January 20, 2007 -- 2:35 PM EST // //
NEW YORK TIMES LABELS IRAQ PLAN "CENTRIST" -- EVEN THOUGH NO DETAILS ARE AVAILABLE ABOUT IT YET!
Updated below.
Okay, here's something you have to see. This is one of the most mindless and reflexive uses of the word "centrist" I've seen by a big news org in a very long time. Check out this headline from today's New York Times:
The headline is: "Senators to Offer Centrist Proposal on Iraq." Yet here's the funny thing: There's no way the reporters or editors who worked on this piece could know whether this plan is "centrist" or not -- because they don't yet know any details about the proposal! As the piece itself says, "aides to the three senators declined to elaborate on the proposal." So how did the paper know that this proposal will be centrist? Because two of the Senators working on it -- Republican Susan Collins and Democrat Ben Nelson -- are allegedly "centrists."
Making this whole framing all the more absurd, here's what the Times has to say about this new proposal and the political context in which it's being created:
Senator John W. Warner of Virginia is drafting a proposal on Iraq policy with two Senate centrists in an effort to provide an outlet for lawmakers uneasy with President Bush’s troop buildup but unwilling to back a toughly worded resolution opposing the new strategy.The flurry of Iraq resolutions, coming from the political left, right and middle, raised the prospect of muddling the outcome of what Democratic leaders had hoped to keep a simple yes-or-no vote on Mr. Bush’s plan.
This is just writing on autopilot. The clear implication here is that the "toughly worded" resolution -- that is, the bipartisan Reid-Levin initiative, which condemns escalation as counter to our national interest -- represents a resolution of the "left" (presumably along with the anti-escalation initiative recently introduced by Ted Kennedy). Meanwhile, the position of the "middle" belongs to those who are "unwilling to back a toughly worded resolution" against escalation, the Times has decided.
Yet polls show not just that very large majorities oppose escalation, but more to the point, that more of those opposed to escalation are against it "strongly" than aren't. Here, for instance, is one poll finding that of the 68% against escalation, nearly three-fourths oppose it strongly. Here's another poll finding that virtually all of the 60% against escalation are "strongly" opposed to it.
Yet the "toughly worded" resolution is the position of the "left," and anything just to the "right" of that automatically gets designated as "centrist." This perfectly illustrates just how devoid of meaning and divorced from public opinion the use of the word "centrist" has become. Indeed, it perfectly captures the extent to which the tidy left-center-right spectrum has devolved into little more than a figment of the big news orgs' collective imagination.
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Update: A few commenters below have argued that the headline meant that these Senators intended to introduce a "centrist" resolution. Even if that were the case -- and I'm not at all sure that it is -- it wouldn't make the paper's use of the word any less absurd or mindless. First off, we have no idea what they intended, because they didn't divulge any real details about the proposal. More to the point, even if they had said that they intended to offer a "centrist" proposal, so what? It nonetheless isn't going to actually be "centrist" in any meaningful sense, at least as it relates to public opinion. And that's the real point here: The big news orgs shouldn't be playing the game of letting so-called Washington "centrists" define what that word means.
The larger problem here -- and this larger problem is why it might be worth obsessing a bit over headlines like this one -- is that use of the word by self-described centrists and by the big news orgs no longer has any connection to what the public thinks. It has come to mean little more than, "legitimate because it reflects the center of Washington elite opinion." If the headline was meant as these commenters think it was, it would reflect this problem more strongly, not less.