Principles of Conservatism: Why the Liberal Media Is Liberal - A Perspective from Hunter's Book I, Sniper

 

I, Sniper by Stephen Hunter is a new Bob Lee Swagger novel and gives us today's topic about the news media's bias.

I recently picked up the latest Stephen Hunter book entitled I, Sniper (Amazon.com). This is one of Hunter's novels based on the ex-Marine sniper character Bob Lee Swagger, found in several of Hunter's other novels and brought to life in the movie Shooter.

The book was a good read but I'm not here to review the book. Instead, I want to point out something Hunter writes in this book which brilliantly illustrates exactly what is wrong with the mainstream media. On page 183, Hunter writes about "the narrative" - the foundational story that drives ideologies. First off, Hunter defines the idea of narrative - the foundational beliefs that the media holds:

The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It's not like they get together every morning and decide 'These are the lies we tell today.' No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it's a set of casual, nonrigorous assumptions about a reality they've never really experienced that's arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they've chosen to live their lives. It's a way of arranging things a certain way that they all believe in without ever really addressing carefully. It permeates their whole culture.

This paragraph caught my attention, not only because it rips on the mainstream media, but also because, in a more general form, it is precisely the idea about narrative that I try to get across to my students in my political ideologies class. These foundational stories are what drive ideologies even to blind people far beyond making reasonable assumptions about reality.

Like any good writer, Hunter continues with several examples about the narrative the press believes. I've edited this a bit to take out the colorful language and fictional references (I, Sniper, after all is a novel) but have left in the nonfictional references:

They know, for example that Bush is a moron and Obama a saint. They know communism was a phony threat cooked up by right-wing cranks as a way to leverage power to the executive. They know Saddam didn't have weapons of mass destruction, the response to Katrina was [messed] up, [and] torture never works. Cheney's a devil, Biden's a genius. Soft power good, hard power bad. Forgiveness excellent, punishment counterproductive, capital punishment a sin. See Nick's [an FBI agent character in the book] fighting the narrative. He's going against the story, and the story was somewhat suspiciously concocted exactly to their prejudices, just as Jayson Blair's made-up stories and Dan Rather's Air National Guard documents were. And the narrative is the bedrock of their culture, the keystone of their faith, the altar of their church. They don't even know they are true believers, because in theory they despise the true believer in anything. But they will absolutely de-frackin'-stroy anybody who makes them question all that.

Here, in this story by Stephen Hunter, is truth.

The narrative that the media holds, based on years of faulty assumptions stemming from the liberalism and disaffection with government in the 1960s, faulty assumptions about the validity of Marxist doctrine, and ideals antithetical to religion, simply gets in the way of seeing any other point of view but its own. It's no wonder such high priests of this narrative, for example the New York Times, MSNBC, or CNN, are crashing and burning. This narrative cannot accept any other truth than its own, narrowly defined perspective. It is, at its roots, a narrative based on severe biases which cannot allow any dissent. This narrative has become more dangerous than any modern religion, unyielding and inflexible.

As Americans recognize and reject the biases of this leftist narrative, the conservative narrative gains more ground - a narrative based on sound and proven principles expressed in the US Constitution, based on free market economics, and founded on solid principles of liberty and justice. In the conservative narrative, there's a lot of room for tolerance of ideas, just not the stupidly destructive ones the media preaches.