“Why Don’t You Cover The Stuff I Happen To Prioritize?!” — The New “False Equivalence”

Question: “Why are you covering issue X, when issue Y demands immediate attention!?” Answer: Because I want to. Because I am not required to tailor my analytical or reportorial output to your particular ideological sensibility. Because there’s an infinite quantity of information available to you instantaneously if you want it, therefore I feel no special obligation to personally provide you with “content” that happens to satisfy your own peculiar needs.

Do you desperately crave coverage of Trump’s character flaws? You can find an absolute avalanche of that whenever you want, day or night, with two clicks. You can find it in literally two seconds. Why I am I somehow obliged to also comment on Trump’s character flaws? I’ll comment on it when I deem it necessary and/or fruitful, and have done so. If you want the latest speculation about Steve Bannon’s coming white nationalist reign of terror, please feel free to simply refresh Twitter once, and you’re guaranteed to be inundated with it. (Or at least judging by my own feed, you’ll be inundated.) I’ll comment on that when I have something useful to add, but I’m not going to be coerced into it because of some rash, cynical demand by anonymous trolls.

I spent a lot of time during the campaign covering the pathologies of liberal elites, which overlapped with the pathologies of the failed Hillary campaign. I intend to keep covering those phenomena, however they continue to manifest. Here’s why: a prime reason Trump won a staggering historic victory is because his opponents were so incapacitated by their own self-congratulatory, unwarranted sense of superiority. The fledgling “digital liberal media” (concentrated overwhelmingly in New York City, Washington DC, San Francisco, and Los Angeles) performed their jobs spectacularly badly. Therefore, they deserve criticism and mockery as we attempt to sift through the rubble. They directly helped cause the ascendance of Trump and they enabled the nomination of Hillary Clinton, one of the most asinine and despicable collective acts in the entire history of American politics.

Here’s another reason why I’m going to continue focusing on these failed pundits and their fellow snobby, rarefied elites. They are going to be ineffective opposition to Trump. They are going to get absolutely butchered by him. They have no capacity for self-reflection, they can’t modify their behavior to accommodate new circumstances, and they have frighteningly little knowledge about their own country. And we’re supposed to rely on these people to provide effective checks and balances against Trump? Please.

Trump has obvious authoritarian tendencies that need to be reined in as much as possible. We’re going to count on this decadent, failed liberal elite class to assume that awesome responsibility? Really? They’re going to demand the preservation of civil liberties while they listen to the “Hamilton” soundtrack for the 25,000th time? They’re going to keep an eye on Pentagon spending while they manically chastise poor whites in southwest Iowa for using the incorrect gender pronoun? These are the people we’re supposed to let remain in positions of influence?

They got everything wrong. They are continuing to get everything wrong. They will not change. They are absolutely convinced of their own righteousness, and no amount of empirical evidence to the contrary can disabuse them of that view. That’s why they need to be stridently scorned and scrutinized. Hence my ongoing “Pundit Accountability Initiative” — more on that soon.

Freddie DeBoer made a really good point about the demand that journalists and writers cover the thing that you happen to want covered, even though there’s a limitless universe of potential information out there that touches on the very subjects you supposedly want illuminated. This kind of demand is drenched in ideology. It’s not grounded in some good faith desire to see that suppressed information be set free. The information is already free. Sure, you can quibble with the emphasis that various institutions place on various subjects, but to demand that one guy (such as me) cover every single issue that you happen to want dwelled on doesn’t make any sense, unless you’re trying to impose an ideological litmus test.

This is ironic because people who think they’re very astute media critics love to complain about “false equivalency.” And it’s true that “false equivalency” has been a problem in the past. But it’s not really a problem any more. Almost no one with any kind of prominent media job asserted “false equivalency” between Hillary and Trump during this campaign. I opposed both Hillary and Trump, but I never asserted that they were “equivalent,” I said that they were both bad for different reasons, and that neither merited a vote. That’s not false equivalency. That’s ethical reasoning.

The mantra these “COVER THE STUFF I WANT!!!!!!” critics are adopting is its own form of “false equivalency” — the notion that I must arbitrarily focus on issue X so as to mollify some amorphous sense that there’s excess coverage of issue Y. They want me to self-impose artificial constraints on myself. If you’re so deeply concerned about issue X, you can find endless content pertaining to it with virtually zero effort. Better yet, you can cover it yourself! The internet allows for self-publishing. It’s wonderful. It’s what I’m doing right now. So I’m going to keep doing what I want to do. Thanks.