Nasty Little Man

Operation Misinform America, Part IV

If you don't pay a lot of attention to the blogosphere, you might not be aware that there is a big ol' dust-up over a column written by Deborah Howell, the Washington Post's ombudsman, which is a term I haven't totally figured out. A "readers' advocate"? Anyway, Howell wrote that Jack Abramoff donated campaign funds to both Repugnantcans and Democrats, and the southpaw bloggers jumped her for it. And, by the way, Lou Dobbs is still reporting that Abramoff gave to both parties, which is completely false.

Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo said this about the controversy:

But the whole blow-up has created this subdiscussion about whether honorable press types like Howell and others are being mauled and knocked around and generally abused by cyber-ruffians who have been on her case over the last few days.

This stuff isn't always pretty. But, really, thank God those folks are on her tail because shoddy reporting isn't pretty either.

So much of the imbalance and shallowness of press coverage today stems from a simple fact: reporters know they'll catch hell from the right if they say or write anything that can even remotely be construed as representing 'liberal bias'. (Often even that's not required.) Indeed, when you actually watch -- from the inside -- how mainstream newsrooms work, it is really not too much to say that they operate on two guiding principles: reporting the facts and avoiding impressions of 'liberal bias'.

On the left or center-left, until very recently, there's simply never been an organized chorus of people ready to take the Howells of the press biz to task and mau-mau them when they get a key fact wrong. Without that, the world of political news was like an NBA game where one side played the refs hard and had roaring seats of fans while the other never made a peep. With that sort of structural imbalance, shoddy scorekeeping and cowed, and eventually compliant, refs are inevitable.

This is evening the balance, creating a better press.

It's like I said on Friday: These are people who have been kicked around for a long time, are sick of it, and have the energy to fight back. Here, here!

posted by Kinder Gentler Little Man @ 8:03 PM