"...the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion." - John Stewart Mill, On Liberty.
There do not seem to be secrets any more. Before the Internet and the ubiquity of inexpensive audio and video recording equipment, uninhibited and unscripted remarks made to groups of like-minded partisans might have been lost. Now those remarks can be preserved and transmitted and we can gain a glimpse into people's true feelings. The alternative is to listen to the sanitized statements that have been laundered through a public relations staff and rinsed free of insight and information.
A couple of weeks ago, Linda Foley the President of the Left-leaning Newspaper Guild, speaking at the National Conference for Media Reform accused, without the courtesy of providing proof, the American military of deliberately targeting journalists. Perhaps more revealing was that Ms. Foley's remarks were greeted with applause and cheers confirming that her audience was sympathetic to her remarks. One gets the sense that there is an incestual reinforcement of views between Ms. Foley and her audience that blinds both to alternative points of view.
After the firestorm that followed Ms. Foley's remarks, one might have thought she would be more circumspect in her comments, at least for a little while. But the lure of an enthusiastic, like-minded audience proved too great a temptation. Following Ms. Foley around with a microphone in search of an incendiary statement is akin to following a fuse to a bomb. The inevitable happens. On a discussion panel on media reform at the Take Back America Conference held at the Washington Hilton in Washington DC this last week, Ms. Foley seemed to eschew balanced news reporting. She said: "The conservatives have got us, as a country, now believing that balance giving both sides is the same as truth, and there are some things that are just false."
Deconstruction of the statement provides and interesting insight into the maelstrom of ideas swirling around what counts for modern Liberal minds. By "balance," Ms. Foley is referring to equal coverage of competing ideas. Ms. Foley believes that the press should identify ideas or notions that progressive minds have decided are settled and not open to debate, upon which there is no longer legitimate controversy. In such cases, according to Ms. Foley's prescription, giving both sides is misleading. It gives people the false impression that both sides of the argument have equal merit. Foley's argument reveals an arrogant distrust in the public's ability to properly weigh the arguments.
