My long-promised reply to Jon Chait's netroots article is up at TNR today, and I hope folks read it.* It's really about quite a bit more than his piece, and I'm very happy with how it turned out. I'm less pleased with Jon's response, which seems a studied attempt to distort my argument and decontextualize my points. For instance, he writes that "[Klein says] I provided no examples. This is just weird. I wrote about the hysterical treatment of liberal heretics, the propagandistic use of the epithet "chickenhawk" to dismiss any and all critics, and the attack on Salon for reporting fairly on the Edwards blogger fiasco." Sadly, my charge was that he doesn't buttress his claim that "In the netroots, the measure of an idea is its rhetorical effectiveness, not its truth." None of those examples prove his point in the least. Jon ideologically dislikes the term "chickenhawk," thinks people should be nicer to his magazine, and is confused by what went on during the Edwards story (which I actually reported on through that night). None of his examples contain a lie. If they're the best Jon could furnish, his argument is weak indeed.
To keep this from becoming too long, I'll jump to Jon's close, where Jon concludes that I'm making an "ultra-relativist" argument, which states that "We all have our biases, none of us is pure, so there's no real way to say who's the propagandist." I expect stronger ripostes from Jon, particularly when my piece contains the following nut graf:
To varying degrees, we all take instrumental attitudes toward the truth. The press does not report truths at random (you don't watch the 9 o'clock news to learn about how plants photosynthesize, whether turpentine sales are flat this year, and whether someone just named a baby girl "Mary"). The truths they tell exist in an uneasy tension between what they define as "newsworthy," what will attract the largest audience (white girl kidnapped in Aruba!), what will give them a relative advantage over their competitors, what will preserve their reputations for objectivity, what won't offend their advertisers, what won't get them hassled by Brent Bozell, and so on. Lefty bloggers, who believe their vision of the world--Iraq is going poorly, Social Security is not in crisis, Bush is very bad--is true, tend to offer the truths they find informational, which also happen to accord with their vision of the world. So the question is not who has a purer commitment to the truth, but whose guiding impulses are doing more to accurately inform their audiences. In other words, whose instrumentalism is better?
Jon doesn't want to argue the substantive point here because it's an argument he and his magazine simply cannot win. I don't fault him for that, of course, but it's rather the opposite of "there's no real way to say who's the propagandist." Indeed, reading Jon's attempt to spin away my points, one might conclude that his arguments were motivated more by a desire for "rhetorical effectiveness" than "truth."
Welcome to the blogosphere, Jon!
*The added bonus of the article is that it includes the backstory to my name. Since this will surely be a pub trivia mainstay well into the future, you may want to take a look. (And for those having password troubles, Fred has advice in the comments)
