Ayn Rand's Ellsworth Toohey, Media, and Politics

I am finally reading Ayn Rand's Fountainhead, over a decade since a friend strongly recommended Rand to me. She has been getting some attention post-bank bailout and as government seems to keep growing, so I wanted to see what people are talking about. I'm about 3/4 through the book's 694 pages. I'm finding a lot to strongly agree with, and some to strongly disagree with.

The book is about Howard Roark, a genius architect who says "Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable", and the forces that try to drag him down. A chief adversary is Ellsworth Toohey, a widely-followed and respected newspaper columnist. There is a saying that "The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." As a "humanitarian", in his sense of the word, Toohey's mission in life is to use his prominence to promote untalented architects and writers, while tearing down the truly talented ones, so they don't achieve total dominence of their professions.

In Toohey's eyes, the power of a critic is best expressed when they take a play that is total crap on the merits and make it a commercial success; the impact of social norms and the desire for acceptance is a big theme in the book. This reminded me of my recent comments about the State of the Union address, and how political pundits (and, sadly journalists) beg their readers to judge the President not strictly on the merits, but on merits, plus a lens of their political parties' priorities and biases.

Years ago when I was studying journalism, I learned that in some cases, journalism students were being explicitly taught methods for positioning the facts to achieve an effect. It doesn't require outright lying. Make more effort to get a quote from one side, while leaving a voice mail for someone on the opposing side ("Calls to the office of Person X were not returned"). Write 10 paragraphs in support up top, with 1 or 2 paragraphs in opposition at the end (Editors know most people don't read the whole article). Put some stories on page 1, and others on page 26.

I learned to consider newspapers and TV news as secondary sources of information, not primary. Thus, I make an effort to watch the State of the Union live, before the press gets a hold of it and applies their lens (I have enough biases of my own). It's a meager attempt to prevent the press from making me see total crap as genius, or vice versa.

The average journalist today is more like Ellsworth Toohey than the average journalist of 5 or 10 years ago, and entire news networks are perceived as having been Tooheyed toward an agenda. Voters assume Fox has a conservative bias, and that MSNBC has a liberal bias, regardless of the actual content on the channel at the moment. They comfort their party and afflict the opposite party. People seek out shows that confirm their own biases and avoid ones that challenge them - which moves them further from the center. This is a large part of why Washington is so dysfunctional.

Many are hoping a new political party will rise and start to take seats in Congress (an example here). I think it would only be a matter of time before the new party becomes like the old. Instead, I hope the growing population of independents remain independent, ignore the Tooheys of the world, and impose discipline on both parties based on their merits. The message of the Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts is "there are a lot of independents in this country, and if you spend too much of their money on things you are not good at doing, we will vote against you." If a large part of the electorate is voting on ideas and not party loyalty, it will force the Federal government to focus only on what they are good at, which isn't very much. Then, please reduce my Federal tax burden and let the States compete for my labor and tax dollars!