QotD: The Media

But how do we get that point across without rending the Sacred Magical Trust of Objectivity? Bias, real and imagined, may rankle many — but equally fatal is the Olympian detachment that informs so many stories. We're duty-bound to pretend that the government of Iran occupies the same moral plane as the government of France, or that the knotty mess in Israel is a matter of competing forces whose theological and historical claims are equally incomprehensible, and hence irrelevant to today's who-shelled-who dispatch. We can't cheer or jeer. We can't imagine why we would.

I'd guess many readers suspect this posture is a cover for something else, for a general unwillingness on the part of the media overclass to confront some unpalatable truths, or admit their own vacillating, tortured relation to their own culture. If they'd call it that. Culture is something everyone else has. The West has sins. And obligations.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2007-08-16