Like Rod, I highly recommend Conor Friedersdorf’s C11 piece on conservative journalism, which was originally published at Doublethink Online a few months ago. In the first place, Conor is an extraordinarily talented writer, and this piece displays a lot of those gifts. Secondly, though, the argument he makes – that what conservatives need is not more “echo chamber” polemics, but rather a responsible attempt to show the ways in which liberal pieties are contradicted by the world’s “stubborn facts” – is really quite important, and it suggests the possibility of a kind of conservative or libertarian journalism that is of a higher quality than much of what American conservatives are presently in the business of churning out.
That said (and Conor is explicitly aware of this), the real world is one whose stubbornness contradicts conservative pieties, too, and a responsible journalist will be able to take note of these as well. Moreover, there’s the fact that narrative journalism, with its essential focus on particulars, has a tendency to overplay the power of singular anecdotes: and so while Conor rightly notes that the sadness of one family being thrown out of a home does not do much to mitigate the demonstrable stupidity of rent control, one of the further examples he goes on to suggest as a model for Right-leaning journalism – he’d like to dispatch a fleet of Tom Wolfe clones to every country whose health care system Ezra Klein hopes to draw on – raises concerns of its own: the mere presence of (even lots of) people who are frustrated with or underserved by their country’s health care system doesn’t show that that system is no good, or otherwise no system would be any good. It’s ultimately the bigger picture – the one that’s borne out, however imperfectly, by opinion surveys and expert analysis – that matters most, and a war of anecdotes (For every displaced renter you find, I’ll turn up a frustrated landlord who can’t make ends meet! — Oh yeah? Well, I’ll see your impoverished cancer patient and raise him one uninsured two-year-old!) is not going to get us to where we need to be.
But Conor knows all of this, and ultimately the critical point is that compellingly-reported anecdotes are needed to illustrate the facts that the best theory and expert analysis bear out. (I’ve tried to do this myself, of course.) And Conor is also open, I’m sure, to recognizing that in certain cases those facts aren’t all that “conservative”, after all. And so his essay is an important one, and well worth the read. That Conor is one of the guiding minds behind Culture11 is a very hopeful sign for the magazine’s future.
Filed under: conservatism, health care, libertarianism, media/culture
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