Proud to be mainstream

By KEVIN HORRIGAN

When first I wrote for money, it was on an Underwood 5 manual typewriter on pulp paper that still had splinters of wood in it. When I needed a pass to get into an event, the credentials said “Press.” I collected facts. I was the lowest of the low.

When I ordered a beer, it was a Budweiser.

Later, I wrote on an IBM Selectric typewriter on wide sheets of hard-finished paper that were fed through an optical scanner. The credentials still said “Press,” and I still collected facts, but at least I didn’t have to mess with typewriter ribbons.

When I ordered a beer, they asked if I wanted a Lite.

By 1980, I was typing on a word processing machine hooked to a giant mainframe computer. I no longer had “press” credentials; I had “news media” credentials. I hung out with people with nice haircuts and good clothes. I got a columnist’s gig, which allowed me to throw in an informed opinion or two along with my facts from time to time.

I was moving up in the world. I could have Budweiser or Bud Light. I could even have an imported beer.

Talk radio

The 1990s were different. I had a personal computer to type on. I worked in talk radio. I talked to celebrities and was urged to say things like, “If you’ve seen a U.F.O., give us a call.”

“Facts, schmacts,” my boss told me. “Knock off that NPR crap.”

Credentials no longer said “news media,” but just plain “media.”

Beer came in regular and light, domestic and imported. Sometimes it came with a slice of lime.

Now it’s the 21st century. I use several computers, each one instantly connecting me with the sum of mankind’s knowledge — and also with a great deal of our ignorance. If I dare to suggest that knowledge and ignorance do not equate, I am sneered at for being part of the “mainstream” media or the “fact-based” media.

Ordering a beer has become an ordeal. Regular, light, domestic, imported, craft-brewed. Beer with wheat. Beer with coffee.

Henry Ford is reputed to have said that people could buy a Model T in any color they wanted, as long as it was black. He pretty much had a monopoly on cheap, well-built cars, so he could get away with that.

It used to be that newspapers, magazines and broadcast networks had a monopoly on the mass dissemination of facts and opinion. First cable and then the Internet changed that.

The problem we’re accused of having is our mainstream, fact-based “prejudice.” We believe facts pull the cart that opinion rides in, not the other way around. So everyone who puts opinions first — at least the loud ones — hates us:

UThe right hates us. At the vice presidential debate here a few weeks ago, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said she liked “being able to answer these tough questions without the filter, even, of the mainstream media kind of telling viewers what they’ve just heard.”

The conservative columnist Tony Blankley says, “The mainstream media have gone over the line and are now straight-out propagandists for the Obama campaign.”

UThe left hates us. The lefty magazine The Nation last summer sneered at the “infatuation” of Sen. John McCain’s “fans in the mainstream media.”

The lefty Ben Armbruster at thinkprogress.org says “by now, we should all be used to the media’s favorable treatment of McCain.”

The weird thing is that nearly everyone I know who works in fact-based journalism believes, with Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., “that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”

The Internet is the ultimate marketplace of ideas, a forum in which anyone, no matter how screwy his ideas, can have his own website. The Internet, alas, does not discriminate — even on the basis of facts.

Thus you can read that Barack Obama is a Muslim and that John McCain is owned by the Mafia, stories that wouldn’t be published as fact in the mainstream, fact-based media, partly because there are such things as libel laws but mostly because there are professional standards.

You can believe these stories if you like, of course. There are many kinds of beer.

The same, though, is not true of reality.

McClatchy-Tribune Information Services