If Andrew Breitbart's hoax has an upside, it's that it demonstrates publicly what I and many others have been saying for quite some time; a phony "objectivity" is making our news media useless. Breitbart's attempt to smear Shirley Sherrod and the NAACP as racist was merely a way to play the media's "both sides of the story" reporting. Unable to credibly deny the existence of racism in the Tea Party (not that he hadn't bent over backwards trying), he tried stimulating a favorite media reflex -- the idea that both sides are equally guilty of any given failing in politics. Decades of complaining of a "liberal media" has made the media hyper-vigilant for any sign of bias in their ranks and being able to say "the left does it too" must be a tremendous relief. Balance is restored and everyone is just as lousy a human being as the next again. So if there's racism in the Tea Party ranks, then there must be racism in the ranks of those complaining about that racism. Otherwise, there is a great disturbance in the media force. The magnetic poles of guilt must always align perfectly.But the idea of the "objective journalist" has given us a media without any objectivity at all. It creates monsters. And not just media trolls like Andrew Breitbart, but conceptual monsters that poison our national discourse. Because, if there's one thing that's been true for the last decade at least (actually, I'd take it all te way back to the rise of talk radio during Bill Clinton), it's that the truth has a liberal bias. And the reason for this is that Republicans have used their "liberal media" complaint to destroy any distinction between public truth and public lie. If the evening news were to point out that a Democrat's figures were true and a Republican figures were false, Republicans would shriek "foul!" So we wind up with an idiotic "both sides of the story" mentality, where the media just repeats what everyone's said verbatim and doesn't bother to separate truth from lie -- it's all equally true, because both sides do it.
My favorite example of this comes from television news. If you've read me long enough, you've seen me use it before. You get one partisan "strategist" from one side and another partisan "strategist" from the other, then you let them interrupt each other and talk over each other and throw out charges. If absolutely nothing one of the strategists has to say is true, how do you know? No one but the other strategist sets the record straight and, frankly, there's no good reason to trust them any more than the other. This goes on for a while and a chirpy anchor chimes in with, "Well, that's all the time we have for the day... Thanks for coming, guys!" And you're no more informed after the whole thing than you were before. No one tells you which line was actually true and we wind up living in a world where there are no objective facts, just differences of opinion. This doesn't do much to inform people...[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
