President Obama labeled conservatives bitter gun clingers, who hide behind religion to conceal their hatred and racism. Hillary Clinton bashed them as a “basket of deplorables.” The mainstream media agreed with both, and echoed those sentiments far and wide in nightly news segments. Conservatives, in turn, defended ourselves in the voting booth and elected their worst nightmare, leaving them clamoring to figure out where they went wrong. One person found out, and he used to run National Public Radio.
Ken Stern is the former CEO of NPR and he decided to do what few leftists have ever done before: get out from under the liberal bubble and spend time with conservatives in order to see things from their perspective. And so, Stern embarked on a year-long journey to red states to see how the other half live. His experiences are detailed in his new book, Republican Like Me: How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right.
Here’s where Stern began his expedition:
Most reporters and editors are liberal — a now-dated Pew Research Center poll found that liberals outnumber conservatives in the media by some 5 to 1, and that comports with my own anecdotal experience at National Public Radio.
When you are liberal, and everyone else around you is as well, it is easy to fall into groupthink on what stories are important, what sources are legitimate and what the narrative of the day will be.
Stern’s travels took him to Texas, Georgia, Kentucky, and Ohio. Along the way he found himself in the pit at a NASCAR race, attending Tea Party gatherings, talking with Steve Bannon on his radio show, worshipping with evangelicals, and hunting pigs with a family. It didn’t take him long to discover that the Right weren’t the slobbering hordes of evil they’ve long been portrayed to be:
At Urbana [a Christian conference], I met dozens of people who were dedicating their lives to the mission, spreading the good news of Jesus, of course, but doing so through a life of charity and compassion for others: staffing remote hospitals, building homes for the homeless and, in one case, flying a “powered parachute” over miles of uninhabited jungle in the western Congo to bring a little bit of entertainment, education and relief to some of the remotest villages you could imagine. It was all inspiring — and a little foolhardy, if you ask me about the safety of a powered parachute — but it left me with a very different impression of a community that was previously known to me only through Jerry Falwell and the movie “Footloose.”
He also walked away with a completely different view on guns, being someone who had never fired one before:
Gun control and gun rights is one of our most divisive issues, and there are legitimate points on both sides. But media is obsessed with the gun-control side and gives only scant, mostly negative, recognition to the gun-rights sides.
Stern also came to very different conclusions about a wonderful Georgia family who easily welcomed him into the fold:
None of my new hunting partners fit the lazy caricature of the angry NRA member. Rather, they saw guns as both a shared sport and as a necessary means to protect their families during uncertain times. In truth, the only one who was even modestly angry was me, and that only had to do with my terrible ineptness as a hunter. In the end, though, I did bag a pig, or at least my new friends were willing to award me a kill, so that we could all glory together in the fraternity of the hunt.
The ex-NPR chief said he did his best to “consume media as they do and understand it as a partisan player.” In doing so, he learned that the media treats legitimate defensive gun use as a “myth,” while his new-found family see it as their “last line of defense for themselves.” This conclusion was drawn, not by watching mainstream media, but by finding store footage of a convenient store clerk defending his shop against an armed intruder — a classic “good guy with a gun, stops a bad guy with a gun” scenario.
“It is an amazing story, though far from unique, but you simply won’t find many like it in mainstream media (I found it on Reddit),” Stern said.
Now, Stern isn’t convinced that the “media is suppressing stories intentionally;” alas, you can’t win them all. But he does at least note that the media ignores stories like these because they “don’t reflect their interests and beliefs,” i.e. fit their agenda.
Stern does remain bubbled up in his disdain for President Trump, whom he believes is doing a disservice to the idea of a free press by criticizing it as the nation’s leader, but at least he’s finally noticing the cracks in the media’s armor:
Some of this loss of reputation [in the media] stems from effective demagoguery from the right and the left, as well as from our demagogue-in-chief, but the attacks wouldn’t be so successful if our media institutions hadn’t failed us as well.
None of this justifies the attacks from President Trump, which are terribly inappropriate coming from the head of government. At the same time, the media should acknowledge its own failings in reflecting only their part of America. You can’t cover America from the Acela corridor, and the media need to get out and be part of the conversations that take place in churches and community centers and town halls.
It’s what Stern decided to do, and he “loved it:”
[T]hough I regret waiting until well after I left NPR to do so. I am skeptical that many will do so, since the current situation in an odd way works for Trump, who gets to rile his base, and for the media, which has grown an audience on the back of Washington dysfunction. In the end, they are both short-term winners. It is the public that is the long-term loser.
Read more details about Stern’s experience at The New York Post.
H/T Newsbusters