Justice Antonin Scalia doesnt want to get upset in the morning, we learned this week from his refreshingly candid interview in New York magazine. Thats why he limits his newspaper consumption to The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times -- reliably conservative outlets -- and avoids the so shrilly, shrilly liberal Washington Post. In the car to and from the Supreme Court, he listens mostly to conservative talk radio, including the call-in show of his good friend Bill Bennett, Ronald Reagans secretary of education. Bennetts producers, Scalia says, keep off stupid people. Now, Justice Scalia has a tough job and deserves all the peace of mind he can muster. Its too bad, though, that he feels it necessary to inhabit a media bubble where his ideological convictions are always confirmed and never challenged. Hes hardly alone, of course: Plenty of other people -- maybe even a liberal justice or two -- confine themselves to an opposing media diet of NPR, HuffingtonPost, and The New York Times. Today its all too easy to self-select a media environment that nourishes blind certitude, and that tendency, Im convinced, is one seed of the current debacle in Washington. Part of the nation hears only that the Tea Partys rage over Obamacare will bring the world economy to its knees, while another is told that the government is undergoing not a shutdown, but a slimdown -- so why worry? Many Americans live on one side of a battle trench, never talking to The Enemy. Exposure to a wide variety of views -- which is, not incidentally, what we try to provide at The Week -- wont lead to peace, love, and understanding. But, like eating spinach, it cant hurt. - James Graff, executive editor, THE WEEK
Posted on: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 04:57:07 +0000
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