Get That Paper
Why do I pick on whom I pick on when I pick on someone on this blog? When it's "the media" I'm picking on, the medium in question has tended to be certain venerable old dame from down on 42nd Street. Now why should this be?
Thrown in with some NPR and The Economist, the Times has been the medium I've always known, and there's something to be said for critique that begins with examination of one's own commitments and the field of presuppositions out of which they come.
It's not that I don't criticize or make fun of The Wall Street Journal or The China Daily. It's rather that I don't belong to a world in which their agendas and assumptions are a natural part of life.
Does this mean that only American conservatives or patriotic Chinese have the responsibility and critical wherewithal to scrutinize those papers while I'm sticking to the Times? Of course not.
Am I holding myself up as some kind of consistent model for this rather grinding kind of self-critique? No, and definitely not on a blog.
Nevertheless, I want to consider a reason that makes sense to me for why this might be worthwhile.
Lately, I have been thinking more and more about how media we consume regularly can furnish our minds with a kind of narrative Mad Libs. The particulars are open, but the structures are pre-set. The intractable old regime, the reform-minded cosmopolitans, the sticking issue on which we wish they had our insight. Are we talking about Egypt, Thailand, or Texas? They tell us, but they tend to fit the differences into a common formula.
Perhaps my worries are not so common. A lot of people I know work hard to find perspectives that challenge them. But for me, for whatever reason, it's never Jadaliyya or BOMB or n+1 that furnishes the easy conceits I almost say, the familiar verbal temptations that it seems I'm always working against.
Perhaps I will always have a slogan just on the tip of my tongue that I'll be tempted to mete out when first confronted with political complexity. It probably sounds like "progress and enlightenment will bring about the brotherhood of man." I am still searching for some kind of check to my prejudice; I am still looking for ways change up the Mad Libs.