The Loneliest Liberal:What’s in this stuff?

By James Knudsen

One of the common gripes from conservatives is that progressives have abandoned standards. “Anything goes, as long as it doesn’t harm anyone,” is the adage that fuels this contempt for progressives and their acceptance of things that are considered out of the mainstream. The slippery slope to anarchy or a state-run-Orwellian dystopia awaits us all if we stray from the tried and true.
    Standards, in and of themselves, are not a bad thing. Standards allow us to do things, safe in the knowledge that someone, somewhere, has done the necessary research to ensure that things are going to turn out fine. If you add oil to your car, you do so safe in the knowledge that that quart of oil has been produced in accordance with standards created by the American Petroleum Institute (API) and that it meets the requirements for viscosity and performance levels. A quick glance at the label will reveal an API symbol with the Service Category that oil meets. When I first learned about these ratings we were transitioning from SE to SF. We’re now at SN.
    The same goes for food...sometimes. When I was a child my father brought it to my attention that ice cream, in order to be called, “ice cream,” must meet a threshold, a standard, for butterfat. So, if you pick up a pint of anything that calls itself ice cream, you are getting a product that has a minimum of 10% butterfat. (You might also be getting as much as 50% air by volume.) Ice milk, sorbet, sherbet, soft-serve – we may group them with ice cream, but they’re not. They haven’t met the standard. More recently a product calling itself “peanut spread” has found its way to the shelves. The word “butter” is missing because peanut butter must be 90% peanuts to be labeled “peanut butter,” 89.5% peanut spread.
    Now, if you shop only the perimeter of the supermarket and never buy anything with a label, standards for peanut and butterfat content may be of no interest to you. But who wants to live in a world with ice cream? And as illustrated by the motor oil example, there are many other fields where it would be nice to know what you’re getting. Like news.

Once upon a time, for any given community there were roughly half a dozen news sources to pick from. There was the local paper, three network newscasts, and the local newscasts produced by the network affiliates. And for the most part – we’re talking peanut butter percentages here – it was news. Occasionally, Walter Cronkite would put on his commentator blazer and give his opinion on an important issue like, “We’re never going to win in Vietnam, let’s get out.” And the local paper still has, as do the papers with nationwide readership, a page clearly labeled, “Opinion.”
    And then we have the cable networks. Two of them actually have the word “news” in their title. A review of the daily schedules revealed that one them has just two hours devoted to news segments. In a 24-hour news cycle that’s not even ice cream levels of relevant content. And there’s probably even more air.

Copyright © 2018 by James Knudsen