Rothman: CNBC Anchor’s Ill-Informed ‘Rant’ Reveals Newsroom Hostility To Conservatives
If you missed CNBC anchor Brian Sullivan’s righteous denunciation of the modern Republican Party on Tuesday’s edition of Morning Joe, you should take the time to watch it. It serves one of the clearest examples of the insidious and prejudicial attitude toward conservatism dominating America’s newsrooms.
“As somebody who grew up in a conservative household, I don’t recognize the Republican Party of even my youth,” Sullivan railed. “I don’t like what I see. I don’t like the far right, I don’t like the extremism. They’ve pushed me away.” He continued:
As someone pretty much not religious, pro-same-sex marriage, pro-legalization of marijuana for the most part, okay? What party is this? What party am I supposed to be in? When I’m a fiscal conservative who believes that small government can often be better — there are times for larger government.
Watch below:
No doubt, Sullivan’s self-styled “rant” earned him a slow clap from the producers and personalities that populate NBC’s news properties with content. The party which he objects to so passionately, however, does not exist.
To say that the Republican Party’s pro-small government, fiscal conservatives have no home if they support gay marriage or marijuana legalization is to demonstrate a lack of curiosity about the modern Republican coalition. On the issue of gay marriage, not only does the GOP not resemble the party of Sullivan’s youth, it doesn’t resemble the party that nominated Mitt Romney for the presidency in 2012.
While a majority of Republicans continue to oppose same-sex marriage, that majority is shrinking with historically atypical alacrity. A Washington Post/ABC News poll published on April 17 showed that 40 percent of self-identified Republicans support gay marriage while 54 percent oppose. In November, 2012, only 31 percent of Republicans in that poll said the same.
This poll is not an outlier, either. Demonstrating some consistency across surveys, a New York Times/CBS Poll from mid-April also revealed that 40 percent of self-identified Republicans support gay marriage. And more evolution is in store for the GOP on this issue. According to the results of a Pew Research Center survey from March, 61 percent of voters age 18 – 29 self-identify as Republicans favor gay marriage.
What about the average Republican’s stance on marijuana legalization? Well, it seems Sullivan has been misled on that as well. The results of surveys conducted by Gallup in conjunction with Pew Research Center reveals that average Republicans have gradually been coming to terms with marijuana’s legalization at a roughly proportional rate as self-described Democrats and Independents:
Today, 39 percent of Republicans support marijuana legalization. In 1984, when Sullivan was in his early teens, just 16 percent of Republicans backed the legalization of marijuana. In contrast, a whopping 21 percent of Democrats at the time agreed with this proposition.
As for Sullivan’s objection to the GOP’s religious extremism, the CNBC anchor might be surprised to learn that the rise of the arch-conservative tea party wing of the GOP coincides with the declining influence of the religious right. The Democratic firm Democracy Corps found in October of 2013 that the tea party is deeply suspicious of the religious right. “They are not focused on social issues at all,” Democracy Corps learned.
That survey also found that evangelicals are acutely aware of their declining influence within both the GOP and the country at large, a theme that Sullivan might have read about in the pages of peer-approved publications like The New York Times.
What the GOP is not is an ideological monolith that shuns and denigrates those members of its coalition with divergent points of view – a dubious characteristic of the modern liberal movement that has been elevated by its devotees to a perverse virtue. If Sullivan’s objection to the Republican Party is that it does not champion the views of the Democratic Party, then he has landed on an unassailable fact.
That was not, however, the CNBC anchor’s stated objection. Sullivan asserted that his gripe with the GOP centers on his belief that it should more closely mirror his own views, but polling data suggests that the party is moving in his direction. That he does not see or is not aware of that reality is more a reflection on the company he keeps.
Sullivan’s objects to an image of the GOP that endures primarily in the fervid imaginations of those souls toiling away in Rockefeller Plaza. One might even call such a proud declaration of closed-mindedness and irrationality “bigoted.” But bigotry, as we are so often reminded, is yet another exclusive province of the Republican Party.
[Image via screengrab]
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This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
