The Scrapbook has complained at least once in recent days about center-left news media using the terms “the right” and “conservatives” in highly tendentious ways.
We grant that it’s defensible, even if not strictly or literally true, to speak of the New York Times editorial board as “left” and the Wall Street Journal editorial board as “right.” It’s sometimes necessary for the sake of convenience to collapse an assortment of commentators and public officials into these broad terms. What’s not defensible is to use the terms “the right” or “conservatives” to denote people who bear little relation to anything credibly called conservative.
These reflections occurred to us more than once in the days after Roseanne Barr’s Twitter tirade and the cancellation of her show. Consider a piece published in the Guardian headlined “How the Right Is Defending Roseanne Barr’s Racist Tweets.” We consider ourselves a small part of the right, so we were curious to discover who among our ideological co-belligerents would defend Barr’s bigotry. The piece, by Arwa Mahdawi, mentioned several people: Ted Nugent, the ancient rocker and pro-gun radical; Noelle Nikpour, “a Republican strategist”; Alex Jones, the 9/11 truther; Peter Imanuelsen, “a Swedish commentator” and Holocaust denier; Lauren Rose, “a self-proclaimed white nationalist with a large following”; and Ali Alexander, “who has a large following on the right.”
The right, then, consists of assorted flakes a writer for the Guardian found on Twitter.
Less egregious but still offensive was a Washington Post story about the Walt Disney Company. “ABC’s abrupt cancellation of ‘Roseanne’ after a racist tweet from star Roseanne Barr,” the Post’s Steven Zeitchik explained, “sent many conservative voices on Wednesday into a frenzy about [the] politics of ABC and parent Disney.” These “conservative voices,” Zeitchik repeated, had accused Disney of “applying a more lenient standard to liberals.”
Well, okay. But who are these “conservative voices”? “The charge was led by President Trump,” Zeitchik noted. Trump had complained on Twitter that although Disney CEO Robert Iger apologized to Valerie Jarrett, the object of Barr’s slur, he never apologized to Trump for “HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC.”
There was a further allusion to “conservative blogs,” but that was it. The piece mentioned no other conservatives or “conservative voices,” despite there being “many,” all in a “charge” “led” by Trump.
The Scrapbook appreciates how gratifying it must be to associate conservatism with Roseanne Barr, and we don’t relish complaining about nomenclature. But if reporters for respectable media outlets wish to discuss conservatives and the right, perhaps they could be bothered to mention one or two actual conservatives their readers are likely to have heard of.
