In Which We Find the Media as Broken as the Republican Party

I wish I could stop being stunned at how badly our MSM completely fails at genuinely informing their audiences the issues of the day. This particular failure is focused on the debt ceiling coverage, which has been breathlessly working on this silly “who won the day” coverage, rather than delve into the detail of what is going on — the state of negotiations, what is on offer in negotiations and how each party to the negotiations is managing their caucus. This kind of coverage is out there, though — you just need to do a fair bit of work to go get it. Which strikes me and counterproductive. Nevertheless, I’m seeing more and more criticism of the coverage of this issue that I wonder if we aren’t looking at a point somewhere in the next weeks or months after this crisis is done where our media does some of the sheepish navel gazing that followed when it became really plain that the Iraq War was done on a very large bed of lies that the media did little (except for the McClatchy organization) to try to check up on. But then again, we’re about to be served up another round of the lazy he say/she say once the Republicans decide to push for government shut down over concluding a budget for the year.

So for this Sunday, I’m linking to many of the critical pieces I’ve seen so far. The theme of almost all of these pieces is that “objectivity” as currently practiced by the MSM is increasingly dishonest, and fairly self-centered when reporting on high stakes political stories. The “objectivity” as currently baked in the cake of American journalism is its own fetish object, to be followed no matter where real information or data takes you. If, in fact, said journalists are even working on getting real data or information. You may have seen links to some of these throughout the week from pieces posted by me or Pandora.

Josh Marshall notes with some wonderment that the key thing from Monday (when this was posted) was that Speaker Boehner did not even have the votes for his own plan in his own caucus, yet the thing you hear from the media all over is that the Democrats and Republicans can’t compromise. Even though Democrats have been compromising all over the place and the people with the line in the sand are Republicans. This is worth reading in its entirety — because he spends just a few paragraphs orienting you to where the real news was on this issue from Monday. Real news rather completely missed by the usual media suspects.

Obama says Boehner wouldn’t agree! Boehner says the opposite! Who’s right? We don’t care! Jon Chait points us to a Republican debunking (from Politico no less!) of the oft-repeated claim that the *Grand Bargain* talks broke down because the President asked for an additional $400B in revenue. He takes off after that to explain (this is important):

Why is this so important? Because this dispute has been the hinge for a dramatic turn in the press coverage. Through last weekend, reporters and pundits were generally portraying the situation, accurately, as one in which Obama was proposing compromises and Boehner was rejecting them. But that is a highly uncomfortable position for reporters and centrist pundits to be in. They want to portray a balanced situation in which each side is to blame. They could define balance to avoid making any judgment about the merits of a deficit agreement or a debt ceiling hike, but the media is openly rooting for a Grand Bargain and a debt ceiling hike, so portraying one party as standing in the way was always going to be tricky.

The dispute over the $400 billion provided enough ambiguity for reporters to stop framing the issue as Boehner refusing to accept a Grand Bargain and revert to the comfortable practice of castigating both parties for refusing to compromise.

So that your news is highly dependent upon how a reporter or pundit or editor can define *balance*. Even though said reporter or pundit may have real information that undermines this fetishized framework. So that in this case — had any of you heard this about the $400B before? — the GOP whinge that the President changed the goalposts was wrong and someone from the GOP confirmed that. Yet this gets in the way of the set narrative that both sides do it, so is ignored.

Washington Isn’t Broken, the Republican Party Is I posted this last week in the Debt Ceiling speech thread. This makes note that journalism as it is currently practiced can’t manage to remind themselves that they have an audience that needs this information, not a bunch of fake theater about balance:

And commentators who are obsessed with balance should remember good journalism is not “Republicans say the sky is blue, Democrats say the sky is red, experts disagree.” It is reporting — without fear or favor — what is actually happening. It means substituting moral clarity for moral equivalence.

Clive Crook is Drowning America This isn’t just about Clive Crook, but about all of the pundits and journalists who can actually point to the problem here, but find themselves retreating to the both sides do it mantra in an effort to not *name* the problem.

Another Krugman piece, The Cult That Is Destroying America — He pretty clearly notes that the press is more dedicated to its own needs than to those they are trying to inform.

Posted yesterday, Media Blows Debt Crisis Coverage from Ari Melber at the Nation does a great job of detailing the problem here and does us the service os defining Balance Bias:

1. The assumption that there is truth and legitimacy to both sides of every dispute.
2. The iron law in political journalism that one side in a debate can never be exclusively right, or have a monopoly on the facts.

What this bias does is provide a ready made framework for political reporting that is pretty much guaranteed to ensure that news consumers never really know what their government is doing. And this is a real problem. You’d think that an institution called the American Fourth Estate would see this problem.

Even Joe Klein is calling out the charade:

I am usually willing to acknowledge that Democrats can be as silly, and hidebound, as Republicans–but not this time. There is zero equivalence here. The vast majority of Democrats have been more than reasonable, more than willing to accept cuts in some of their most valued programs. Given the chance, there was the likelihood that they would have surrendered their most powerful weapon in next year’s election–a Mediscare campaign–by agreeing to some necessary long-term reforms in that program. The President, remarkably, proposed raising the age of eligibility for Medicare to 67.

The Republicans have been willing to concede nothing. Their stand means higher interest rates, fewer jobs created and more destroyed, a general weakening of this country’s standing in the world. Osama bin Laden, if he were still alive, could not have come up with a more clever strategy for strangling our nation.

What is really heartbreaking is that these journalists (not pundits who mostly are political operatives with an ax to grind) seem to have no idea — genuinely no idea — that they are failing their audiences. Audiences who don’t really have a sense of the state of play or of the substance of the policy being discussed (or not) by their politicians. So they continue to be hugely mistrusted and continue to craft pieces that don’t adequately inform anyone about that is at stake. To be certain, this is easier journalism, but this isn’t journalism that holds anyone accountable or helps their audiences do that. Time for these journalists to remember that journalism is not about its reporters — it is about making sure that people know what their government is actually doing. And lazy BS saying that Democrats and Republicans won’t compromise — in the face of all kinds of evidence that that is simply not true here — doesn’t help anyone but the journalist resorting to this bit of laziness.