Reading With the Enemy

Oliver Griswold - One Month Immersed in Right-Wing Media

The project was inspired by Morgan Spurlock, the director and producer of Supersize Me, a documentary about obesity in America and our supersize-it culture. Spurlock decided to test fast-food companies’ claims that their food isn’t unhealthy by relegating himself to a diet of McDonald’s meals: breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks for 30 days.
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ME: What if I only listened to the Eagles for a month?

ME: Horrible, but not enough.

ME: What if I only read Russian novels? Or chick lit?

ME: Yes, but reading only happens at bedtime – too easy.

ME: What if I only rode local buses everywhere?

ME: OK, now you’re just reaching.

My ideas were too superficial, too banal. Spurlock’s near-renal failure haunted my brainstorming process. A month of Don Henley is painful but no match for thirty days of Filet-O-Fish.

Then my girlfriend had an idea. An idea that required a real struggle, a complete lifestyle change, with the potential to ruin personal relationships, trash my psyche, turn my whole world not just upside down, but inside out and backward. In other words, a really great bad idea.

HER: What if you spent one month reading, listening to, and watching only right-wing media. No New York Times, no NPR, no network news, no CNN, no lefty blogs, no liberal novels. Nothing left-wing or centrist, and nothing ‘objective.’ Nothing that makes up the world you currently inhabit.

ME: Babe, you’re an evil genius, and I love you.
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I worried specifically about the positions I knew the least about, or had spent the least amount of time considering: capital punishment, immigration policy, globalization, reinstating the draft, small business, agriculture, and health-care and prescription-drug policy. I fretted that in trying to focus on a wide range of issues, instead of doting on the comfort zone of my well-established ideals, I would actually be learning from the Right.

My fear felt justified. I have lived in a liberal world all my life. How would my world react if the Right’s arguments appealed to me? So help me, what if I thought they were right? At the very least, a month of trying to remain open to their views might give me a reason to believe my regular media diet was, in fact, presenting the issues from a liberal viewpoint.
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My girlfriend did make some ground rules clear: If I started spouting Coulterisms (‘My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building.’) or even mentioned the word ‘submissive,’ she’d be gone before I could say ‘supply side.’
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At the end of a typical day, I felt as if I had boxed 12 rounds with Lennox Lewis. Or, more accurately, with a dozen white, privileged, whining Lennox Lewises.

Many of the themes I encountered on the Right sounded, well, great, at first glance, like the messages in political campaign advertising. I almost swooned at the grand exultations of individualism and love of God and country, protecting America and the spread of democracy, small government, and personal responsibility. These are the traits that made America great! But when I dug down into the details, I found that many of the lofty themes didn’t mix very well, leading to some bad-tasting intellectual pretzels. To wit:

- The Heritage Foundation unequivocally supports President Bush’s tax cuts (lofty theme: helping the economy), while also supporting an expansion of the USA Patriot Act (lofty theme: making America safe), without making the connection that reducing the size of the federal treasury will make the hiring of additional Justice Department workers more difficult.

- Ann Coulter complains in one column that ‘according to liberals, it’s Christianity that causes murder’ (lofty theme: defending her faith), while in another, she exhorts the U.S. government to ‘invade [Islamic] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity’ (lofty theme: spreading democracy).

- Right-wing pundits across the board decry affirmative action in hiring and admissions on the basis that only merit should count when deciding who should be hired or admitted (lofty theme: individual achievement), but the same pundits accuse Senate Democrats of racism when they filibuster against the appointment of a black or Hispanic conservative judge (lofty theme: eventually, small government).

Too frequently I discovered those lofty themes are not meant for all Americans, but trotted out in a jingoistic attempt to suit conservatives’ own agenda, which is often racist, nationalistic, xenophobic, and greedy. The more I read, the more disillusioned I became with the gulf between the rhetoric and the reality of the Right. My resistance to conversion on any issue was bolstered by the sense that the Right doesn’t have a vision for America, it just drags one out as a means to achieve selfish ends. The oratory sounds like cock-a-doodle, but the truth tastes like doo.
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The other stream of the Right’s never-ceasing political campaign – the one that binds various groups supporting various issues into a force to be reckoned with – is its disdain for the Left. (Leftists disdain the Right, too, but their tendency to argue amongst themselves about how to best turn their anger into action has prevented the Left from becoming any sort of unified force.) It’s a far more powerful cocktail than any issue-related conviction. The Left, a corrupt occupying army that has sown the seeds of political correctness, ‘homosexualist’ agendas, soft foreign policy, baby killing, the welfare state, and reverse racism across this land, is to be fought to the death with no surrender. Ann Coulter not only believes that Bill Clinton was a ‘known felon and probably a rapist,’ but she posits that all liberals are treasonous and slanderous, and titled her most recent books Treason and Slander to prove it. Columnist Diana West finds pro-choice marchers ‘obscene’ and ‘banal.’ Oliver North accuses Democrats of not just supporting, but socializing with ‘dictators’ and ‘tyrants.’ Suzanne Fields calls Hollywood stars and university professors ‘arms suppliers in the culture war.’ The denizens of FreeRepublic.com, the Right’s heavily populated and highly virulent message board of choice, routinely refer to shooting Muslims, and call lesbians and gay men ‘dykes,’ ‘fags,’ ‘Sodomites,’ ‘deviants,’ and ‘highly immoral.’ Rush Limbaugh’s Web site bears a headline that declares ‘Kerry Campaign Like Chappaquiddick,’ and I listened to Rush regularly call feminists ‘feminazis’ and environmentalists ‘wackos.’ The list of slurs and epithets is long and varied, and can seemingly go on forever.
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Every article began to sound the same, and not simply because they were cribbed from the talking points sent out daily by the Republican National Committee. Operating within such strict parameters pares down the number of ideas upon which one can conceivably remark.
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Sometime in the middle of the month I decided to look up the definitions of liberal and conservative in the dictionary, just for kicks.

Liberal a. Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry.

b. Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded.

Conservative a. Favoring traditional views and values; tending to oppose change.

b. Traditional or restrained in style.

c. Moderate; cautious.

For the rest of the month, these definitions framed every sentence I read in the National Review, FrontPage Magazine, and all the like-minded sources that had become my only sources. The Right decries the ‘liberal media establishment’ in every other op-ed column, broadcast, etc. They believe their views are correct, as do we all. But here, the point is that the Right establishes narrow strictures not just for the ideas they are willing to hold, but also for the ideas they’re willing to hear, and then proclaims the space within those parameters ‘the mainstream.’ Every institution, then, that offers a voice outside their restrictive worldview must be ‘liberal.’ The amazing thing is, they’re absolutely right – most of our public and private entities try to be broad-minded, open to new ideas for progress, and free from bigotry, at least when they aren’t controlled by the Right or trying to appease them.
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The final week of the project proved easy. The boredom returned, and I hardly read, watched, or listened to much of anything. I taught middle school, went for a few nice runs, paid some bills, loved my girl. I became 90% of America, and cared little about national and international news. I had food, shelter, water, oxygen, a comfy bed, and a few beers in the fridge. Life in a bubble was nice compared to life with the wolves.
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I know the Right better now, and my immersion will serve me well. Their strategies are seamless, powerful, and worth imitating. Like a well-oiled machine, the Right coordinates messages hourly across all its holdings: media, government, non-profits, and foundations. When the 60 minutes are up, America hears the same words, phrases, themes echoed from Web sites, newspapers, radio hosts, think tanks, senators, the president, and all the people in between. To the politically undecided or ignorant, this orchestrated effort can drown out the more haphazard messages from the Left side of the divide.
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I don’t feel any sort of loss. I satisfied an itch I had, some curiosity about whether I could do it. I dived in. I did it. And as Morgan Spurlock told CNN a few months after eating McDonald’s for 30 days, ‘I feel a lot better now.

el - An observation - some of the examples he gives may not have come from within a one-month immersion in only right-wing media but are well-known left examples of rightwing bias over several years.