‘Dogged’ press just reflects consensus

OF all the myths propagated about the American news media, none is more laughable than the notion that it is an adversarial institution, that journalists today compose a kind of cultural fifth column.

The truth of the matter is that our reporters, editors, photojournalists and broadcasters are about as relentlessly bourgeois a group as you’re likely to meet anywhere. By and large, they are, by virtue of education and income, deeply rooted in the broad American middle class, resolutely and uncritically middlebrow in their tastes and opinions.

The growing influence of the 24-hour news cycle and online journalism, which have given a new prominence to analysis and opinion, has made all this painfully apparent. Survey the news media’s treatment of any major news story today, and what comes to mind is that protean commentator Walter Bagehot’s scathing dismissal of Sir Robert Peel as “a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities.”

That’s pretty much the story of analytic and opinion journalism today -- uncommon technical facility in the service of utterly commonplace thought.

Take, for example, the way the commenting classes responded this week to a pair of guilty pleas to criminal charges lodged against two public men -- Michael Vick, the star quarterback of the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons, and Larry E. Craig, the senior Republican senator from Idaho. Vick pleaded guilty to federal charges growing out of his role in a dog-fighting operation; Craig pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct after he allegedly solicited sex from an undercover police officer in an airport men’s room.

In both cases, the virtual tidal wave of responses in the allegedly adversarial and countercultural press precisely mirrored the popular consensus concerning Vick’s and Craig’s respective conduct.

For the professional football player, that meant universal revulsion and condemnation. Given the fact that you can’t spit these days without hitting a columnist or commentator of some kind, you’d think one of them might have said something like: “This is disgusting, but you know they’re only dogs. Do we really want to jail a guy and ruin his life over this?” You might have thought that, somewhere, there’d have been an editor who assigned a reporter to find out whether Vick came from a family or community with a tradition of dog fighting? You know, the kind of let’s-see-if-we-can-understand-why-he-did-this treatment we routinely give mass murderers.

It didn’t happen because animal cruelty is one of those issues concerning which America has undergone a tectonic shift in attitude. It’s one of those offenses against the common conscience for which we’re no longer willing to admit excuse or reason. There are lots of reasons for that, some of them having to do with the way environmentalism has broadened our concern for living things. Some have to do with our long shift from a rural nation to a suburban and urban one. Farmers and ranchers have a utilitarian attitude toward animals, even the working ones like dogs. People in the suburbs and cities hold their pets in deep affection as companions. The latter trend probably has been amplified by the growing number of households in which dogs and cats stand in for children in the lives of single people or childless couples. (The televised ads for one national pet store chain now address “new pet parents.”)

The net effect is that we’re probably, in this sense at least, a kinder society, though paradoxically an unforgiving one. There was an interesting empirical measure of that this week, when the online magazine Slate.com asked its research partner, Mediacurves.com, to monitor in real time the responses of 300 people, as they watched Vick’s televised apology for participating in dog fighting. The study found that nobody believed him. That’s fairly startling since, these days, it’s hard to find 300 Americans who would unanimously agree that tomorrow’s sunrise will occur in the east.

On the other hand, a CBS News/New York Times poll pointed to where that consensus breaks down. It found “that 32% of black Americans believe Vick’s status as a star athlete has caused him to receive worse treatment by the authorities, compared to only 6% of white Americans.” As 50-year-old Hiram Melvin of Decatur, Ga., told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “This dog fighting has been going on for years. It’s not something that just started. It’s not a big deal.”

When America makes up its mind, sentiments like those are drowned out, in the news media no less than everywhere else.

Contrast this unanimity with the commentary concerning the Craig scandal. Even on the conservative side, the only thing on which people seemed to agree was a desire to put as much distance as possible between Craig and themselves. (By week’s end, the only organization willing to retain him as an ally was the National Rifle Assn., and it would keep Osama bin Laden on its rolls if he paid his dues and agreed to oppose all restrictions on handguns.)

For example, Naomi Schaefer Riley -- the Wall Street Journal’s “deputy Taste editor” (you can’t make this stuff up) -- wrote that Craig erred in denying that he’s gay. “If he were just gay, no one would even blink,” she argued. “Join the Log Cabin Republicans, for heaven’s sake. Even some of his more religious supporters might just decide to love the sinner and hate the sin.”

Linda Chavez, who headed the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights under Ronald Reagan and is now a Republican fundraiser, argued that since Sen. Craig essentially was entrapped by “a police officer who was there solely to catch homosexual men soliciting others for consensual sex,” he “would have been better advised to remain silent on his sex life, but the media hypocrisy in this affair is at least as troubling as Sen. Craig’s.

“On the one hand, the media generally regards sexual orientation as a private matter, moreover one that is morally neutral. But because Sen. Craig is a conservative, although not someone who has had a history of gay-bashing, the media have had no qualms about violating his privacy.”

Actually, an echo of this difference of opinion also could be found on the liberal side. On the one hand, there are those who believe that equal legal rights for gays and lesbians are a fundamental civil rights issue that does not admit differences of opinion. For them, the fact that Craig voted against gay rights measures while allegedly pursuing sex with other men makes him a bigot and a hypocrite who has forfeited any right to privacy. On the other hand, there are those who regard privacy, particularly in sexual matters, as a foundation of civil liberties. They tend to be uncomfortable with the whole “outing” phenomenon, whatever its rationale.

This is one of those areas where demography probably is destiny. Studies show younger Americans, whatever their region or religious background, overwhelmingly believe equal legal treatment of gays and lesbians is a civil rights issue and should be treated as such.

In the meantime, as America struggles to make up its mind, the consequent confusion sets the tone for a news media that continues to be more society’s reflection than its leader.

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com