Remora

Bias

Limited Inc was thinking that the big story today - which is, of course, Britney Spears new CD, and how it compares with the great works of the past -- was something we should get right on. We should jump on this with both feet, Jim. We should make our own preferences -- for Britney's Blue period, and her experiments in dissonance and the atonal register when she was going out with that N Sync guy -- crystal clear. Of course, we were heavily sedated when these and other thoughts raced through our head...

Instead, we are going to address a less serious issue -- that of liberal bias in the press and the entertainment industry. Housesitting over the weekend, we finally had a chance to take in the O'Reilly report. The report -- we kid you not -- was a shocking expose of LEFT WING BIAS IN THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY! Roll over Walter Winchell, and tell Estelle Parsons the news... Uh, right, where were we? Oh yes, O'Reilly's shocking scoop.

What makes this scoop particularly delicious -- and it is made in a number of venues about the NYT, or news organizations in general -- is that it is always denied, with a sort of prim huffiness, by press guys and gals. And then there's always Eric Alterman to tell us, hey, how about all those right wing bigmouths on Fox TV.

Well, why is it that nobody makes a big deal of, say, the rightwing bias of oil executives? Or how about the male-military bias of car designers (find me a woman who has any sayso in designing an American car, and I will admit, then, that finally, finally, feminism has broken through). In fact, since Comte was a pup, we've all gotten hip to a social fact: in all subcultures, there will be a certain commonality of ideas -- a certain tone that constrains which ideas are expressed. This makes for group cohesion, and for tacit rules that allow expelling members from the group -- and what is the point of a group if you can't expel members? Etc., etc. Anyway, to continue this boring presentation of platitudes, such constraints will act to select people for membership in those subcultures. Try being a born again Christian in the New York Times -- or try being a radical feminist lesbian in Exxon. I am pretty confident that the culture that writes the news in BigMedia, as well as the culture of Hollywood performers (not producers, or owners, or distributors of films) would turn out to be slightly to the left if one polled them about 'social' attitudes. Economic attitudes are a different matter. In the same way, I am pretty confident that the same poll would skew right for Oil Company execs. Now, I have never been sure what the point of this is -- are the O'Reilly's of the world really calling for ideological quotas? I think that might be a good idea, actually. Mixing in a few Florida Christians among the Hollywood set, or watching movies that indicate that God would really, really like those Jewish people to sort of consider taking Jesus Christ into their hearts as their lord and savior, right after wiping out this next set of dusky colored people with 666 tatooed on their foreheads, would be more than offset by El Paso Oil being represented by Sandra Bernhardt in some Senate hearing about the manipulation of power prices. And wouldn't it be nice if GM were forced to recruit for their designers at Ms. Magazine, instead of among retired defense industry apparatchiks?

The defense of focusing on the media or entertainment -- a last ditch defense, I think, and barely worth mentioning, as indeed this whole issue is barely worth mentioning -- is that ideology counts more, in these industries, than it does in energy or building cars. But you have merely to say that sentence to see that it is self-refuting. The decision to make a decent, low priced, low emission automobile is most definitely ideological -- it is about, among other things, how one wants to operate within a whole industrial system that has concretized other decisions about social action. It has to do with whether the corporation is more responsible to its stakeholders or its shareholders. There's nothing more ideological than that.