Sphere of Dirty Hippies

13Jan09

Here’s nifty visual interpretation of what the media considers acceptable areas of debate and what’s beyond the pale from Jay Rosen.

It’s easily the most useful diagram I’ve found for understanding the practice of journalism in the United States, and the hidden politics of that practice. You can draw it by hand right now. Take a sheet of paper and make a big circle in the middle. In the center of that circle draw a smaller one to create a doughnut shape. Label the doughnut hole “sphere of consensus.” Call the middle region “sphere of legitimate debate,” and the outer region “sphere of deviance.”

It’s necessary to place certain things outside the sphere of decency, not all ideas are worthy of consideration. So on a certain level it boils down to category error as Rosen suggests was the case with the Iraq War.

A lot energy is expended analyzing the media’s little quirks, and even more energy is spent mocking them. But really it’s just a matter of the judgments they make at the time. They thought the Iraq war was pretty bullet proof proposition, at least to extent they thought about it all.

A while back Monkey Cage suggested that political punditry has an awful record in terms of predictions, which basically suggests the opinion pages largely exist to entertain people in the short term.

The lines between each category isn’t that firm. The sort of immigration baiting that Lou Dobbs engages in hasn’t got him bounced from polite society. John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt might have been denounced in a dozen forums, but I think they’re higher profile then before they published The Israel Lobby and there is certainly no reason any given media figure couldn’t invite them on television tomorrow.

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Tags: Censorship, Jay Rosen, Media, Media Debate