Cognitive Dissonance

Publius ressurects an old post of his to explain the Mary McCarthy outrage on the right.

By my scorecard, there have been five major unified hyena attacks that had (or almost had) a major impact on the media: (1) Rather; (2) Swift Boats; (3) Eason Jordan; (4) Schiavo/Martinez memo; and (5) Newsweek. For now, I’m going to put the Swift Boat story aside because it’s analytically different. It involved an attack on a political candidate rather than on the media itself. In the other four, the mob demanded the head of someone in the media itself.

When you put these four stories side-by-side, you can see some common characteristics. First, and most obviously, they all include negative critiques of either the administration or the Republican leadership more generally. But more critically, they all involve specific types of critiques. With the exception of Jordan, they are all subsets of larger critiques that are almost indisputably true. These larger critiques are also the sort of critiques that trigger immense cognitive dissonance for Bush supporters. In my expert psychological opinion, the lynch-mob hyena attack is a defense mechanism against cognitive dissonance rather than sincere outrage against media bias.

Sounds about right to me.