Dueling biases
The media are biased. So am I. But which bias shall we choose and why?

One of the memes of the blogosphere since Nick Berg's brutal beheading on May 11 has been the enormous tilt of the traditional news media away from Berg's murder in favor of piling up ink and broadcast minutes about the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal by American soldiers.

I summarized this phenomenon a week ago, and many other writers have, too, including some traditional media outlets.

The web is biased, too.

As of the date-time of this posting, a Google search for the exact phrase, "Abu Ghraib" yields "about 527,000" results.

A Google search for the exact phrase, "Nick Berg" yields "about 777,000" results.

Google searches non-media sources on the the web as well as media sources. So the searches show that Berg has received more coverage on the WWW than the prison scandal to the tune of a quarter-million more pages.

Does this mean that the web is biased toward the Berg story by 250,000 entries? I'm not trying to sound like Reuters, but could it be that "one man's bias is another man's fairness"?

Commentary overkill

In the Cold War, it was said that we had so many nukes pointed at Moscow that all most of them would do would be to "make the rubble bounce." And with the prison and Berg stories, instead of talking about what happened, we are talking about how we are talking about what happened.

There just isn't any "new news" coming from either case. All we are doing is recycling the same pictures and analysis over and over. Not even the courts-martials for prison offenders qualifies for the amount of "news" coverage Abu Ghraib still gets: there just isn't that much to report. And nothing new has happened in the Berg story except the Iraqi authorities captured four suspects, let two go and still hold the other two. (Wonder what their treatment is like?)

Hence, what is going on now is dueling biases. Have the mainline media shoved Berg down the memory hole while they relentlessly hammer the prison abuse story? Unquestionably.

Are web commentati, including me, pretty much off the Abu Ghraib story and still pounding the keyboards about Berg's murder and what it portends? Absolutely.

Both sides proceed from pre-existing biases. But are all biases equally objectionable or comparable? I don't think so. Discriminating among choices with moral import and deciding which to choose is the fundamental problem of ethics.

Ethics and commentary

There are a fair number of ethical matrices that can be used to approach the question. Aristotelian ethics would ask about the objective sought, whether it is just and excellent. Kantian ethicists might try to determine what is the rule to be followed. Utilitarian ethics leads one to ask what course would most likely result in the greatest good for the greatest number.

All these approaches have their merits and their deficiencies. I tend to approach tough ethical issues using the method of H. Richard Niebuhr. The first question in his ethics system is not, "What to do?" but, "What is really going on?" In other words, what is the setting of the ethical dilemma as best as can be known and described?

I believe it is impossible to discuss the present issue apart from the fact that large numbers of violent Islamic extremists have declared total war upon the United States. There are potentially millions of human lives at stake, and not just American lives. Should the Islamofascists detonate a nuclear weapon inside an American city, as they have said they want to do, there is no way to say in advance that the American government certainly would not respond in kind against a city inside the Axis of Evil.

And that leads us bump into the goal of Niebuhr's ethics: the promotion of human flourishing. This is not really the same as Utilitarianism's goal of the greatest good for the greatest number, a system which founders for the lack of a utilitarian calculus. HRN said that ethics is the problem of determing the "fitting response" to a situation. A fitting response is that which advances human flourishing (in HRN-speak, "advances the potentiality of beings.") Hence, HRN's ethics are consequentialist to some degree.

As ethics should be, for while consequences of a chosen course are rarely wholly determinative of what the course should be, they can hardly ever be disregarded (as Kant wanted to do, holding that only the rule mattered).

Consequences matter

It can hardly be argued that human flourishing is better to be achieved by Islamists. The Taliban, for instance, beat and even shot women who went outside their homes without company of theiur husbands or a close male relative. They flogged or hanged men whose beards were too short. In Saudi Arabia last year, a girls' school caught fire one night and the decency police (yes, they have them in Saudi Arabia) refused to unlock the exits because the girls were not properly veiled. At least 15 girls died. And surely human flourishing will not be brought about by the routine practice of beheading enemies, as Islamists have been doing for a very long time.

I quite agree to the other side of the argument, that human flourishing will not be brought about by the kinds of tortures that were done to Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. But there are two crucial, indeed central, differences, to which the news media are almost entirely oblivious and the blogosphere is not: