behind the news

Of Cops and Reporters and Their Antagonists

September 1, 2004

Yesterday afternoon, in Union Square, I watched a group of cops stand passively as a middle-aged woman in slept-in clothes and scraggly hair screamed some of the nastiest invective this side of Yankee Stadium in their direction. If the woman was hoping to provoke retaliation, she was in the wrong place: The police have mostly been restrained in dealing with provocations from protesters this week, something that even the protesters grudgingly admit, if only in private.

On the streets, however, the public rhetoric among protesters is far different: the police are brutal monsters who are quick to violence, overeager to arrest energetic young idealists for nothing more than looking in their direction. When four 20-something protesters were arrested yesterday, one of whom, according to a lieutenant, was carrying a vial of creamy liquid with the word “POLICE” written on it, the crowd chanted “Shame! Shame!” At the New York Public Library, after one of two women who had tried to hang a protest banner was pinned to the ground, protesters answered the police’s entreaties to move on with chants of “Oink, oink, oink.” One gets the impression that it would take a particularly heinous action — perhaps the brutal beating of an innocent bystander by a protestor — to convince many of those demonstrating that any kind of police action is justified. And even then they’d have their doubts. Like the politicians they’ve come to rail against, the protesters in New York are relentlessly on message when in the public eye, and they aren’t going to let reality get in the way of rhetoric.

We mention this because it seems an apt analogy for the way that ideologues try to ignite, and then keep aflame, a continuing debate over media bias. Both the left and right long ago realized that hysterical (but calculated) posturing has its advantages over nuance in pulling conventional wisdom in your direction. If you ask Brent Bozell and his brethren, The New York Times and the rest of the “liberal media” is constantly pushing a relentlessly far left agenda. Liberals, of course, paint a different picture of the world, one in which a compliant press has become little more than a pipeline for right-wing propaganda.

The two sides do have one thing in common: an unwillingness to concede that the media might not fall on one side or the other of the ideological spectrum; that what most reporters worry about is not how to cleverly slant their copy, but about getting beat by other reporters on a story that they consider competitive. (Put a group of haggard political scribes together over a few late-night drinks, and you’ll hear the gossip that really lights their fire, and it won’t be about politicians — it will be about each other.)

The protesters, with their drumbeat posturing about cops, take the same strategic line as ideologues charging media bias. It’s an effective strategy, of course; one of the reasons that the police have been so lenient with the protesters is that they know they will be harshly criticized for even the slightest perceived infraction. But it also obscures the true state of affairs, and reduces dialogue to a mere rhetorical tug-of-war. Part of the reason that the media bias debate so rarely seems worthwhile is that both sides have decided that extreme positions help their cause more than honest assessments.

They may be right. But until the players can agree to stop mindlessly parroting their loaded message and rationally engage reality, we’ll continue to be stuck with a war of words in which little of substance ever breaks the surface.

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–Brian Montopoli

Brian Montopoli is a writer at CJR Daily.