Author: Elayne Riggs

In entertainment, as with so many other subjective phenomena, many of the old clichés come into play, the main ones being "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and "I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like." While one purpose of entertainment may be to seize on the universal in order to create a bond between creators and audience that explores or delights in our common humanity, it’s also a fact that everyone brings their own unique experiences to bear on their chosen entertainment, so different people can often have very different reactions to the same creation.

And this is fine, if it’s understood. But people often also use experiences to reinforce their preconceived notions, and the more extreme or emotional their experiences have been, the more adamant the reinforcement. This is true whether the subject is religious, political, scientific, cultural, whatever. Our unique prisms color our perceptions, and always will.

Let’s look at the most recent example from the political blogosphere, involving a pundit named Melinda Henneberger who wrote a New York Times op-ed about why Democratic candidates should abandon one of their current core values and risk losing their base in an effort to perhaps maybe possibly woo a few people who don’t much care for their core values anyway. One reason a lot of liberal bloggers have come down hard on Henneberger, besides the absurdity of her premise, is how she backs it up:

"Over 18 months, I traveled to 20 states listening to women of all ages, races, tax brackets and points of view speak at length on the issues they care about heading into ’08. They convinced me that the conventional wisdom was wrong about the last presidential contest, that Democrats did not lose support among women because ‘security moms’ saw President Bush as the better protector against terrorism. What first-time defectors mentioned most often was abortion."

On its face this is an anecdotal confession, with no more solid evidence to support it than anyone else getting on a soapbox or pulpit or keyboard and backing up their personal agenda based on things they’ve been told in private conversations or email, made even more nebulous by its deliberate vagueness. Upon deeper examination, it seems to be typical of "inside the beltway" know-it-alls who start out with a certain premise then deliberately seek out confirmation of that premise. As Avedon Carol observed, "where do you start when you’re actually looking for women to interview who were ‘first-time defectors’ to voting for a Republican in 2004?"  And Tom Hilton notes that this is nothing new: "This, of course, is how it’s done in the exciting fast-paced world of professional columnizing. David Broder goes out among the Common Folk and finds a deep yearning for bipartisan compromise. Tom Friedman takes a taxi and learns that globalization is a force for good. And Melinda Henneberger talks — no, ‘listens’ — to women and discovers, amazingly, that they agree with her on abortion. They go out with an agenda and ‘hear’ whatever confirms it."

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