What “Balanced” Means Inside The Beltway
Glenn Greenwald has a must-read piece dissecting how journalists seem incapable of calling out one party for craziness without balancing out the criticism with a but they do it to comparison – no matter if it’s deserved or not.
Thus, Politico publishes an article discussing the fact that the Right is dominated by crackpots and it is therefore required to claim that the Left do, too. Here are their examples to balance out their claims so as to not upset Matt Druge and Rush Limbaugh:
Nor are Democrats strangers to having their crazy uncles take center stage. During the run-up to the Iraq war, for example, Reps. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), Mike Thompson (D-Calif.) and David Bonior (D-Mich.) famously flew to Baghdad, where McDermott asserted that he believed the president would “mislead the American public” to justify the war. The trip made it a cakewalk for critics to describe the Democratic Party as chock-a-block with traitorous radicals.
That’s one of the most amazing passages I can recall reading. Even now — when everyone knows that the President did exactly that which Rep. McDermott, in 2002, said he was doing: “misleading the American public to justify the war” — those who pointed out that truth are deemed “crazy.”
That example is stunning. But maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m missing the similarities between telling what turned out to be true concerning Iraq and yelling about birth certificates, death panels, socialism, communist, Hitler, etc. Maybe we’re all crazy.
To recap: everything the Republican leaders said about Iraq turned out to be false, fictitious, imaginary — and their false-pretense war led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings. Yet they’re the sane, sober, Serious ones trying to ensure their party isn’t dominated by the right-wing version of crazy traitorous losers like Jim McDermott, David Bonior and Scott Ritter.
This is perfectly reflective of the prevailing Beltway mindset. One would be, I’d bet, hard-pressed to find many establishment journalists who reject the notion that war opponents like Jim McDermott are crazy, unSerious extremists while the Right’s war proponents are still Serious and credible on national security. Even after everything that’s happened, anything associated with “the Left” is, for that reason alone, discredited and unSerious in the media mind.
Yeah, war is serious business – even if you lie about it.
I blame the split screen. You know, where they have a world renowned climatologist on one side and Joe the Plumber on the other. Just having them side by side raises Joe’s status. It’s ridiculous, and far too common. It’s like writing an article about a woman who claims to have given birth to an alien’s baby and then, in the name of balance citing women who support breast feeding their babies as fanatics.
Glenn Greenwald’s closing sentence says it all: “When it comes to credibility, supporting wars trumps everything — including truth. Nothing illustrates that better than the fact that Jim McDermott and those like him are considered “crazy” — still — while those who supported the disaster of Iraq are highly respected and credible.”
We have a serious credibility issue in this country, and it’s getting worse with all this bogus false equivalency, or -as our Republican commenters always say… but, but, but, he did it, too!
Tags: Glenn Greenwald, MSM
I absolutely agree. The problem is not that the media is stuck on the “He said / She said” formula, it’s that they don’t know who the correct he and she are. They still assume that since they are the sides they know, that the debate must be between Democrats and Republicans, between the Left and the Right. The real debate right now is between the Left and the further Left, Conservative Democrats and Liberal Democrats. But networks still feel it’s unbalanced to have two Dems arguing, so they pick one and throw in a Republican who has nothing helpful to say. It’s like deciding foregn policy shouldn’t be debated by only easterners, so you have Hillary Clinton and some guy from a streetcorner in San Fransisco in a “The End is Near, Repent” sandwichboard.
Glenn is brilliant as usual and this so-called balancing is one of my biggest pet peeves about the current media. This:
But networks still feel it’s unbalanced to have two Dems arguing, so they pick one and throw in a Republican who has nothing helpful to say.
is especially annoying since the only goal of having this insistence on a pretty dumb version of balance is routinely played by repubs as an opportunity to just repeat whatever the lie of the day is. The reporter or interviewers don’t challenge this much, so you are left with two “viewpoints” one of which is pretty much not true. I’m stunned that reporters find it useful to spend their time clearly being lied to and not challenging that.
But I am just as interested in Glen’s observation that civility in our current discourse is more prized than decency — it is OK to lie and advocate despicable policy as long as you are polite about it. This is just as insidious and is incredibly internalized by people on the Left — even to the point in some cases that pushing back and presenting a real intolerance to this indecency is just too hard to do. Because we can’t get past the need to be polite. Frankly I wonder if the media would change if we lead the way and stopped tolerating the worst of the behavior that comes into our midst each day.