ones.

In a June 30,2002 Commentary in the Eugene, Oregon Register-Guard, Edward Monks writes about the demise of the Fairness Doctrine,

Talk radio shows how profoundly the FCC's repeal of the Fairness Doctrine has affected political discourse. In recent years almost all nationally syndicated political talk radio hosts on commercial stations have openly identified themselves as conservative, Republican, or both: Rush Limbaugh, Michael Medved, Michael Reagen, Bob Grant, Ken Hamblin, Pat Buchanan, Oliver North, Robert Dornan, Gordon Liddy, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, et al. The spectrum of opinion on national political commercial talk radio shows ranges from extreme right wing to very extreme right wing - there is virtually nothing else.

On local stations, an occasional nonsyndicated moderate or liberal may sneak through the cracks, but there are relatively few such exceptions. This domination of the airwaves by a single political perspective clearly would not have been permissible under the Fairness Doctrine.

Eugene is fairly representative. There are two local commercial political talk and news radio stations: KUGN, owned by Cumulus Broadcasting, the country's second largest radio broadcasting company, and KPNW, owned by Clear Channel Communications, the largest such company. On local stations, an occasional nonsyndicated moderate or liberal may sneak through the cracks, but there are relatively few such exceptions. This domination of the airwaves by a single political perspective clearly would not have been permissible under the Fairness Doctrine.

KUGN's line-up has three highly partisan conservative Republicans - Lars Larson (who is regionally syndicated), Michael Savage and Michael Medved (both of whom are nationally syndicated), covering a nine-hour block each weekday from 1 p.m. until 10 p.m. Each host is unambiguous in his commitment to advancing the interests and policies of the Republican party, and unrelenting in his highly personalized denunciation of Democrats and virtually all Democratic Party policy initiatives. That's 45 hours a week.

For two hours each weekday morning, KUGN has just added nationally syndicated host Bill O'Reilly. Although he occasionally criticizes a Republican for something other than being insufficiently conservative, O'Reilly is clear in his basic conservative viewpoint. His columns are listed on the Townhall.com web site, created by the strongly conservative Heritage Foundation. That's 55 hours of political talk on KUGN each week by conservatives and Republicans. No KUGN air time is programmed for a Democratic or liberal political talk show host.

KPNW carries popular conservative Rush Limbaugh for three hours each weekday, and Michael Reagan, the conservative son of the former president, for two hours, for a total of 25 hours per week.

Thus, between the two stations, there are 80 hours per week, more than 4,000 hours per year, programmed for Republican and conservative hosts of political talk radio, with not so much as a second programmed for a Democratic or liberal perspective.

For anyone old enough to remember 15 years earlier when the Fairness Doctrine applied, it is a breathtakingly remarkable change - made even more remarkable by the fact that the hosts whose views are given this virtual monopoly of political expression spend a great deal of time talking about "the liberal media."

Political opinions expressed on talk radio are approaching the level of uniformity that would normally be achieved only in a totalitarian society, where government commissars or party propaganda ministers enforce the acceptable view with threats of violence. There is nothing fair, balanced or democratic about it. Yet the almost complete right wing Republican domination of political talk radio in this country has been accomplished without guns or gulags.

The Liberal Media myth is a propaganda tool employed by conservative radio hosts, columnists and pundits as a convenient excuse why after 20 years their ideology has failed to convince the public at large, and as a memetic inocculation of the public against the evidence that the media bias is in fact a conservative one.

Not only does the liberal media claim have no basis in fact, it also does not make sense considering the issues of media ownership and influence of advertisers. Most media outlets are owned by a handful of conservative corporations and individuals, and funded by usually economically conservative advertisers who have no need for an educated, alert, independent and critical citizenry. What they need is a dumb, bored, cynical and apathetic public that has abandoned all critical faculties and is easily distracted by celebrity gossip and mindless sports games. A public that will believe anything it is told, or nothing at all, which amounts to the same end result. This pro-corporate conservative bias of the media is well-documented and shows itself in consistent under-reporting or ignoring of any information that would lead people to question the fundamental status quo.

Further Reading:

• The Myth of the Liberal Media
• Media and protests—Part Three: Who are the fringe people?
• News media and protests—Part Two
• The News media and political protests
• Debate or CIA propaganda?
• Democracy, the election, and the news media
• Lies, Conservatives and Statistics
• Media in the 'Crossfire'
• Examining the "Liberal Media" Claim - Journalists' Views on Politics, Economic Policy and Media Coverage
• Meet the Myth-Makers: Right-Wing Media Groups Provide Ammo for "Liberal Media" Claims
• Rush Limbaugh, Talk Radio and The Corporate Bias Media
• Media Whores Online
• FAIR's Rush Limbaugh Resources
• The Way Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh Debates Reality
• The Way Things Really Are: Debunking Rush Limbaugh On The Environment
• Maybe The Public -- Not The Press -- Has A Leftist Bias
• Lessons of Right-Wing Philanthropy
• Conservative Foundations Lavishly Subsidize Authors While The Left Loses Out: The 'Right' Books and Big Ideas
• Think Tanks and Research Insititutes
• Book Excerpt: Black Holes of Power

The Myth Of The Homosexual Lifestyle

Listen to an activist of the far right rant against gays and lesbians for a few minutes, and you will hear the expression "the homosexual lifestyle" at least once. It is one of the standing phrases of the Religious Right, and they use it ad nauseam and beyond. However, they rarely explain what it is supposed to mean. It is the purpose of this little essay to shed some light on the definiton and proper usage of the word lifestyle, and to show that the Religious Right usage of the word in conjunction with homosexual is propagandistic and misleading.

Let us first notice that there is an inherent ambiguity in the phrase the homosexual lifestyle. It is supposed to mean the lifestyle that homosexuals have, or the lifestyle that homosexuality is?

I will come back to that question after I have explored the meaning of the word lifestyle.

Webster's dictionary defines lifestyle as

The Cambridge International Dictionary of English gives the following definition:

Dictionary.com gives the following usage note:

In summary, lifestyle is generally understood to refer to habits of consumption, dress and recreation, such as favourite foods and drinks, where they are eaten (at home/restaurants/parties), and with whom (alone/family/friends), what products one uses for body hygiene, what clothes one wears, what shows one watches on television, what movies ones sees, and so on.

It should be clear even to someone who has never consciously met a gay man or a lesbian woman that there is no uniformity of consumption habits, or dress, or hobbies among the group of people with a homosexual orientation. And why should there be? There is no connection whatsoever between who we love and what we like for breakfast.

Now that we have disposed of the idea of a uniform lifestyle among homosexuals, we can address the second idea: that homosexuality itself is a lifestyle.

From the examples, it is apparent that a lifestyle has two distinguishing qualities. It is

Race, nationality, gender and the color of your eyes are not lifestyles, because they are inborn traits. They may be superficial, but they are not freely chosen.

As we see, a certain trait can fail to be a lifestyle on just one of the two accounts. Love towards and sexual attraction to members of the same sex fails to be a lifestyle on both accounts. It is neither superficial, nor freely chosen. Throughout history, gay men and lesbians have lived their relationships in spite of social disaproval, and often under the threat of incarceration, torture or death from governmental or religious persecution. No mere lifestyle would ever prevail over such adversity. Nor would a mere lifestyle independently occur in societies all over the world, and throughout recorded history.

That sexual orientation is an immutable characteristic of human and animal sexuality is the conclusive result of decades of anthropological, psychological, zoological and sociobiological research. Not only is it not a lifestyle, it is about as far removed from being a lifestyle as anything can be. The phrase the homosexual lifestyle is the classical example of an oxymoron, i.e. two words that are used together, but have the opposite meaning (like the fiery cold, or Justice Thomas).

To put it in a less educated way, the phrase homosexual lifestyle is nonsense. Yet the Religious Right continues to use it with persistent malevolence, because it compresses the religious right view of homosexuality into a single, convenient phrase. With today's soundbite-driven, short-attention span mass media, such phrases are the stock and trade of any successful propagandist.

The phrase homosexual lifestyle demeans and trivializes same-sex relationships, by suggesting that they are not an expression of deep feelings of love and companionship, but only transitory associations with no intrinsic worth or value. It denies the true nature and depth of sexual orientation, by relegating it to the arbitariness and shallowness of a mere lifestyle choice. And it is an insult to the millions of gays and lesbians who have suffered greatly during their coming-out process, and who most certainly do not need the arrogant, condescending advice of religious fanatics who think that who we love can be changed as easily as having a hot dog with mayonnaise instead of with ketchup.

Suggestions for countering the rhetorical device of the homosexual lifestyle.

2. Ask for a detailed characterization of the homosexual lifestyle. What movies do homosexuals see? What soap do they use? What cars do they drive? What toppings do they have on their pizza?

3. If there is a homosexual lifestyle, there must also be a heterosexual lifestyle. Ask for a description of the heterosexual lifestyle. Also ask your opponent why he or she chose the heterosexual lifestyle, and under what circumstances. Ask for the exact date it happened. If your opponent can't remember the date or the circumstances, inquire why the details of such a monumental decision would have slipped from memory.

4. Point out that no one in their right mind would choose a lifestyle that makes one subject to all kinds of discrimination, constant harassment and vicious namecalling. Why would anyone want to be a second-class citizen, legally banned from marrying, and in some states, thanks to archaic sodomy laws, even officially be considered a habitual criminal?

5. Ask why some animals seem to choose the homosexual lifestyle as well.

6. When a Christian fundamentalist asks why you or someone else doesn't "leave the homosexual lifestyle", ask back why he or she doesn't leave the Christian lifestyle.

"Rampant homosexuality, a sign of cultural decadence and moral decline from Rome to Weimar, is celebrated as our first lady parades up Fifth Avenue to share her ‘pride’ in a lifestyle ruinous to body and soul alike."   Pat Buchanan, 8/10/2000 Fact: Under Emperor Hadrian [A.D. 117-138], who was gay, the Roman Empire enjoyed its greatest security, prosperity and stability. The decline of the Empire roughly coincides with Christianity becoming the state religion. The middle ages, when Christianity ruled absolute, are rightfully considered the dark ages of humanity. The age of enlightenment started when Christianity lost its grip on society. History teaches us an undeniable lesson: if anything, then rampant Christianity is a sure sign of cultural decadence and moral decline. "If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus." [A.D. 96-180]   Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776