Chelsea Handler Quotes
He laid into me with the same gusto as a right-wing political pundit on the O'Reilly Factor defending President's Bush right to vacation six days out of the week.
Handler, Chelsea. My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands. Bloomsbury, 2005.
He is credited with the origin of this statement by many sources but a primary quotation has eluded us.
The Congress was debating President Johnson’s Voting Rights Bill. Southern Democrats and Conservative Republicans were opposed to legislation that would prevent states from discriminating against Black and other minority voters. Johnson needed the support of minority leader Dirksen and the moderate Republicans. Dirksen was at the White House discussing the strategy for the passage of the bill. This quotation illustrates the “partisanship of the day” where opponents were quite friendly even when they were “denouncing” each other, The venom and personal disrespect and hatred of the beginning of the 21st century was absent in the 1960s even though the most radical and controversial legislation was being debated. The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Non Discrimination in Housing and Medicare were all passed that year with filibusters and cloture votes. Yet there was always comity.
Until the 20th century almost all American political media were shamelessly and overtly biased—left or right. Political Parties had their own de facto publications much like Fox News became for the Republicans in the 21st century. In the 20th century journalism developed into a profession that evolved standards of objectivity in reporting. That norm then prevailed for about 70 years. With the extreme polarization of the later years of the 29th Century the right wing began to accuse much of the media of a left wing bias, and the media tended to react as Krugman describes in this quotation. The model of having spokespersons for “each side” of an issue works for highly subjective political preferences with a two party system, but where it broke down is with scientific and technical issues. On these, there often really are not two scientific points of view, but there is a scientific consensus of the vast majority of scientists and almost all the prestigious and accomplished scientists are in accord. However, there may be some who have a cultural, religious and/or political concern for some science and its implications for society. They in turn find a scientist or two, often one who is unaccomplished and not recognized in the scientific field to argue a different point of view. The media have tended to equate the two and have a “debate” as if there were two sides to the science when there are not. These issues tend to cluster around scientific medical issues involving sex and birth control methods, environment and conservation, evolution, the age of the earth and the method of creation of the universe. The problem is particularly exacerbated by the general scientific illiteracy of the American population and the relatively few journalists who themselves are scientifically literate who can explain scientific issues well.
Chelsea Joy Handler is an American comedienne, actress, writer, television host, producer and activist. She hosted the late-night talk show Chelsea Lately on the E! network from 2007 to 2015 and released a documentary series, Chelsea Does, on Netflix in January 2016. Between 2016 and 2017, Handler hosted the talk show Chelsea on Netflix.
