Why journalists are failing the public with 'both-siderism' in political coverage
Why journalists are failing the public with ‘both-siderism’ in political coverage
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-10-15/republicans-democrats-both-siderism-political-failures?
American politics has changed dramatically since my post-Watergate generation of journalists began covering the story. Political journalism hasn’t kept up.
For years it was easy to cover “both sides” — Republicans and Democrats — as equally worthy, and blameworthy, partners in democracy. While we reporters had come of age as witnesses to the unprecedented resignation of a Republican president who’d tried to corrupt the institutions of government to affect an election — imagine! — what remained was a Republican Party still capable of a creditable role in a healthy two-party system. After all, Richard M. Nixon was forced to resign when congressional leaders of his party began abandoning him. Again, imagine that, Kevin McCarthy.
Now, when reporters or pundits use the words “both sides” in regard to some political problem, I stop reading or listening.
I started to chafe at false equivalence a quarter-century ago, as a congressional reporter amid Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolution. One party — his — was demonstrably more responsible for the nasty divisiveness, government gridlock and norm-busting, yet journalistic pressure to produce seemingly “balanced” stories — pressure both ingrained and imposed by editors — prevented reporters from sufficiently reflecting the new truth.
By 2012, as President Obama dealt with the willful obstructionists, conspiracists and racists of an increasingly radicalized Republican Party, political scientists and long-respected Washington watchers Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein put the onus for the dysfunction squarely on the GOP in their provocative book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.” Significantly, they implicated journalists: “A balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon is a distortion of reality and a disservice to your consumers.”
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Democrats can’t be expected to deal with these guys like they’re on the level. Nor should journalists cover them as if they are.
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Another fail is that the only facts they care about are quotes, particularly from republicans.
The sun doesn't rise in the north, but if a Republican said it did, they'd run a whole story about how someone *said* the sun rises in the north. That he *said* it is a fact. That what he said is a lie, the media couldn't care less about.
This is the media's excuse for washing their hands of republicans lies and exaggerations and smears. Hey, we're just quoting important people!
