There’s not much question which space this blog inhabits:
In the sphere of deviance we find “political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject as unworthy of being heard.” As in the sphere of consensus, neutrality isn’t the watchword here; journalists maintain order by either keeping the deviant out of the news entirely or identifying it within the news frame as unacceptable, radical, or just plain impossible. The press “plays the role of exposing, condemning, or excluding from the public agenda” the deviant view, says Hallin. It “marks out and defends the limits of acceptable political conduct.”
Anyone whose views lie within the sphere of deviance—as defined by journalists—will experience the press as an opponent in the struggle for recognition. If you don’t think separation of church and state is such a good idea; if you do think a single payer system is the way to go; if you dissent from the “lockstep behavior of both major American political parties when it comes to Israel” (Glenn Greenwald) chances are you will never find your views reflected in the news. It’s not that there’s a one-sided debate; there’s no debate.
One could quite reasonably add about 80 percent of the views I hold to the deviant sphere, starting with the recognition that Keynesian economics are utter hogwash. Look at how almost every single so-called conservative at National Review supported the Paulson Plan. Did it work? No. Did that harm their credibility with Republican readers in the slightest? Apparently not.
Bruce Bartlett wanted to know who saw the housing bubble coming. Out of curiosity, I checked my blog archives and saw that I wrote this in September 2002:
[T]here can be little doubt that the implosion of the equity markets will soon be followed by the pricking of the credit and real estate bubbles. As great financial houses such as Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase teeter on the edge of bankruptcy, it is well within the realm of possibility that the triple whammy of the equity, credit and real estate implosions will lead to the collapse of the entire global financial system.
Okay, the global financial system hasn’t collapsed yet, but two for three isn’t bad so far. And it’s not as if the triple whammy has finished crashing yet; Obama is still on deck.