Harrison Bergeron
Dragging everyone down to your level doesn’t make you an intellectual, and hiring a White House staff member to provide recommendations on altering the editorial content of PBS doesn’t eliminate bias, especially when the review is based on one program’s invited guests. Why are so many Republicans afraid of intellectuals? I see this move as not dissimilar, in fact just an offshoot from, the drive to demonize university professors and, more recently, all teachers (although it appears English teachers especially, perhaps because they teach children to read and to think critically).

It wasn’t so long ago that various people who might otherwise have been relied upon for a liberal viewpoint were themselves targeting the so-called elitists in media and education, driving the “politically correct” usages into public consciousness, causing a general backlash that continues today, albeit pretty nearly exclusively from the far right. The main difference now, however, is that the purpose isn’t to elevate discourse, to be inclusive (howsoever far the arguments may have been exclusive originally), but to deny equality even while pretending to argue for it. You’ll hear claims that gays and lesbians don’t want special attention drawn to them at the same time as you’ll see a referendum on a ballot to enact legislation against gay marriage, or arguments that the 70-cents-on-the-dollar wage discrepancies between what women earn versus what men earn has become mythic, that women are doing better than ever, so they don’t need any special protections. You’ll hear someone say: why can’t they just be Americans instead of African-Americans or Native Americans or Chinese Americans (and you’ll hear the same argument in countries in Europe and in Australia), but you won’t hear an acknowledgement of centuries of oppression or discrimination, and certainly not an apology for any specific acts carried out in the past. No welfare, no pension, no “hand-outs.” The argument will often turn on “levelling the playing field,” making opportunity possible for everyone. But too often in practice what this amounts to is dragging down more of us, fencing off opportunities already arrogated to an elite much different from those being disparaged, those who argue most pointedly from an opposing perspective, that raising up the disadvantaged is a better method of benefiting all of society.

There is no “liberal bias” in the media any more than there is a conservative bias. There is the New York Times and there is the Wall Street Journal. If you look more broadly around the country, you’ll find a more conservative editorial content generally. In Australia, there’s the Fairfax papers and the Murdoch papers, and both publish content – editorial and news – from the opposite ends of the political spectrum, while otherwise attempting an open minded approach to the stories and opinions they print. PBS’s content similarly addresses society broadly, and there are some who see things more narrowly, so they perceive the programming there as too left wing. The same fight is happening here over the ABC, and in England over the BBC. We needn’t be surprised: look who we’ve elected to the highest positions in our nations.