Dear Media,

You guys are fond of leaning on lines like “we report, you decide” these days. And not just at FOX News, either. David Gregory, who took over hosting duties (after Tim Russert died) at arguably the most-influential of the Sunday political shows, Meet The Press, infamously argued that it’s not his job to fact-check his guests. Even before Gregory, Russert had earned himself a measure of infamy along the same lines when he revealed, in the wake of the Valerie Plame scandal that he considers all conversations with powerful political newsmakers to be “off the record” by default unless otherwise explicitly specified.

The tendency today of preferring “balance,” the “both sides do it” notion of reporting which states a reporter must try to find or think of an example of “the other side” behaving similarly badly when one side is caught with their hands in the cookie jar, is fast becoming endemic to your profession, media folk. And, as Bill Maher artfully points out, it’s having a ruinous effect.

So I have an idea, one that will hopefully not violate your inexplicable but undeniable recent urges for balance above objectivity, but will still provide us out here in the public – you know, the consumers of news, your customers – with better tools than you’ve been providing us lately to make informed choices about what or who is really responsible for certain things we see in the news. Here it is:

What say, instead of scurrying around through your memory banks to try to find counter-examples to items in the news, you simply report what happened, and tell us who was behind it; who was responsible/to blame…and then let US decide to what extent “both sides do it,” based on how many instances we see of each side, y’know…actually doing it. We can count and stuff, after all.

Would that be too much to ask? I mean, think of it this way: you’d get to do less work (which means you’d get to head home or down to the bar that much earlier) if you don’t have to try to wrack your brains to come up with examples of how the other side does it, too. Just report what happened, and do enough work to find out why…and then let US decide whether “both sides do it.” Fair enough? kthxbai.

Love,

Pheno

Dean Baker Slaps Tom Friedman Silly

It’s well deserved, of course, as are most of the brickbats leveled at the man who once, in 2003, offered Charlie Rose the notion of “suck on this” as a rationale for the Iraq war (no, really, he did):

Ah, memories. This is who much of the current crop of leaders of industry (read: baby boomers) revere as a great thinker. Dean Baker gives us yet another reason (besides “suck on this” and the endless Friedman Units which Atrios coined and FAIR chronicled) why that was never true, and why treating Friedman as a serious person is, in fact, a pernicious misconception, not a harmless one:

The problem for which baby boomers share blame is that we allow people like Friedman to distract us from real concerns. For example, Friedman gives us a lecture today about living within in our means. In fact, the reason that so many people find themselves in bad financial shape today is that people like Friedman crowded out voices who saw real economic problems like the stock bubble, the housing bubble and the over-valued dollar.

The consumption of the 90s and 00s would have been entirely sustainable if the stock bubble and the housing bubble did not burst. And the country would not be borrowing from China or anyone else if the dollar fell to a level that was consistent with balanced trade. But the people who were warning of the collapse of the bubbles and who understand international trade did not have the same megaphone as Thomas Friedman.

Exactly.

 

Stories Like This Make Me Wanna Suck On My Car’s Tailpipe

Christ. What ARE we, as a race, if this can not only happen, but the country’s best newspaper can do such an abysmal job of reporting on it?

Mmmm….donuts….

…or, The Intersection of Media and Politics, and How The Internet Is Changing Both. (see, I told you “Mmmm….donuts….” was a catchier title).

Mmmm....donuts

Anyhoo. Most of us who are politically literate often find ourselves frustrated with what even Sarah “Not The Sharpest Moose In The Shed” Palin calls the “lamestream media.” It’s a frustration borne of seemingly a number of different causes, but it’s become an astonishingly common phenomenon in recent years to find oneself shouting at the TV news – especially cable news, but also the broadcast channels – due to some glaring oversight in their coverage of an issue or sometimes, even their flat-out refusal to cover the news in a way which seems stone-obvious to the viewer. An example would be the current, partially FOX-inspired mania for “horse-race” journalism, and its corollary, the whole “two sides to every question, so let’s give them equal time and equal weight” disease which currently bedevils the media coverage of far too many previously-settled questions. Some yahoo tent-preacher in Bumblefart, FL claims that there are questions about evolution, and it’s given the same “weight” as a panel of expert (but publicly unknown) biologists who’ve spent their entire careers studying the subject diligently. You get the picture – heck, you already know it.

But today, I ran across an article which was genuinely useful in shedding some light on it and fleshing out some of the reasons for why this exists. Also, fortunately, it explains why there is a giant chocolate-glazed, sprinkle-covered donut depicted in this post in what otherwise might seem to be an excessively gratuitous fashion.