Adrianna Huffington stepped out of the pages of her Huffington Post Web site the other night for an appearance at Goucher College.
She was there to talk about the race for president. She was there to talk about the great upheaval in the modern media landscape.
And, not to be minimized, she was there to be adored by a packed house of True Believers.
The school’s big auditorium was packed with those who know Huffington from her liberal web site, or her liberal columns, or her appearances as a liberal talking head on any of the political TV shows on which she’s appeared over the past decade.
TV choreography being about as spontaneous as hip surgery, the talk shows always know what they’re getting when she shows up.
That’s why they bring her on. And not just Huffington, either. We are, more and more, a nation that chooses up sides and tunes in mainly to hear reinforcement of our own team’s talking points.
You want conservative, you turn to Fox News on the TV, or the Drudge Report on your computer, or Rush Limbaugh on the radio. You want liberal, you turn to MSNBC or the Huffington Post or one of its mirror images. You need a political fix and want something down the middle, your pickings are getting a little narrow, and getting a little drowned out by all the partisan noise on both sides of them.
At Goucher the other night, Huffington made the case that she’s not specifically waving pom poms for Barack Obama. Her Web site, after all, was the first to report Obama’s controversial remarks about small-town Americans turning to “guns and religion” in their modern frustration. But she admitted she’s definitely in business to champion a point of view.
In these closing days of the presidential campaign, this becomes more obvious by the day. Conservatives have reveled for the past decade in the The Drudge Report, and liberals now turn to sites such as Huffington’s.
The Drudge Report gets an average 2.1 unique visitors a day, while Huffington Post has jumped past it to roughly 4.5 million visitors – such a flood that the site is now reported to be worth roughly $200 million, though it’s only been in existence for a couple of years.
Who says liberalism’s dead? Not those who turn to the site each day and know they’re going to get a wave of political viewpoints that are as steadily, and unapologetically, as liberal as the Drudge Report is unrepentantly conservative.
But, in a historical context, this is a sea change. The old journalistic ideal in America has been objectivity. It was never entirely true, of course, since no human being is entirely objective. But you got as close to it as possible. As Joe Friday used to say: Just the facts, ma’am.
Now it’s advocacy journalism, or a thinly veiled version of it, all the time. Bared fangs, take no prisoners.
Sometimes, it’s tough to figure if the different analysts are watching the same campaign. By midweek, Fox News was talking about tightening national political polls, while MSNBC was talking about the electoral count, which showed Obama topping 340 electoral votes (far beyond the necessary 270), and one of the commentators at CNN (which is usually the most balanced of the cable news operations) was wondering if John McCain has secretly thrown in the towel.
At Goucher the other night, Huffington mentioned all those state polls that have Obama supporters beaming. I asked a fellow in the crowd, whom I happen to know, how his wife was handling so much dispiriting news. She’s a conservative (and therefore stayed home.)
“She’s fine,” he said. “She gets all her news from Fox and conservative talk radio. She thinks McCain’s winning.”
And maybe he will win.
But it’s getting harder to figure the full truth of things based on a lot of the new reporting. On MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, for example, he trots out a chorus line of veteran reporters each night – but they seem like a repertory company of predictable characters, validating each other’s points of view. You sense they’re enlisted for this very reason, and know it, and deliver the good because they like the exposure.
Fox, which has taken the phrase “fair and balanced” and turned them into a liberal sneer, seems to broadcast directly from the Republican Party’s back pocket. They give us Bill O’Reilly. He invites opposing points of view onto his show, but it’s mainly so he can out-shout the poor slobs. That’s not journalism, it’s a playground bully picking on a series of defenseless nerds.
In either case, it’s not information we’re getting, it’s theater. Even when it’s your point of view that’s been trumpeted, you suspect the fix is in, just to give viewers a happy ending.
