Don't Get Angry at the Dung Beetles

So the Atlantic's Megan McArdle has been sliming Elizabeth Warren. Soon afterward Thomas Levenson went through McArdle's various deceptions in detail, and said:

...in this post you find McArdle doing the respectable-society version of the same approach to argument that Andy Breitbart has just showed us can have such potent effect.

The Atlantic?!? Publishing things with the intellectual shabbiness of Andrew Breitbart?!? My god, just wait until David Bradley, the owner of the Atlantic, hears about this!

"Andrew’s nexus is that he knows people in Hollywood and he knows people in DC and in each place he’s kind of like a celebrity because people in Hollywood who are kind of like quietly political, meaning they’re on the right, are fascinated with him because he knows all these media pundits that we’ve been reading quietly, and he actually knows them! It’s incredible! And in D.C., he goes there and he’s Mr. Hollywood" [said Breitbart's friend Jude Christodal]. Mr. Breitbart strode up. He had been talking to Republican Congressman Eric Cantor and publisher David Bradley, who had been thrilled to finally put a name to a face. “You’re Andrew Breitbart?” [Bradley] exclaimed when introduced.

That's from a 2008 profile of Breitbart. Bradley got all excited when Breitbart appeared at a party Bradley was throwing in Minneapolis at that summer's Republican convention.

This kind of thing is why you shouldn't get angry at individuals within our hideous media system. Of course, I've succumbed to that temptation myself many times; no one appreciates more than I do that McArdle is one of the world's most excruciating human beings. But it's counterproductive.

After all, why is McArdle so excruciating? It's not because she is Wrong On The Internet. It's because she is Wrong On The Internet while in a position of influence and power.

And why is she in this position? Is it because David Bradley, the owner of the Atlantic, wants to employ people who work hard to present an accurate picture of the world, and McArdle has somehow fooled him? Or is it because David Bradley wants to employ people who work hard to dishonestly slime Elizabeth Warren?

Obviously it's the latter. The U.S. media is like an ecosystem, with various evolutionary niches for different creatures. Bradley has created a niche for McArdle to do her thing. But there's no reason to get angry at her, any more than you should get angry at dung beetles for filling their particular evolutionary niche. They're not going to stop rolling their little ball of dung all day long unless that niche disappears. And if all the individual dung beetles were somehow wiped out by an infection of accurate criticism on blugs, something else would soon fill the niche in a similar way.

(And while I may be giving McArdle too much credit, it's possible that if the ecosystem changed, she might be able to evolve into something different.)

I found Thomas Levenson via Atrios.

AND: Glenn Greenwald made the same point here. However, it was in an interview with the Atlantic, so he sadly did not compare Atlantic writers to dung beetles:

GREENWALD: When I began writing about politics, I believed that applying pressure, shame, and the like to our national journalists could help influence behavior in a positive way. I no longer think that. Our national media isn't subservient to political power because of the behavior or personality attributes of any particular journalists — at least not primarily. The real problem is structural and cultural... That's why I no longer think the goal is to reform the existing establishment media but, rather, to create an alternative to it, a competitor to it, that will perform the functions it refuses to perform.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Posted at July 25, 2010 08:42 PM

