No “both sides” or “pizzazz” analysis here
by digby
When it comes to media criticism, nobody does it better than Margaret Sullivan, formerly of the NY Times and now at the Washington Post. As expected, her analysis of the impeachment coverage is right on. Quoting a woman named Carol, she first points out first the obvious point that the central problem we face is that a good number of people just no longer believe in facts. Then she reminds her readers of a test she laid out for the media to deal with that:
Their test was to cover the impeachment proceedings without getting mired in the usual traps: false equivalence; distraction by presidential stunt; rampant speculation; the use of squishy language; and what I called Barr-Letter Syndrome, a reference to the way the mainstream press allowed Attorney General William Barr last spring to mischaracterize the findings of the Mueller report.
Now that Trump has been impeached, it’s not possible to say that the mainstream media has earned anything close to an A.
Nor did they flunk out.
There was a ton of coverage. But as Sullivan points out it wasn’t easy to get to the facts, much less the truth though all that verbiage.
We try to do what we can here to follow the news cycle and do some analysis you might not always hear everywhere else. There’s a lot to keep track of. But I can guarantee you will never see me or any of the contributors writing fatuous “both sides” analysis or “pizzazz” theater criticism.
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