The Sunday NJ brings us an editorial with this amusing observation:
The back-and-forth in Washington is our way of holding a grand debate. We’re kind of sloppy about it. We call each other names. We go before video cameras and offer creative interpretations of facts. Some people lie. Others become amazingly selective about which portion of a fact they will use.
It’s how we debate.
Notice anything missing here?
You can read this entire scold and not see one word about how the American media actually enables the worst of this so-called debate. In fact, you could use this editorial itself as clear evidence on the increasing failure of media to function as the Fourth Estate. The NJ invokes its cynicism about politics and its players to reinforce yours*. And what a waste of newsprint.
One of the genuine problems in the current state of American debate is that it is so utterly dependent upon the debaters for all of its content. There is little in the way of fact-checking or even provision of context that might help Americans get a handle on the debate. It would be harder to lie, Editors of the NJ, if you and your colleagues were better at noting the lies. But as long as fact-checking and context as out-of-bounds in the name of a debased concept of objectivity there is no one acting as a ref or accountability agent in this process. Except for the reader, who is left to go do the heavy lifting elsewhere if knowing the facts and context of the “debate” is important to him or her.
*They invoked none of this cynicism in their cheerleading for the extensions of the Bush-era tax-cuts, interestingly enough.