Matt Taibbi is one of the good guys, so it's distressing to see him writing this bit of both-sides-do-it-ism in his New York Times review of Seth Rosenfeld's Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power:
... the current culture war being played out between watchers of Fox News and readers of The Huffington Post is really the same old '60s argument, pitting social conservatives' unshakable faith in American exceptionalism against the progressive insistence that there's something dark and violent at the core of American hegemony. These two sides have painstakingly constructed competing versions of recent American history, leaving us without even a common set of historical facts to debate....Why does Taibbi have to give us this pox-on-both-your-houses nonsense? He goes on to praise the book, which makes clear that the FBI was absolutely guilty of excesses and tunnel vision in its overwrought war on the left. If "liberal cable shows" covered the book, wouldn't they cover precisely that, and praise the book in pretty much the terms Taibbi uses? And in praising the book, isn't Taibbi saying that if Michael Savage attacked it by railing against "red-diaper doper babies," it would be a sign not just of his intemperance, but of the fact that he's flat-out wrong about what the book tells us? And even if lefty talkers did focus on anti-Reagan gossip, wouldn't they at least be angry at one of the book's actual villains -- while Savage would have the heroes and villains reversed? Doesn't that mean the two reactions wouldn't be equally regrettable?
If forced through the typical blue/red "Crossfire"-style propaganda shredder, the sensational material [in the book] would be debased, both sides using the book's iconic characters to score quick and easy on-air points. Right-wing screamers like Michael Savage would rail against the book as 700 pages of whining by "red-diaper doper babies" whose idea of changing the world was singing "Yellow Submarine"' and hanging Ronald Reagan in effigy. Liberal cable shows, meanwhile, would make great hay over the sordid revelations about Reagan (whom the F.B.I. records reveal to have been petty and cowardly, snitching on a young actress to the F.B.I. just because she embarrassed him at a cocktail party).
*****
It upset me that, just as the mainstream press is finally starting to drop its reflexive both-sides-do-it-ism and is vaguely beginning to recognize that the right is nuts, folks like Taibbi and Conor Friedersdorf are seizing the Broderite both-your-houses cudgel, albeit in a libertarian or left-of-liberal form.
I understand why you'd attack Democratic as well Republican politicians if you don't like drones or the drug war or the coddling of banker-criminals. But why attack the left-wing media and its audience, which have shown a willingness to go after both parties from the left on these issues?
This plays all too perfectly into the annoyingly wrong idea that we could break partisan gridlock if it weren't for equally angry partisanship in which both sides have their own facts -- in fact, the right has shown far more willingness to believe conspiracy nonsense than the left, and Fox News spreads craziness much more effectively than any left-wing media outlet does.
Both sides aren't equal in this. C'mon, Matt -- you're smarter than that.
