WASHINGTON — Years from now, in journalism schools, they will
call it the “Taranto Principle.” At least that is what they will
call it, if they still have journalism schools years from now. In
the future, the great republic may only have blog schools, those
being schools where students are taught to sit in their underwear
in front of their luminescent laptops and pound out semi-literate
diktats to an — for the most part — unobservant world. The
amalgamation of all this indignation is today called “The
Blogosphere.” Its competing rants are occasionally treated as
significant in the media, though lunatics howling on street corners
are not…very curious.
What is the Taranto Principle? It is a principle laid down by
the Wall Street Journal’s perceptive editorialist, James
Taranto. Taranto, in his column “Best of the Web Today,” surveys
the media and reports daily on their output with special emphasis
on their contradictions, hypocrisies and — most deliciously —
imbecilities. Like all other thoughtful observers of American
media, Taranto recognizes that they are heavily biased toward the
Democratic Party and the left in general. Yet, while many who hold
that this advances the Democratic Party and the left, Taranto
believes that that it has a harmful effect on left-wing politics,
often causing left-wing candidates to lose at the polls.
According to the Taranto Principle, the media’s failure to hold
left-wingers accountable for bad behavior merely encourages the
left’s bad behavior to the point that its candidates are repellent
to ordinary Americans. According to Taranto, in 2004 the media
quietly went along with Senator Jean-Francois Kerry’s exaggerated
claims to heroism and military prowess, thus encouraging his
braggadocio and leaving him utterly unprepared when his fellow vets
stepped forward and demonstrated that he had been a dreadful
showoff in Vietnam. Officers who had fought alongside him served up
evidence that his exploits were embellished and sometimes
completely made up. They cast doubt on his medals and most
damningly reminded us that in testimony on Capitol Hill Kerry
accused his fellow soldiers of war crimes. The vets reproduced the
video, video that any journalist could have laid hands on.
The vets’ assault on Kerry is now called “Swift Boating” by
left-wingers and journalists alike, who insist the vets’ charges
were “lies,” though four years later it is apparent that the
so-called lies composed an accurate rendering of blowhard Kerry’s
war record. Had the media treated his initial boasts with some
skepticism, he might have been better prepared for the vets’
response. The left-leaning media spoiled Kerry and brought out the
worst in him to the revulsion of enough voters to lose him the
election.
Now the Taranto Principle can be seen in the reporting on
Governor Sarah Palin. As a former mayor and sitting governor, she
has about as much experience as former President Jimmy Carter had
in 1976. Moreover, she obviously has more executive experience than
the Democratic presidential candidate. Yet the media have let her
experience become a vexed issue. Worse, at the highest level of
media she has been subjected to unwarranted scurrilities that are
without precedent in a presidential election. Just the other night
an idiot comedy show portrayed her daughter and husband in an
incestuous affair. The consequence of this is that Governor Palin
is running away with the women’s vote and doubtless picking up
sympathetic men also.
According to this variation of the Taranto Principle, the media
circulate infamies that encourage leftists to confect greater
infamies, thus causing the defamed candidate to cop the sympathy
vote. That vote will have consequences in this increasingly bizarre
election.
Meanwhile the press continues to treat the inexperienced and
gaffe-prone Senator Barack Obama as though he is the next JFK.
Among the howlers is the presumption that he is an orator of great
gifts as JFK was an orator of great gifts. In truth, the Prophet
Obama suffers one of the strangest oratorical disabilities I have
ever seen in a presidential candidate, to wit: his dependence on
the teleprompter. We know of politicians who depend on the
teleprompter for fluency. Senator Obama, however, relies on a
teleprompter so that he will not be heard talking down to the
electorate. If he is not lecturing with his nose in the air he is
all uhhs and ahhs. Perhaps if he had served as mayor in a small
town he would have gotten over this revealing disorder.
