Fox is playing quite a bit in my home, thanks to my Christian mom, and it really irks me to see that people actually take this station seriously. It seems like such an obvious slant; the bias in and of itself would almost be forgivable, but the arguments presented are just awful. Emotional appeals followed by strawmans, etc. It doesn’t help that I take the non-existence of God for granted, and Beck likes to harp on that issue quite a bit (my mom’s favorite Fox show).
I know Fox shouldn’t be representative of the whole Republican party, but other conservative sources appear just as bad. There’s the whole debacle of Conservapedia.
Where can I go to listen to some rational repubs who are a little less socially conservative and, I don’t know … willing to compromise on some social issues / not appeal to a base of religious fundamentalist? Their BS is pushing me away really hard. Still, I’m a kid interested in being all scientific-like, so I’m willing to listen to the credible supporters of the Republican viewpoint.
I have seen him stray from the Republicans over the last few years. He tried to defend them but became disillusioned.
That said I think he remains a conservative voice that is rational and less socially conservative as you want.
Beyond that I am at a loss. Used to be the likes of William F. Buckley Jr., who founded the National Review, were a voice of conservative reason. I used to count George Will in that group too.
Buckley is dead, his son Chris was fired (or at least asked to leave) from the National Review after Chris expressed his dissatisfaction over the McCain/Palin ticket. George Will, IMO, has completely sold out.
I think that tells the story overall. Conservatives have zero room for dissenting voices. You toe the line or you GTFO.
More’s the pity.
I think in the end it hurts them…badly. We are already seeing the results of their overreach (e.g. New York-26 which is diehard red just voted in a democrat).
Republicans overall have moved so far right I think a reckoning is coming for them soon. I hope so anyway.
I keep my eyes peeled for reality-based conservatives. They are harder and harder to find.
The Economist magazine is conservative by European standards, but liberal by American ones. Capital gains and games hosts Bruce Bartlett, one of the designers of the Kemp-Roth tax cuts of the 1980s. He was fired by AEI when he failed to toe the party line.
The The Volokh Conspiracy is a conservative legal site. Perhaps because it is related to a specialty (law in this case) it has an inherent tether to reality.
Because I am pessimistic about human nature and human potential I am conservative on social issues, but liberal on economic issues. I distrust freedom as an ideal, and favor a large, powerful, and expensive government paid for by high taxes on the rich. I like democracy. I also like strong leaders who get things done.
I want a new New Deal, and a second Franklin Roosevelt. I like to be governed by rich Democrats whose families have been rich for generations, who went to prep schools and Ivy League universities, and who view business executives as social inferiors.
I voted for Barack Obama, and will do so again, but I am disappointed in him.
Most news is like this. But if you’re on the left side of the spectrum:
a) It doesn’t seem like it to you.
b) There’s a wide enough spectrum of coverage that you can find a version that is objective to your level of liking, whereas the right only has a single outlet to choose from.
Nonsense, that’s a false equivalency. Fox is not news, it’s a propaganda network that casually and systematically lies. It’s the equivalent of Pravda, not of CNN.
Technically speaking, it’s about equivalent to ABC World News and NBC Nightly News, as of 2004.
FOX is about double the distance from the center as CNN is. Most news is not in the center. There seems to be two lobes (left and right) both centering around about ± 10 of center. The left lobe has significantly more entries.
I didn’t say anything about them being right wing, I called them liars and compared them to a Communist propaganda publication. If the “left lobe has significantly more entries”, that’s because the facts are more “left wing”.
I think the first fault of your premise is that you see “Republicans” as a monolithic group- There are three groups that make up the backbone of the modern Republican coalition, and they were all driven to that side of the fence by positions Democrats took.
First and foremost are the “economic Conservatives”, the guys who worship money, and they eskew government for making it harder for them to make money with things like minimum wage laws, regulations, taxes, etc. This really isn’t a big slice of the electorate, but they control things because they can write out the big checks to the empty suit that espouses their view.
The second group are people like your Mom, who aren’t rich, are never going to be rich, but don’t like the changes in society since 1960, and blame permissive social attitudes for them. The ironic thing is, the Republicans never can get elected without these people, but the have very little to show for their efforts. Abortion is still legal, gay rights are gaining, etc.
The thing is, 80% of Americans believe in God. that number isn’t going to change because at some level, we want to believe that there is something beyond death. The GOP has gotten very good at appealing to that because the Democrats eskew it. Jesus was actually pretty liberal in his views, when you get down to it, but there is a democratic contempt for religion that has driven the religious out of the Democratic ranks.
Third group are the security conservatives, people who get really angry when they see some foreigners thumbing their noses at us. Again, we can pretty much thank George McGovern for driving that bunch out of the Democratic party. The reason I started voting Republican in 1980 was I got tired of watching Jimmy Carter getting schooled by every third world despot who challenged him.
David Brooks has potential, but all I hear him on is on NPR where, unfortunately, he is reduced to a he said-she said sound biter. A polite, well-reasoned sound bite exchange, but not long enough to really expound on any coherent theories.
He’s not a big social conservative and will often agree with the liberal counter-commentator on social issues, and is not afraid to call out Republicans when their strategies are crazy. He’s pretty fiscally conservative, though, but again, sane, and does not think that lowering taxes is the solution to everything.
My biggest beef with him, besides the short format of his interviews, is that he often gets reduced to “concern trolling”, namely, ostensibly agreeing with the other person but expressing concern that their point of view will be deeply politically unpopular and will lead to huge Democratic losses.
It’s only 10 or 15 minutes once a week, but he’s on the PBS NewHour every Friday with Mark Shields representing the liberal side. It’s usually pretty good.
I agree with everything you’ve written except your comment about Democrats’ contempt for religion. Democrats aren’t against religion, at all; most Democrats I know, including most Democratic politicians, believe in some version of a Christian deity. Democrats generally, and rightly in my opinion, oppose religious influence in the public sphere, and especially on legislation and policy.
Also, not to get all nit-pickery on ya, but it’s eschew, now eskew.
This is a new one. Since liberals are correct any real news organization would have to be left-leaning because they are just reporting the objective, true facts. Wow.
That sounds exactly like the rationale behind China and its censorship.
Daniel Larison is an extremely thoughtful, non-doctrinaire conservative whose blog at American Conservative’s website is always worth reading. I’ve never seen anyone say a bad word about him. He’s one of those bloggers who, to engage him at all, other bloggers have to actually read him closely, where they find that they can’t just dismiss him. They can argue against him, but he’s impossible to write off as a hack.
If there’s a drawback to him (or maybe this is a plus), he’s not as into the horse-race side of politics, staying more on the side of conservative philosophy. But he still deals with news items and current events; it’s just that he doesn’t really engage those events at the level of “and that’s why I could never vote for this candidate.”
What I like best about David Brooks is the slight sense of embarrassment, as if he realizes that however often he tells himself he is a courtesan, he’s still a whore.
But, man, can he ever wear a suit! Not like Mark, who always looks like he stuffed his suit into a washer/dryer about two hours before show time, then climbed into the dryer while it was running and put the suit on.
Are we looking at different parts of the paper? In Table 3, I see most of the entries more or less in a single clump, with two severe outliers on the right (FoxNews with Brit Hume and Washington Times) and one severe outlier on the left (Wall St. Journal … pre-Fox! ).
Perhaps the most amusing result in this paper is that NPR, which rationalists admire for objectivity but which right-wingers condemn as highly partisan, shows as centrist, indeed Newshour with Jim Lehrer is most centrist of all (Table 4).
I think a lot of Democratic politicians SAY they believe in Christ, but do you think they really believe in talking snakes?
But either you believe in talking snakes or you believe we evolved from Monkeys. there’s really not an either-or choice in the matter on a subject like teaching Evolution in the schools.
What you call “influence” they call moral choices- Abortion, Gay rights, Evolution. I don’t think you can call yourself religious and really be neutral on these issues.
So you’d vote for snobs just because they’re snobs? I mean someone who looks down on an equally successful man just because he made the money and not because your great-great-great-grandfather was granted a holding by Governor Stuyvesant is a good trait? And Democrats have run successful candidates who wern’t ultra-rich and from an elite family-Harry Truman for example
).