The political media is in danger of failing again. We have to push back.
by digby
From the time I first started writing this blog many years ago, I’ve been criticizing the political media. It’s not because I dislike newspapers, magazines and cable news. I love them. I really do. I’ve been a political junkie since I was a kid and journalists have always been my heroes. And they still are today.
The problem is that our political media are stuck in some very destructive grooves much of the time and have allowed themselves to be pushed around by the right wing over many years to such as extent that their portrayal of events is biased. By that I don’t mean they overtly take their side. But in their desperate desire to appear “fair” they end up giving a skewed version of the truth.
A case in point from the past weekend:
That headline from the New York Times is technically accurate. But it isn’t the truth.
There is no “dispute” over facts, the facts are the facts and only one side of this partisan divide is “disputing” them.
The impeachment is partisan, but the partisanship in this case is not defined by a debate between two groups with different ideologies. Neither is it polarized between the two parties because of crude tribalism. The divide in this nation between those who are still governed by reason and facts and those who are not. Indeed, we see former Republican thought leaders, officials and operatives now standing on the Democratic side of the divide, despite serious differences in political philosophy because their former party is no longer rational. That has never happened in my lifetime.
Many in the media remain unwilling or unable to grasp this simple truth and it’s making things worse.
As Columbia Journalism Review pointed out over the weekend:
When it comes to much impeachment coverage, bothsidesism isn’t the beginning and end of the problem, but part of our broader reflex to frame contentious political stories around the concept of partisanship. In parts of the press, a set of party-oriented impeachment narratives has taken hold that contains some truth, but also rests on a selective interpretation of available evidence. Entrenched partisanship—in Congress and the country—is real, and newsworthy, as is the role that our fragmented information ecosystem has played in stoking and reinforcing division. And yet it does not follow, as some journalists and pundits seem to have surmised, that impeachment has been a waste of time. At the beginning of his show yesterday, Todd said the “national response” to impeachment has been “whatever.” And yet, as I wrote earlier this month, support for impeaching Trump, while recently static, is historically high. (A Fox News poll out yesterday reinforced that finding.) Six Republicans in Michigan are not the country.
The media’s job, done properly, is multidirectional: it holds power to account, and communicates matters of public interest to news consumers. On impeachment, too much coverage seems to have got stuck in a feedback loop: we’re telling the public that politicians aren’t budging from their partisan siloes, and vice versa, with the facts of what Trump actually did getting lost somewhere in the cycle. The cult of “both sides” is integral to this dynamic, and it’s serving the impeachment story poorly. Now, more than ever, our top duty should be to fight for the truth.
We saw how this sort of coverage played out in 2016. I warned about it in real time all the way back in 2015. Recall this lovely headline:
The coverage of the presidential race arguably brought us where we are today and many in the media have never grappled with their responsibility for that.
And we are in grave danger of it happening again as you can see by that headline above.
Here at Hullabaloo, we’ve been relentlessly critiquing the media from day one. And I think that over time, blogs and other social media have made a difference. The mainstream media have, in general, improved massively since the days when they would treat Rush Limbaugh as a respectable commentator. For the most part the media has polarized too and while that has huge problems it’s certainly better than the right wing having sway over all media.
But this problem still exists and we have to keep pushing. You can bet that as long as this blog continues, we will keep doing that. And it’s going to be more important than ever going into this election. We simply can’t let what happened in 2016 happen again.
It’s Holiday Fundraising time. If you’re of a mind to support the kind of independent media we provide here, informed by nearly two decades of daily observation and analysis, you can do so at the links below or at the address on the column on the left.
Again, thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. It means the world to me. — digby
Happy Hollandaise everyone!
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