TNR Defends The MSM A Little Too Much

Franklin Foer has a pretty interesting piece on The New Republic Website today which will undoubtedly stir a fair amount of debate in the blogosphere.

 Foer has this to say:

Newspapers deserve an army of enemies that nag them to be less lazy, less timid, and less nice. But they don't deserve the savage treatment that they routinely receive in the blogosphere.

Either Foer fundamentally fails to grasp the frustrations of the progressive blogoshpere, or he intentionally misleads when he says:

What they're attacking is the MSM's Progressive-era ethos of public-minded disinterestedness.

No, what we are attacking is the MSM's willingness to let the Bush administration, and other Republicans get by with outright lies without calling them on it.

At some points in the piece, Foer seems to grasp the problem:

The Bushies pulled off this legerdemain--and repeated the trick many times--by taking advantage of the news media's disinterested style, which obliges it to give a hearing to both sides of a debate, even if one side has uttered a total falsehood. My colleague Jonathan Chait has argued, "[The press is] evenhanded to a fault, presenting every side of an argument as equally valid, even if one side uses demonstrably false information and the other doesn't. Bush has exploited this tendency ruthlessly, most memorably in 2000, when he described his tax cut as consuming a mere quarter of the projected budget surplus."

Chait has perfectly described the problem.  The MSM is guilty of indiscriminate objectivity, in some cases letting folks lie without consequence--see MSM coverage of the first 4 years of the Bush administration, and in other cases, creating parallels that do not exist in reality--see recent MSM attempts to make the Abramoff scandal a bi-partisan scandal, when it decidely is not.

When one side is engaged in outright lying, and the press fails to call them on it, they not only fail to punish bad behavior by politicians, they are actually tacitly reinforcing it.  "Fairness" and "objectivity" should not require the MSM to ignore reality.

If the GOP says the earth is flat and the Democrats say it's round, their over-developed sense of fairness ought not prevent the MSM from showing the NASA photos that seem to resolve the question. 

Instead, the MSM reports, "Controversy broke out today on the shape of the earth, with both sides exchanging bitter attacks."

Foer criticizes bloggers for attempting to hold the MSM accountable, without offering so much as a hint of how reform is likely to come without consistent pressure from somewhere. 

Perhaps the rules of journalism should be modernized to short-circuit this tactic. Reporters should have greater latitude to point out distortions without worrying that they have violated the laws of objectivity.

 Mr. Foer, wishing for things to change is not a strategy.  If the MSM media wishes to retain their role as a referee, then they need to learn to use their whistle.  Otherwise, through their inaction, they are indirectly encouraging a rigged game.