It all begins with a well-known, know-it-all Never Trumper lecturing us po'
dumb Democrats on how Real Grown-Up Politics works.
A consistent mistake (imo) that Democrats have made for *decades* is not understanding the thermostatic nature of politics: "I don't like this party being extreme" means "I want moderation," not *the other extreme* /2x
— Tom Nichols (@radiofreetom.bsky.social) July 23, 2026 at 2:49 PM
Now, this is the sort of thing that sounds very wise if you start from the
assumption that both parties are basically interchangeable institutions that
occasionally wander too far from the golden mean.
By the way, this is the same well-known, know-it-all Never Trumper who ignored
all the dire warnings by some of us po' dumb Democrats that his Republican
party was becoming a fascist shithole until it was far too late. Then, when
caught flat-footed by the aforementioned Republican party becoming a fascist
shithole, reacted with the cheap, dishonest, and automatic
bothsiderist reflex which
is every Never Trumpers' last line of defense against self-reflection.
This Tweet has since mysteriously disappeared from X/Twitter but lives on in a
plain-text form on this here blog of mine:
You will get no such contrition, because I think your party had plenty of matches and lighter fluid and is not free of responsibility here.— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) July 14, 2019
Notice what is missing here: not an admission that the Republican Party
created the conditions for Trump, but a quick escape hatch in which everyone
gets a share of the blame.
Then, as is also endemic among Never Trumpers, Tom went on to present himself
as one of the few Never Trump voices who saw all of this coming, which is why
Trump Republicans resent them so. Which is why, the Bulwark,
MSNOW and The Atlantic all looked at his concatenation of arrogant
certainty that proved catastrophically wrong, followed by reflexive, defensive
false equivalence, followed by sheer puffery about his predictive abilities
and all said, we gotta get this guy on staff!
You wanna bring someone on to opine about the threats and probable future
trajectory of the Soviet Union during the 1980s? Tom is your guy.
But given his record, why anyone would seek this Cold War relic's counsel
about American politics of the recent past and the here and now is, well, to
be honest, bog standards legacy media stuff. He tells the tale they want
told.
So, back to Roger Rabbit and lecturing us po' dumb Dems.
First, let us breeze past ol' Tom's obvious false equivalence which was
immediately and effectively booed off the stage by Blue Sky commenters, one
small sample of which is here:
Second, if you want to read a much longer (Two Parts!) discussion of how
modern politics really works, links are
here
and
here. The shorter version is this...
As all true Roger Rabbit fans know, there is a certain sequence and cadence of
words which all Toons find irresistible. And when the phrase is left
uncompleted they feel an uncontrollable compulsion to finish it, even when
doing so will put them in life-threatening peril.
Psychologists have a name because of course they do. It's called the
Ovsiankina Effect, named after Russian-German-American
psychologist Maria Arsenjevna Rickers-Ovsiankina. In psychology, this
effect describes an innate human urge to finish unfinished tasks. Our
brains like order and clear endings. When things are left open or undone --
"Shave and a Hair Cut..." -- this creates stress. When you finish
whatever-it-is -- "...Two Bits!!!" -- our brains reward us with a quick
dopamine hit, making you want to cross things off a list.
(Bonus Info! Because apparently even psychological concepts need their
own spin-off franchise, Ovsiankina Effect should not be confused with the
closely-related Zeigarnik Effect, named after Lithuanian-Soviet
psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, and which is more about the tendency of people
remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.)
Because what is politics, if not a giant collection of unfinished mental
patterns competing for closure?
Which brings us to the particular unfinished phrase our national brain has
been trained to complete. For a long time now -- decades -- our politics has
been overtaken by a very specific form of Ovsiankina Effect. And you
clever dogs already know what it is, because you've read about on this blog
thousands of times already.
What the legacy media has pulled off -- in plain view and with the consent of
way too many of our fellow citizens -- one of the most successful propaganda
campaign in American history. One that dwarfs the Right Wing's Fox
News/Hate Radio "Liberals are Murrica-hating, terrorist-loving, commie baby
killers" propaganda campaign and, in the long run, has been far more
destructive.
From
The Washington Post, before it went completely to shit:
“The Politico model of insider coverage and savvy style of analysis is premised on conditions in politics that became less true over time, which then undermined the model,” said New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen. “Conditions like two roughly similar parties obeying democratic norms, with similar establishments in both parties and competing for swing voters.”
The coverage of the 2016 campaign in particular was abysmal. The focus on Hillary Clinton’s emails stemmed from the media’s reflexive both sides-ism, and an obsession with feuds among Donald Trump's staffers reflected an insider-focused approach to politics gone too far. More deeply, the press went out of its way to suggest that the people supporting a candidate who campaigned on banning Muslims from the country and building a wall between the United States and Mexico were expressing “economic anxiety” or a desire for an outsider politician.
The Guardian,
September 6, 2024:
The media is still pursuing the appearance of fairness by treating true and false, normal and outrageous, as equally valid
The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer.
Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions – the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under pressure of [the] Trump era”. Centrist political reformer and columnist Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions “have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”.
Last winter, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has a Nobel prize in economics, told Greg Sargent on the latter’s Daily Blast podcast that when he writes positive pieces about the Biden economy, his editor asks “don’t you want to qualify” it; “aren’t people upset by X, Y and Z and shouldn’t you be acknowledging that?”
Meanwhile in an accusatory piece about Kamala Harris headlined When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls?, a Washington Post columnist declares in another case of bothsiderism: “Voters want to blame someone for high grocery bills, and the presidential candidates have apparently decided the choices are either the Biden administration or corporate greed. Harris has chosen the latter.” The evidence that corporations have jacked up prices and are reaping huge profits is easy to find, but facts don’t matter much in this kind of opining.
From PressWatch,
July 31, 2020
In a seminal tweet early this summer, during the battle over a particularly abhorrent op-ed, journalist Wesley Lowery set down a marker:American view-from-nowhere, “objectivity”-obsessed, both-sides journalism is a failed experiment. We need to fundamentally reset the norms of our field. The old way must go. We need to rebuild our industry as one that operates from a place of moral clarity— Wesley (@WesleyLowery) June 4, 2020Some have depicted this view as radical, demanding some sort of uniform view on all issues. But what Lowery and others (including myself) are arguing for is not moral conformity, just clarity.
From Breaking the News,
October 23, 2022:
Margaret Sullivan has some proposals in her book. So do scores of other organizations and people all scrambling to create a different news ecosystem to replace what seems unchangeable in our current one. So will I, upcoming, in this space.
Significantly, nearly all of these ideas involve less of what Margaret Sullivan has being doing in her columns, and what I have done over the decades, and what many others have emphasized as well: pointing out what is not working in the current media models.
-That seems less and less worth it.
-If critiques were going to stop “both-sides-ism,” that would already have occurred.
And this next bit takes us where we're going next. From
News Literacy Matters,
October 21, 2022
What’s wrong with bothsidesism?...a knee-jerk response to include both sides in a story can lead to what is now known as bothsidesism. This misguided pursuit of balance sets up a false equivalence, a form of specious reasoning in which two sides are treated as the same when they are not.
Part of the problem is that the public both expects and wants bothsidesism, according to a Pew Research Center survey. Three-quarters of people surveyed say journalists should always strive to give all sides equal coverage, while more than half of all journalists think the opposite.
And there -- right there -- is why our politics is no longer reliably thermostatic. Because for decades the general public has been enveloped in a media bubble where comforting Both Siderist false equivalences are delivered every hour of every day on the house by Savvy Media Experts from America's most prominent and influential media corporations.
And because of this relentless conditioning from trusted sources, the public has developed a reflexive Ovsiankinan response to every Republican act of depravity and treason. To get rid of their nearly subliminal sense of disquiet and anxiety, and to get that nice little bump of Dopamine, when confronted with any news of Republican perfidy, they will automatically balance out an equation which their nagging subconscious is telling them is unbalanced with "...but the Democrats" or ...and the Democrats" or "Sure, but, y'know, Both Sides".
This legacy media propaganda is so much more insidious and toxic than Fox News/Hate Radio propaganda because in comes disguised as "fairness" and "impartiality" which, in different country along a different timeline, would be admirable traits. But here and now, it's just propaganda which both prevents the general public from actually fairly adjudicating the vast moral and policy differences between the two sides, and provides an all-purpose, every-occasion alibi for Republicans who are sick of Trump and MAGA but could never in a million years bring themselves to vote for an Murrica-hating, terrorist-loving, commie baby killers.
Of course, that's just my two-bits worth. You are free to leave your support, or rebuttal in the comment section.
I Am The Liberal Media
