Great article from Dan Froomkin on the media’s weak
performance in the 2012 election.
Norman Ornstein is a superb political analyst and
historian. Earlier he wrote an essay pointing out what everyone knows but no
one has the guts to say: that Republicans in 2012 adopted a strategy of lying
as much as they possibly could for political advantage, because the media,
fearing accusations of bias and the loss of advertisers, would continue to
peddle the false equivalency of asserting that both parties lie equally. Even
the self-appointed truth-tellers, newspaper ombudsmen and fact-checkers, fell
into the trap of refusing to call out lying Republicans too often, for fear
that they would be accused of bias.
Not only did the essay have no positive impact,
Ornstein and his co-author are being shunned. Newspapers no longer use Ornstein
and his pal as nonpartisan sources because they are obviously biased, and the
Sunday talk shows will only try to book them if they can counterbalance them
with a Republican speaker – as though “Truth” and “Republican” are opposing
philosophies.
Which, of course, they are.
So…anyone who points out that Republicans lie more
than Democrats….must be lying?
What a world.
As I pointed out earlier, if the media had done
their jobs in 2008 and 2012, pointing out the cataract of lies that underpinned
those two Republican campaigns, Obama would have won by even larger margins.
And the Democrats would still have the House, too.
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