The wisdom of 10th graders…

My AP Government class is just finishing up the unit on the media and politics. Yesterday we talked about allegations of bias in the media. All I do is pose the question and the kids take off. Remarkably, every single one of my students thought that the mainstream media has a liberal bias. When I started teaching this class eight years ago, the class would divide in the middle when I asked the question. I used to be able to have class debates on the question, but now there aren’t any students who want to argue against that proposition. And yes, they all also agreed that Fox had a conservative bias. So, after that we talked about the White House Communications director’s attack on Fox this weekend. I showed them some clips from CNN and asked their opinion of whether this was smart politics. And once again, they uniformly agreed that it didn’t make any sense for a White House official to attack a media critic. The previous day we’d talked about tools that a politician has to manipulate media coverage – things like strategic leaks and photo ops. No one had suggested that one technique to use was to attack the press. Most of my students are 10th graders. They understand that it doesn’t make any sense to attack your media critics. It doesn’t make sense when conservative politicians do it. It might thrill their base, but all it does is come of as whining to the rest of the people. Even John Nichols of The Nation gets it as he wrote yesterday to advise the White House people to stop whining about Fox. Nichols points out that we’ve had a partisan press ever since Washington’s administration. He also thinks it’s very short-sighted to keep the President out of Fox interviews. He should demonstrate that he can stand up to tough questions.

Amazingly, it’s not only Fox that the Obama White House is irritated with – they’re also tired of the liberal criticisms from leftwing bloggers as they told NBC’s John Harwood that those bloggers need to take their pajamas off and realize what a tough job it is to govern this country.