Alex B. Berezow

Alex B. Berezow is a political activist/science writer with a Ph.D. in microbiology.

Pandering to a Conservative Audience
Describing himself as ideologically neutral or moderate, he nonetheless descibed Pres. Barack Obama as being on the "far Left" when promoting his book, Science Left Behind at the American Enterprise Institute on Oct. 24, 2012. Just how rightist must one be to credit description of a president who saved finance capital from its managerial excesses with enormous bailouts and has been more aggressive in prosecuting the War on Terror with drone strikes than former President G.W. Bush of being not just "left" but "far-left"?

Berezow may not believe that about Obama, but his hyperbolic pandering to this conservative audience included whining about the supposed leftist bias of U.S. news coverage. That claim is not supported by scientific findings. Indeed it has been unambiguously disconfirmed. See Tien-Tsung Lee's "The Liberal Media Myth Revisited: An Examination of Factors Influencing Perceptions of Media Bias." Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media. 49, 1 (2005): 43-64.

So why make the unscientific claim of leftist media bias? One possibility is that Berezow may reject empirical social science like that reported by Lee as science. However, unless he believes that human behavior is not part of the natural world - that it is somehow supernatural - then he must accept it as science. He might believe that all news coverage is inherently biased and that the only possibilities are the binary of leftist bias or righist bias. If so, then that is an obvious example of the fallacy of the excluded middle. Neutral, unbiased news coverage is common enough.

Amusingly enough, at least one confused wingnut described Berezow as a liberal in an online conversation thread. That means little because opinions expressed in such fora are evidence of nothing more than one individual's opinion. Uber-conservatives tend to label anything they fail to agree with/understand as liberal or communist. One list (of uncertain provenance) also casts Berezow as a centrist. Perhaps whoever originated that list should look at the C-Span video of Berezow calling Obama "far-left."

Links

 * Left-Right Ideological Spectrum
 * hyperbole
 * People