Reality and Truth in the Politically Correct Organization:
The Case of the Dan Rather Memo Debacle at CBS News
By
Howard S. Schwartz
Professor of Organizational Behavior
Rochester, Michigan 48380
USA
(248) 684-5345
ABSTRACT
The CBS News organization is
analyzed with regard to the Dan Rather memo debacle, in which Rather made
charges against US President George Bush based on forged memos. It is seen as
an outgrowth of political correctness. News organizations can do good
journalism even though they have a specific perspective, as long as they
operate under the assumption that there is an external world which their
reporting can get wrong. Political correctness undermines that assumption, and
in fact undermines the whole idea that there is an external world. In the
politically correct organization, truth refers to correspondence with a
fantasy, rather than correspondence with facts in an external world. This leads
to the corruption of journalistic organizations, but it also poses a threat to
all complex organizations.
Keywords
Political correctness, Dan Rather,
CBS News, media bias, Mary Mapes, hysteria,
psychoanalytic theory
Introduction
From its beginnings in the university, political
correctness has metastasized into every area of social relations. Even within
the corporation, it has risen to unquestioned dominance over communication in
the matters to which it applies.
If this control were just in the area of speech, it would
be a matter of little concern to organizations. However, the merest reflection
indicates that it cannot control speech alone, since organizational decisions
involve positions that are proposed and defended through speech. Hence control
over speech through political correctness must imply control over
organizational decision-making, and hence over every aspect of the
organization.
The implication of this is that the psychological dynamics
that underlie political correctness come to be the underlying dynamics of the
organization as a whole. If, as I shall argue, the dynamics of PC are
antagonistic toward organization, the threat it poses to organizations can be
quite severe.
Schwartz (1993, 1997,
2002, 2003, 2004) has written extensively about the psychological roots of
political correctness I will repeat here only the rudiments of his approach.
Schwartz’ Theory of Political Correctness
From the standpoint of
psychoanalytic theory, it would be expected that a psychological force as
powerful as PC would have to have very deep, primitive roots. So it is.
According to Schwartz, the key to the understanding of political correctness is
the psychology of sex roles, which are based on primitive images of the mother
and the father. In those terms, the mother represents a loving world which has
us at its center. This is based on the fusion we had with her, or imagine we
had, in infancy, when her love was sufficient to make our lives perfect. The
father is seen as an obstacle to our fusion with mother since he has a
relationship with her that does not have us at its center.
Now the father is not
really the obstacle to that fusion, he is only the form in which it first
appears. The obstacle is reality itself, which determines that we are all
separate creatures, and not one with mother. Nonetheless, because he is the
form in which it first appears, the father has a special relationship with
external reality.
In the traditional
Western psychology of sex roles, his life gains its meaning by his engagement
with the external world. He deals with
it as a way of gaining the love of the mother through his achievement, by
transforming it so that she can simply be her loving self, offering the
possibility of fusion. In order to do this, the father must learn to deal with
external reality on its own terms. He must be able to see himself as an actor
among other actors, as others see him who are not emotionally connected to him,
as an object rather than as a subject. This requires learning a way of seeing
himself and the world that Schwartz calls (2003) objective
self-consciousness. Through
objective self-consciousness we come to appropriate the pattern of shared terms
and meanings that Lacan calls the symbolic.
By introjecting
him, the children come to acquire objective self-consciousness. This enables
him to teach the children what he has learned about the world through this
process of transformation. In this way they come to acquire the idea of an
external world, which is to say a world that is indifferent to them and
operates according to its own terms.
Political correctness
means the repudiation of the role of the father and his works. Its unconscious
premise is that we could all have fusion with the mother if we could only get
him out of the picture. Directly and indirectly, this outlook involves the
rejection of objective self-consciousness and, along with that, the idea of
objective external reality, which is rooted in it, and the symbolic, through
which it is represented.
This is so for a
number of reasons. For one thing, as we have seen, the cause of our separation
is not really the father, but reality itself. The father only represents
reality. So it is really reality that is under attack when the father is
repudiated in political correctness. Second, to the extent that the father is
the object of attack, as we shall see further on, the repudiation of reality is
strategically invaluable. The father needs external reality so that he can
engage it and transform it and in that way gain standing with the mother. Get
rid of the idea of external reality and the symbolic and you deprive the father
of any possibility of gaining standing. The standing he has had then is seen as
having been stolen from those who have not had standing. He must be hated for
his theft and those who have been deprived by him must be loved as
compensation. In this, we see the familiar workings of PC.
However, the father really has had achievements.
Specifically, students of organization will understand that the structural
elements of organization are the legacy of the father. The formalized division and coordination of
labor, standards of performance, and so on, require the idea that there is
something outside oneself which we must learn about. In other words they
require the idea of an objective reality and the shared meaning of the
symbolic, along with the attendant definitions of truth and knowledge.
Repudiating these works would make organization impossible.
This will be a problem that may be most visible in
organizations whose primary purpose is itself truth and knowledge, such as the
university and the news business. Schwartz (2003)
has written about its effect on the university. The purpose of this paper will
be to explore its effect on journalism through the analysis of a recent debacle
at CBS News.
In that matter, a program designed to present damaging
information about President Bush’s career in the Air National Guard was quickly
determined to be based on memos that were obvious forgeries, and which would
have been known to be forgeries if proper journalistic practices had been
employed. Evidently, CBS’ journalistic standards had broken down and its
processes had become corrupted.
Of singular importance is the fact that CBS officials,
specifically anchorman and managing editor Dan Rather, clearly believed that
the story was true, even though the usual journalistic bases upon which truth
is established were missing. The question is, what could he have meant by
truth? My contention will be that the idea of truth he was using was rooted in
hysteria. It thus had a different basis than empirical verification. It was
rooted in a subjective feeling of truth. But this feeling has intrapsychic roots, and is not anchored in empirical
reality. Truth conceived in this way subordinates objectivity to fantasy. These are the workings of political
correctness. Ultimately, they must corrode every aspect of organizational
behavior functioning.
I will begin with a brief description of the memo debacle
and then proceed to an exploration of the organizational processes that were
responsible for it.
Burkett’s Revenge
Our story begins with a CBS News
program on
Within hours of the broadcast, questions had been raised
on the internet about the authenticity of the memos. The first feature that was
recognized was that the memos were in a proportionately spaced font, which is
common in the word processed documents we have today, but extremely rare on the
typewriters in use when the memos were supposed to have been composed. Other
anomalies indicating that the documents were produced on a word processor
became quickly apparent.
In the next few days, more problems emerged concerning the
violation of standard Air Force and general
As the momentum of this criticism was developing, however
Rather and CBS stood by the story. In a statement released on September 10. for
example, they said:
This report was not based solely on recovered documents,
but rather on a preponderance of evidence, including documents that were
provided by unimpeachable sources, interviews with former Texas National Guard
officials and individuals who worked closely back in the early 1970s with
Colonel Jerry Killian and were well acquainted with his procedures, his
character and his thinking.
In addition, the
documents are backed up not only by independent handwriting and forensic
document experts but by sources familiar with their content. Contrary to some
rumors, no internal investigation is underway at CBS News nor is one planned.
(Thornburgh and Boccardi 2005),
But over time, these defenses crumbled. The “unimpeachable
source” turned out to be a well known crank named William Burkett, who had an
obsessive hatred of Bush and a history of mental illness. The sources familiar
with Killian claimed that the support they were supposed to have given had been
misrepresented, and the independent experts who were supposed to have
authenticated the documents, in fact, were found to have doubted their
authenticity. The last straw was that Killian’s secretary, who would have had
to type the memos since Killian did not type, denied having done so. In the
end, Rather and CBS had to admit that the documents were fakes, though Rather
continued to maintain that they were still “accurate,” whatever that could
mean.
The official verdict, rendered by a commission composed of
Richard Thornburgh and Louis D. Boccardi, whom CBS
hired to investigate the matter, left no doubt that CBS had erred in airing the
story. The passage that follows, as well as all the other documentation in this
and the next section are reprinted in the Thornburgh and Boccardi
report:
The stated goal of CBS News is to have a reputation for
journalism of the highest quality and unimpeachable integrity. To meet this
objective, CBS News expects its personnel to adhere to published internal
Standards based on two core principles: accuracy and fairness. The Panel finds
that both the September 8 Segment itself and the statements and news reports by
CBS News that followed the Segment failed to meet either of these core
principles.
Although they were not willing to conclude with “absolute
certainty” that the documents were forgeries, the expert judgments that they
included in their report did not leave much room for doubt. For example, they
quote Peter Tytell, indubitably one of the world’s
leading authority in these matters, as concluding that “the Killian documents
were not produced on a typewriter in the early 1970s and therefore were not
authentic.”
For the purposes of organizational analysis, however, the
important issue was not whether the documents were fake or authentic, but
whether CBS had sufficient grounds to assert that they were authentic when they
broke this highly prejudicial story in the middle of a presidential election.
On that issue, there can be no doubt: all are agreed that they did not. The
producer of the segment, Mary Mapes was fired, and
four other executives were asked to resign. Rather himself was allowed to
retire.
Organizational Analysis
The question for organizational analysis is how CBS could
come to violate so deeply its own most important standards -- standards that
could easily be said to define the very nature of its work. Answering this
question was, of course, part of the task set for the Thornburgh commission,
and they did provide some answers. Before turning to our own investigation, we
should consider the validity of theirs.
Their claim was that CBS erred as a result of trying to
get the story on the air as soon as possible. In making that claim they
discounted the possibility that CBS was acting out of a political motivation.
Take the second item first time first. The Commission may
not have come to the conclusion that CBS acted out of political bias, but their
argument here is very weak, consisting largely in the denial on the part of
Rather and Mapes that they had a political
agenda. The other arguments were to the
effect that the editing process had made the story less incendiary than it
otherwise might have been, and that the documents, if they had been authentic,
would have provided important information. Neither of these arguments add much
support, it seems to me, to their conclusion.
There is, however, much uncontested information in the
pubic domain indicating Mapes’ passion for the story,
on which she had been working for four years, and her belief that it would have
a powerful political effect of a sort that she strongly desired. For example,
consider these items:
(1) Mapes was working with a freelance
(2) On July 30, Mapes
sent an email to one of her superiors at CBS in which she said: "...there
is some very interesting Bush stuff shaking out there right now...Re...his
qualification [sic] and refusal of service in
(3) On August 3, she wrote:
"There is a storm brewing in
(4) On August 31, Smith wrote to her
to see whether she could arrange a book deal for Burkett, as part of a way to
entice him to give them the memos. In the message, Smith maintained that one of
the selling points would be that the information they were trying to obtain
“could possibly change the momentum of an election.” Her response: "that
looks good, hypothetically speaking, of course."
Given such indications of political bias on CBS News’
part, it would seem that the argument for the alternative claim, which was that
CBS simply rushed the story into press to gain a competitive advantage, would
have to be fairly strong. But it is not. The support for it comes from the fact
that other news media were on the story, and might have beaten CBS News to the
punch. But if other news organizations were rushing the story into press, that
simply opens the way to another question, clearly related to the issue of
political bias, which is why was this
the story that they were trying to bring out? This possibility was addressed by
the Commission, who noted:
The Panel recognizes that some will see this widespread media
attention not as evidence that 60 Minutes
Wednesday was not motivated by bias but instead proof
that all of mainstream media has a liberal bias. That is a perception beyond
the Panel’s assignment.
It is easy to see how the Panel could have ruled this
matter as being beyond its assignment, but it is difficult to see how, having
done so, the Panel could have ruled itself competent to decide the matter of
political bias at CBS News. For the charge of political bias has not been made
against CBS News exclusively, but against the mainstream news media generally.
By reframing the issue at that level, and then ruling themselves incapable of
answering it, the Panel effectively denied their competence to resolve the
matter at the CBS News level as well.
In fact, political bias in the media has been a frequent
charge. It is often supported by studies that show that those who work for the
media are overwhelmingly liberal (e.g. Lichter,
Rothman and Lichter 1986; Weaver and Wilhoit 1996; Povich 1996) and that their viewpoint is
reflected in the content of the news stories that they publish (Groseclose and Milyo, in press).
Certainly, belief in the
But
what does this show? Does it show that, contrary to the Panel’s report, CBS
News made its error because of political bias? Not necessarily. To be sure,
research data like this are hard to ignore, but journalists claim that their
political orientation is unimportant, since they can follow the canons of
objectivity no matter what their orientation.
I grant their premise.
In
fact, the idea of news media not having a political slant may well be an
aberration. In many Western countries, it is understood that newspapers have
characteristic outlooks and perspectives, and this is not believed to detract
from the quality of their journalism. What is important for the quality of
their journalism is that they understand a fact to be a fact, independent of
themselves, and that they accept their subordination to the facts. What is
important is not that a news organization be
objective, but that it tries to be
objective: that it recognizes that its biases may get in the way of their understanding
of independent reality, and that it tries to keep that from happening and to
learn from its mistakes when they happen.
The critical issue, then, is not whether they are biased,
but whether they have made a good faith effort to follow the canons of
objectivity. This means, first and foremost, a willingness to recognize facts
as facts, even when they get in the way of the vision of the world that our
point of view prefers. And that is where, I maintain, CBS News lost its way.
Telling the stories it wanted to tell came to be more important than whether or
not these stories corresponded with the facts. In order to tell those stores,
they had to dispense with the canons of objectivity.
This brings us back to the Thornburgh Panel’s claim that
their fault was undue haste in rushing a story to press, rather than political
bias. These reflections on the importance of facts enables us to test their
theory. If the matter had been one of gaining a competitive advantage, facts
that reflected badly on the other side would have also been reported.
But this is not what happened. On the contrary, facts that
led to critical views of Kerry, though equally or more important, were largely
ignored.
In contrast with the extensive concern with Bush’s record
during the campaign, Kerry’s record was subjected to very little scrutiny,
despite some very serious charges. One important set of accusations concerned
Kerry’s war record, and was laid by a group of
At that point, the news media, generally without
mentioning the details of the charges, soon announced that they had been
discredited. They had not been discredited. Some of their claims were disputed,
but in none of the cases that were in dispute was the evidence against the Swiftboat vets stronger than the evidence they had brought,
and in some cases there was no serious dispute of the vets’ charges at all.
I cannot go into all the details here. I will recount only
one such charge, whose truth was essentially acknowledged. It was that Kerry had
made up a story about being in
John Kerry’s
Kerry made this assertion a number of times, first in a
movie review in the Boston Herald:
On more than one occasion, I, like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now, took my patrol boat
into
But the most important was in a debate in the Senate on a
bill to provide aid to the contras in
I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in
These were not Kerry’s only mentions of his travels in
And who is he,
really?
A close associate
hints: There's a secret compartment in Kerry's briefcase. He carries the black
attaché everywhere. Asked about it on several occasions, Kerry brushed it
aside. Finally, trapped in an interview, he exhaled and clicked open his case.
"Who told
you?" he demanded as he reached inside. "My friends don't know about
this."
The hat was a little mildewy. The green camouflage was fading, the seams
fraying.
"My good luck
hat," Kerry said, happy to see it. "Given to me by a CIA guy as we
went in for a special mission in
Kerry put on the hat,
pulling the brim over his forehead. His blue button-down shirt and tie clashed
with the camouflage. He pointed his finger and raised his thumb, creating an
imaginary gun. He looked silly, yet suddenly his campaign message was clear:
Citizen-soldier. Linking patriotism to public service. It wasn't complex after
all; it was Kerry.
He smiled and aimed his finger: "Pow."
(
Now, as these stories were circulated on the internet,
quite a storm developed. With regard to the matter of Christmas 1968, some
quickly noted that Nixon, who had indeed made a speech asserting that there
were no Americans in
And the idea that he went on a secret mission for the CIA
was extremely unlikely. Swift boats never traveled solo, and, being large and
noisy, they were ill-suited for clandestine infiltrations. What is more, the
idea that the CIA would choose a junior Lieutenant, with no more than three
months experience “in country,” instead of someone who was familiar with the
waterways, is difficult to believe.
But even stronger doubts were raised about whether he had
ever been in
What’s more, there was documentary evidence from Kerry
himself. This was the last entry Kerry wrote in his
The banks of the [
Not surprisingly in the face of this evidence, but unremarked by the news media, Kerry’s campaign backed off
from this story. First, they said that Kerry had patrolled the watery area
"between"
Moreover, if we can
assume that his adventures in
That was during the
campaign. After the campaign, on
MR.
RUSSERT: And you have a hat that the CIA agent gave you?
SEN.
KERRY: I still have the hat that he gave me, and I hope the guy would
come out of the woodwork and say, "I'm the guy who went up with John
Kerry. We delivered weapons to the Khmer Rouge on the coastline of
But
if he was, as he said, delivering weapons to the Khmer Rouge, that would have
been an important story in its own right. It would have meant that, while
fighting the communists in
Let us take stock of
this. My need here has not been to prove that Kerry lied about being in
CBS News in our time
So what have we got
here? It appears to be a demonstration of bias, but as I have said, if we take
it that way we have missed the important point. What is important is that the
organization had lost its subordination to the facts. Telling the story that it
wanted to tell became more important to the news organization than whether or not
the story was true. This appears to be where CBS News fell down. Its problem
was not that it was biased, but that it had lost the idea that it ought not to
be.
But how could a news
organization lose that idea? Indeed, how could an organization that had lost
that idea still be a news organization? And if it was not a news organization,
what was it? And how did it make the transition from a news organization to
whatever it became? These are the questions toward which I will now turn.
The point that I wish to
make is that CBS News had become a fundamentally different type of organization
than it had been. It came to be doing something else. Its meaning had changed.
It had ceased to operate according to one underlying psychological dynamic and
came to be operating according to another. It had become hysterical. These are
theoretical points to which I shall return. First it will be necessary to get a
more tactile sense of the organization’s processes, especially with regard to
the question of how, in the memo scandal, CBS News could have overridden the
normal checks a news agency maintains to make sure it does not get things
wrong.
In doing an
organizational analysis of this sort, it generally makes sense to focus on the
central role. In the broadcast news business that would be the producer (Fund
2004), who in this case was a woman named Mary Mapes.
Focusing on Mary Mapes quickly yields dividends. Several times in the
accounts of CBS News journalists and executives, the explanation given for the
debacle is that a belief in Mapes’ integrity carried
the day when there was an issue of verification. Her prestige was said to be so
great that when she said, for example, that her source was unimpeachable, it
was accepted without further investigation that her source could be trusted.
For example:
Mapes’ executive producer, Josh Howard
said, ''Mary Mapes told us her source made her
completely confident about where they came from, and that they were authentic,
and that made me confident..." (Rutenberg 2004)
From a sociological
point of view, it is clear enough what we have here. The organization suspended
its own faculty of critical judgment, and relied on the judgment of a specific
individual. Instead of relying on their procedures to determine what they
should do, they relied on her. In psychoanalytic terms, Mary Mapes had been put in the position of the ego ideal. This
is coterminous with the classical psychoanalytic view of the leader (Freud,
1921). She was exerting, and they accepted, her leadership. But leadership is
something that social science knows about. According to the standard account,
leadership generally goes to the individual who best represents the group’s
judgment of what a member of the group should be. In accepting Mary Mapes’ leadership then, CBS News was saying something about
its own identity. In exploring the mind of Mary Mapes,
then, we are also exploring CBS News as an organization.
The Mind of Mary Mapes
Let us begin with an
account on the CBS News website that appeared in the wake of the debacle.
Mapes, 48, was described by
colleagues on Tuesday as a dogged and talented journalist who made no secret of
her liberal political beliefs…
"She pursued stories very aggressively always," said Jeff Fager, executive producer of 60 Minutes. "She definitely has an investigative sense.
She was responsible for the bulk of the work on Abu Ghraib.
That was her story." …
She worked at
John Carlson, a former commentator at KIRO-TV who is host of a conservative
radio talk show in
Mapes was "quite liberal" and disliked the
current President Bush's father, he said.
"She definitely was someone who was motivated by what she cared about and
definitely went into journalism to make a difference," Carlson said.
"She's not the sort of person who went into journalism to report the news
and offer an array of commentary."
(CBS News 2004)
What I think is important to understand about this account on the CBS
News website is the apparent recognition that for Mary Mapes,
reporting the news was secondary to “making a difference” in terms of what she
cared about. This is hardly the profile of a person passionate about getting
the facts right, but seems to be a dominant characteristic of the person, as
understood by CBS News and, as I have said, a model of what CBS News took
itself to be.
This is an important
point. CBS News could well have employed Mapes for
her virtues: doggedness, intelligence, passion, etc. while avoiding her deficiencies
by keeping them under observation and subjecting them to critical appraisal.
Knowing that she was devoted to a political cause, they could have compensated
for that in the way they evaluated and used her material. However, their
adoption of her as a model precluded that, and turned her into her own
instrument of validation. This is what was involved in choosing her as a
leader. In doing so, they subordinated their own concern for the truth.
This subordination of
concern for truth to the drives of political passion is shown again in an
account by John Fund (1974) of a remarkable incident in her KIRO period.
In this case, which
took place in the winter of 1987, police raided a
The Bascomb shooting angered many people in
Fortunately for the
cops, Mr. Fincher wasn't the only one at the scene of the raid that night. A
reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Mike Barber, was tagging along
with officers. Mr. Barber observed the officers arriving at the house,
knocking, announcing themselves and then entering. He was there when the
shooting happened and when the ambulances were summoned. At that point, a man
"reeking of alcohol" walked out of some nearby bushes and approached
him. He wanted to know what had just happened. That was Wardell
Fincher. But Mr. Fincher wasn't thoroughly checked out, so all this came out
after the story aired. The police were eventually cleared but it took years and
an unsuccessful civil-rights lawsuit by the Bascomb
family to undo the damage.
By that time, Ms. Mapes had left Seattle, and no one I talked with who worked
at KIRO at the time can recall her being disciplined in any way for her
mistake. Instead, in 1989 she was fast-tracked to the "CBS Evening
News" and later became Mr. Rather's hand-picked
producer on "60 Minutes.” (Fund 2004).
From the standpoint of
our organizational analysis, this last paragraph is crucial. CBS could not have been ignorant of this
incident, in which her ideological zeal led to a serious and consequential
lapse in journalistic standards; they simply cannot have thought it was very
important. This is consistent with the idea that it was her zeal that was her
qualification, and not her adherence to journalistic standards.
But what was that
ideological zeal, and how did it interact with her journalism? What kind of
stories did Mapes want to tell, and what kind did she
not want to tell?
With regard to the
first, in going over the two stories that brought Mapes
the most fame, Mark Gimein (2005), writing in New York Magazine finds a consistent
narrative in Mapes’ productions:
Both the Abu Ghraib story and the story of Bush’s National Guard files
started as narratives of the military’s punishing the lower ranks while
protecting the privileged and well connected.
But all the people
involved with the story at the start—Lawson, Charles, Mapes—believed
that this was a story not just of a few American soldiers who abused their
position, but of soldiers who were themselves mistreated by the military.
With regard to the
stories she did not want told, Washington Post reporter Jennifer Frey (2004)
tells this story, again about the KIRO period:
Even in her early
years in the business, Mapes was driven, passionate
and unafraid of ruffling feathers. [Mapes's close
friend Lisa] Cohen remembers her clashing repeatedly with the KIRO news
director … bristling at publicity stunts she found journalistically
distasteful.
"We had a very
portly sportscaster," Cohen remembers, "and the news director thought
it would be great publicity if we sent him out in a Santa Claus suit to show up
live on people's doorsteps to give them one little bag of groceries. One little
bag. Mary was assigned to it. She was horrified. She told him he couldn't do
that, that it was unfair to these people, that they were giving them no
warning, that it would embarrass them. If he was going to do something, she
wanted him to do something meaningful."
To Cohen, that was
classic Mapes: principled, unafraid to challenge,
always willing to work harder than anyone else.
This story suggests
more about Mapes and how she acted within her role.
What the story says, and of course this is simply an adumbration of the
We are now in a
position to form an hypothesis. It is
that what Mary Mapes
was passionate, principled and hard working about, what she was unafraid to
challenge authority about, was political correctness. By accepting the
leadership of Mary Mapes, CBS News was affirming the
importance of political correctness.
Political correctness and journalism
With this in mind, let
us return for the last time to the issue of media bias. As we know, media
figures claim that, while they may have a certain political point of view, they
can still be good journalists. I have agreed with that. All that is necessary
is the recognition that one can be wrong. But if what has been called a bias is
really political correctness, then the possibility of being good journalists
disappears. The reason is that political correctness involves the repudiation
of reality and it is inconsistent with the psychological assumptions that
underlie good journalism. You can have bias and good journalism, but you cannot
have both good journalism and political correctness.
As I have said,
political correctness is always an attempt to destroy the father’s standing
with the mother. But what is true of the father’s standing with the mother may
be generalized to all status. For the politically correct, differences in
status are regarded as illegitimate, and claims that some have earned their
status by concrete achievement are dismissed as smokescreens to cover up
oppression. If some have more status than others, they must have stolen that
status from those who are of lower status.
Within the ambit of
political correctness, the meaningful and moral life is a project of reversing
the effects of this collective crime. It means transforming the world so that
those who have been deprived of status in the past are compensated with love,
and those who have had more status are hated for their crime. But transforming
the world, in this case, simply means transforming the way people feel. In the
absence of an objective world, feelings are all there are. We can easily see
the role that information media will play in this project. That will include
those media previously given over to the task of journalism, but they will no
longer be practicing journalism. Journalism will have died.
The reason why PC is
lethal to journalism is rooted in its rejection of the idea of an objective
world, an idea that PC absolutely cannot tolerate. If there were an objective
world, people could legitimately gain status by achievement, by doing something
beneficial in terms of our collective capacity to live in that objective world.
Only through denying the possibility of achievement is it possible to reduce
the world to the simple morality play of oppressors and oppressed. For this
reason, the very idea that there is an objective world becomes an object of
scorn and hatred. Obviously, this precludes journalism recognizing the
possibility that it has gotten the facts wrong. In the absence of an idea of an
objective world, journalism could only mean the furtherance of the politically
correct morality play, but that isn’t really journalism at all. What is it? The
answer is simple. It is political correctness, which is an end in itself.
We can certainly see
all this play out in the coverage of President Bush during the campaign. He
represented the father and was seen in this context as the arch oppressor. That
was why no good could be ascribed to him, and why any attacks on him, no matter
how spurious, ill-founded, or even bizarre were regarded as legitimate. They
were legitimate because, for the politically correct, hatred of the father is
the very source of legitimacy, the epistemological
bedrock, as it were, of legitimacy. This is why the idea of Bush having
gotten his positions in life, including his position in the Air National Guard,
through illegitimate pressure gained so much traction.
Mary Mapes maintained that the forged documents meshed perfectly
with the known facts about George Bush. As the Thornburgh Commission
demonstrated, she is wrong about that. However, the documents certainly meshed
perfectly with the fantasy she had
about George Bush. That fantasy was, for her, the ultimate reality, and so it
was for many others. When Dan Rather said that the documents were “fake but
accurate”, that is what he had in mind.
The Psychology of Hysteria
To get a fuller sense
of the meaning of political correctness, we have to expand our psychology a
bit. So far, we have looked at the psychodynamics of the memo debacle as a
matter of attacking the father’s role. Presumably a weakening of the father’s
role would mean a strengthening of the mother’s role. But what is the mother’s
role? In our account so far, we have considered the mother’s role only under
her aspect as the object of the father’s desire. Within this dynamic, her role
is only a passive one. Doesn’t the maternal role involve doing anything? Doesn’t
she have her own desires?
There is a problem
here. The problem is that, as Lacan put it, desire
arises from lack and she has no lack. Having no desire of her own, she cannot
form an agenda, a program of action for fulfilling those desires. She cannot,
then, do anything in furtherance of her agenda. What then can she do that makes
sense?
The point is that the
maternal role, and by extension the female role, always involves doing things
within the context of someone else’s active agenda. So it is that we think of
her as a care-giver, a nurturer, or for that matter even an organizational
participant. This, of course, means dependence on an agenda created by men, and
hence a dependence on men. At the same time, though, the male agenda is created
around pursuit of fusion with the mother, and hence on women, which is a
dependence that is even more profound.
Thus, the male and
female roles are complementary to each other (Schwartz, 2003, 2006) each
providing an aspect of meaning for the other that they cannot provide for
themselves. In her role as representing fusion, the woman is the one for whom
things are done. Her role is to offer the possibility of her love, which brings
out such activity. The underlying fantasy is that she needs simply to be
herself. She is, after all, as the representation of fusion, sufficient exactly
as she is.
The mother is perfect,
but precisely because of this perfection, her life has no form. She requires
the father to form an agenda. He is happy to do so, since action in pursuit of
fusion with her, earning a place in her love, gives him the sense that there is
something to be sought. This gives the context in which behavior can have a
purpose, and activity in pursuit of that purpose may be said to have meaning.
The meaning it may be said to have is the structure of life that it is his
function to create. In this way, and
only in this way, can his behavior have meaning, because, given his inherent
limitation, he cannot even have the fantasy of simply being who he is.
So there is complementarity between theses roles. But this complementarity creates a mutual dependency, and with
dependency comes tension, each party of the struggle trying to become
self-sufficient by dominating the other.
In psychoanalytic
terms, the attempt on the part of the paternal role to dominate the maternal is
referred to as the obsessive-compulsive character, in which the individual
takes his own desire as a source of threat. When the maternal role tries to
overcome the paternal, we have what is called hysteria. In hysteria the
individual, identifying with the maternal, takes herself as perfect in herself,
and rejects subordination to any male agenda, which she always takes to be
inferior, in favor of her just being herself (Schwartz, 2006).
Political Correctness and Hysteria
If we want to fully
understand political correctness, we must see it as an essentially hysterical
phenomenon (Schwartz, 2006). Under its sway, identifying with the perfect
mother, the politically correct have the sense of being perfect in themselves,
rejecting any kind of external constraint or determination or even meaning.
Political correctness identifies these as domination by an imperfect and
oppressive father. Their object, then, is to reveal the imperfection of this
father, implicitly contrasting that imperfection with their own perfection and
declaring his agenda as something that they do not have to follow.
For the politically
correct, life revolves around a certain question. The question, which isn’t
really a question at all, but an assault, is “Who are you to tell me what to
do?” The object here is undermining the father with this question, revealing to
him and to everyone else that he cannot have a place within the mother’s
affections, since he has not and cannot earn a place. Psychoanalysis refers to
this project of undermining as castration. It is the meaning of life for the
politically correct -- an end in itself.
The problem is that
everything we know about reality, embodied in the symbolic, was the product of
the father’s attempt to get close to the mother. Rejecting what they see as the
father’s agenda means rejecting the idea of reality itself, and therefore all
grounds for prudence, for taking conscious purposeful action, and, with regard
to journalism, the idea that one’s ideas can be contradicted by the facts.
All that is left is
the fantasy of being oppressed by the father, which becomes the self-justifying
criterion of truth and the determinant of all meaning. It arises from inside
the self, not through interaction with the world outside. It is the product of
internal dynamics, which may have nothing to do with what is going on outside.
Validation is accomplished, therefore, by reference to feeling, rather than by
empirical investigation. For the politically correct, truth is a matter of
aesthetics, rather than of correspondence with reality.
This is why
politically correct journalists can make the most outrageous and destructive
statements, for example that the
This is a matter that
has very serous consequences. Political correctness is not a project
consciously aimed at reaching a desired state. The energy that keeps it going
is the self-righteous rage that provides the emotional core of the state of
opposition. Hysterics live to castrate the father, because the act of
castrating provides them with all the meaning they need and can have.
Interestingly, the
self-sufficiency of the castrating process means there has to be a father. Of
course, it does not take much to be declared an oppressor. Political
correctness has never lacked for villains to attack, even when it has had to
conjure them out of whole cloth, as witches were conjured up to give meaning to
the witch hunt
But if we refer back
to the psychology of sex roles, we can see that this is as much of a dependency
as any traditional housewife had on her husband. The difference is that the
politically correct are parasites, rather than partners.
As with any parasite,
the danger is that they will, even if inadvertently, kill the host. The
castrated father will not be able to do his job of protecting the family. In a
world as dangerous as this one, such castration is essentially suicidal. The
pure internal focus of the politically correct assures that they will not know
they are killing themselves until it is too late. This state of permanent,
proto-suicidal moral assault is the project upon which CBS News embarked when
it gave up journalism.
Looking at the matter
this way helps us to understand certain matters in current journalism that
might otherwise seem peculiar. For example, it explains why even minor
imperfections in George Bush, the United States, the Republicans, all of whom
represent the oppressive and constraining father, are blown up to extreme
proportions, while nothing is made of the imperfections, even major ones, of
those whom the father opposes. For example, at the time the media were filling
themselves with images of naked terrorists at Abu Ghreib,
the contemporaneous filmed decapitation of a living kidnapped American received
almost no mention. The reason is that the only project of political correctness
is the castration of the father. There is no world beyond that. A corollary is
that any hint that the father needs to fight terrible, common, and very real
enemies would give him grounds to assert his claim to importance, and that
cannot be allowed.
Conclusion and Generalization
What has been said of
journalism applies, mutatis mutandis,
to any organizational project that requires the belief that there is an
independent reality which we must learn to understand, and about which it is
possible to make a mistake. That means all organizational phenomena beyond the
equivalent of a lynch mob.
At the very least, an
organization is a system by which people are brought to do what needs to be
done. This means that any organization makes demands. But any organizational
demand can be felt to be an imposition and an element of oppression. For the
hysteric, legitimation on the basis of objective
considerations is not allowed; hence all such demands can be seen as
illegitimate. Standing in opposition to them can be a fully absorbing, and even
intensely moralized, project in its own right.
Schwartz (2002) has
argued that political correctness leads to a kind of organizational nihilism,
in which the organization reorganizes itself around the aim of its own
destruction. These reflections provide, and only provide, an additional
dimension to that.
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