I once was blind ...

If an Ebola virus the size of a coyote came running at us, we could shoot it—but because it’s tiny, it can kill caregivers if they slip up even slightly. So it is with media bias: Many Americans can see and discount overt bias, but subtleties kill.

I recently ran across a distorting story I wrote long ago. The Boston Globe published it on Jun 18, 1973: that was my last year as a Communist. It started with a dire lead: “The Massachusetts farmer is fighting for his life and the odds are killing him.”

Then came a quotation from the director of the Boston Flower Exchange: “We don’t have the same worries that the vegetable farmers have because it seems people will spend money on the luxury we provide.” That set up my next riff, about how vegetable and dairy farmers produced necessities and struggled, “while the producer of a luxury thrives.”

Small Massachusetts farms faced problems, but instead of examining those realistically I pinpointed a villain: the “farm marketing system that remains highly unpredictable.” That gave me the opportunity to play journalistic ventriloquist—finding an expert to utter the reporter’s message—by quoting a University of Massachusetts professor, N. Eugene Engel: “The system doesn’t allow everyone to produce as much as he’d like.”

Blame “the system.” The story ended with a quotation from farmer Steve Cerrill: “There are people starving all over the world. But we have to juggle here all the time, worrying about producing too little sometimes and too much other times. … I don’t know what the answer is, but something’s holding us all back.”

My Globe editors applauded: The “something” I pointed to, of course, was capitalism. To the hammer everything is a nail. To me as a Communist, everything was a hammer and sickle, and bourgeois family farms would inevitably disappear.

My article had one sentence of overt editorializing: “In any competitive market [production] rarely balances out, and the result is either an artificially manufactured scarcity, which drives prices up, or a glut, which brings little profit.” The story mostly featured storytelling about big capitalism oppressing small farmers. One story by itself means little, but those who steadily consume such tales become putty in the hands of liberal candidates.

By the way, four decades later (counter to my predictions) Massachusetts still has 7,700 farms, and 80 percent of them are family-owned. The average farm size is 67 acres, and producers of cranberries, apples, and dairy producers, along with greenhouse plants and flowers, are hanging in there.