Subway death coverage confirms that in the liberal bubble, only conservatives are political
Timothy P. Carney
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Right after the 1994 New York governor election, my high school English teacher assigned us to write a letter to the Pataki administration opposing his proposed tax cut.
Our teacher fed us the standard teachers union line, which was that a tax cut would reduce state education spending and thus harm our schools and shift a greater burden onto local taxpayers. We were supposed to put this in our own words as concerned children and plead with Albany to keep our parents’ taxes high.
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I raised my hand and said that, actually, I think greater local control of education is good — especially for those who didn’t trust former Gov. George Pataki! The teacher said, “Look, I don’t want you to make this a political debate,” to which I responded, “Isn’t lobbying against a tax cut political?”
The teacher rejected this as false equivalence.
For the past nearly 30 years, I have seen exactly this conceit play out a thousand times: Liberals in a professional liberal bubble believing that their conservative opponents are politicizing something while their own side is being totally apolitical, thank you very much.
Check out the Washington Post’s latest conservatives pounce piece on the prosecution of Daniel Penny, who has been charged with manslaughter for taking down and restraining an aggressive, mentally ill panhandler named Jordan Neely and apparently causing Neely’s death with a chokehold.
Substack writer Chris Bray aptly sums up the predictable Washington Post piece, which is part of a genre:
You’ll be shocked to hear that this one’s a seizing on piece: “The political right has seized on police statements that Neely had 44 previous arrests for offenses such as assault, disorderly conduct and fare evasion.” Not to mention the attempted kidnapping of a seven year-old, but let’s not be right-wing about this. Let’s not POUNCE on the mere act of kidnapping of a child, Nazis! …The premise of the story is that the political right is cynically using the controversy to “score points,” and yes, the story actually uses scoring points: “The financial support Penny’s legal team has received is due, in part, to the coverage of right-leaning media outlets and Republican politicians using his case to score points on the latest front of the culture war, experts say.”
Yes, it’s an “experts say” and “conservatives pounce” story, which means it is simply just a liberal opinion piece disguised as a news story. That’s not shocking. What’s shocking is how banal the central opinion is in this thinly veiled opinion piece. Basically, the opinion is that conservative politicians are (mis-)using the story as a way to make their point that crime and disorder are on the rise.
The thing is that crime and disorder are on the rise, especially in the New York City subway, but also in other cities around the country. This is a valid political point because public policy is almost assuredly behind the rise in crime. (Consider the decriminalization of minor subway crimes, the triumph of “progressive prosecutors,” and the COVID lockdowns, which ruined the lives of people who, in turn, take up antisocial behavior, and other policies). Yet to the Washington Post, conservative politicians talking about the disorder and crime amounts to politicizing something — “Penny’s case has been injected into the bloodstream of partisan politics,” the article argues. And as the headline makes clear, the injection is being administered by conservatives like DeSantis.
There was no “Liberals seize on Jordan Neely’s Death” story in the Washington Post. There was instead an “After NY subway chokehold death, protesters call for an arrest.”
That “protesters call” piece didn’t include the words “liberal,” “progressive,” or “Left” — compared to the 13 appearances of the word “conservatives” and about 10 mentions of the “political right” or the “far right” in the “conservatives hail” piece.
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You see, the “lock him up!” protesters aren’t really political; they’re just protesters. The “don’t lock him up” folks are all ideologues.
I don’t think this is conscious bias. I think that in newsrooms of major newspapers, the left-wing view is seen as standard and noncontroversial, while the right-wing view is seen as ideology. A Washington Post reporter reporting from a liberal milieu is like a fish reporting on water.