The Value of Media Bias

Bravo Romeo Delta

I believe that my regular reader may be familiar with the strategic notion of the "culminating point of success" that I have mentioned in previous posts.

The first phenomenon is that strategy is governed by a contradictory, paradoxical, contrarian logic. For example, if you do well in business, you have a good product, you will be successful, and if you work harder and you do it on a bigger scale, you will be more successful. But in strategy, if you have the right formula and you win victories, you just have to continue to do the same thing and you will unfailingly reach a culminating point of success, and then you will collapse, because your very victory evokes reactions. That is why your Napoleons, your Hitlers, their mistake was to overshoot the culminating point of success.

Once McDonald's has 2,730 franchises, getting one more would weaken the company. Not in strategy, because as you become more successful, people who were neutral towards you now become concerned that your power might get to them, so they turn against you. And your enemies that you defeated suddenly find allies and supporters.

Overshooting applies to every level of strategy, right down to the tactical level, and it works in all kinds of ways. Let's say somebody came up with a really magical antitank weapon which cannot be defeated by countermeasures. The effect will be no more tanks. You can overshoot yourself to the point where you annihilate yourself just by your effectiveness.

One of the great challenges of statesmanship, therefore, has always been to sense when you are approaching the culminating point of success and to stop short of it. Why is this such a challenge? Because you are inflamed, empowered and driven by the winds of victory, the sense of success, and everywhere you look people are applauding. It takes enormous, cold, calculating intellect to stop at the very moment when it is easiest to go ahead.

Well, this same paradoxical logic applies to the realm of politics as well.

In specific, as long as the media trends left (a condition I think is endemic, rather than deliberate), it may result in a net gain for the very folks that they're trying to run aground.

We have seen the rise of talk radio and more centrist (or at least more openly right-biased) news sources, and so on, but these developments skirt the actual significance behind this continual drift leftward of the media.

For starters, this is a primary reason that the average self-identified Republican tends to be more centrist, while the average self-identified Democrat tends to be fairly far towards the left. Since people are making their own self-evaluation based, in part, on how they measure their own belief versus the picture of the world that has been painted for them, then it tends to drive party membership of the Republicans towards the center, and the Democrats towards the left.

Secondly, in having a higher "burden of proof" for argumentation, Republicans tend to be a bit less likely to find themselves out on a limb. Any temptation to lurch that direction has been pretty solidly beaten out of the party by decades of critical appraisal. This encourages party discipline, as well as resulting in a silencing effect on many far-Right extremists.

Third, the media starts to lose some measure of credibility, which I am becoming less inclined to think is a bad thing. This is not related, per se, to the broader question of bias, but rather the fact that with the eruption of J-school journalists who have precious little actual subject matter expertise, in conjunction with shrinking news cycles, we have more people with less to say about subject holding forth at greater length about things which are beyond their understanding. And those folks are passing it off as news.

Finally, the lack of critical analysis that has accompanied media in recent years has provided a fertile ground for the modern day equivalent of pamphleteering - the blog. Finding a world in which the news is ineffective at best, and genuinely hostile at worst, what would have been a disgruntled audience years ago, has taken a genuinely useful step towards more fully participatory democracy. Rather than simply walking away, head shaking, now people, from both the right and far left, man the ramparts and engage in productive analysis and examination of the world around them.

All in all, the cloud of media bias certainly isn't without its benefits. And as long as the media keeps its bias, then the rest of us can profit from it. The day that media bias evaporates, is the day that we'll not only cease to derive gains from it, but also will be the first step towards a Republican Party that will eventually become sclerotic and weak.

Launched by Bravo Romeo Delta at August 16, 2004 09:15 PM