The Challenge
Dan Froomkin, Washington Post columnist and blogger, understands the cancer of the republic:
Mainstream-media political journalism is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant, but not because of the Internet, or even Comedy Central. The threat comes from inside. It comes from journalists being afraid to do what journalists were put on this green earth to do.What is it about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert that makes them so refreshing and attractive to a wide variety of viewers (including those so-important younger ones)? I would argue that, more than anything else, it is that they enthusiastically call bullshit.
Calling bullshit, of course, used to be central to journalism as well as to comedy. And we happen to be in a period in our history in which the substance in question is running particularly deep. The relentless spinning is enough to make anyone dizzy, and some of our most important political battles are about competing views of reality more than they are about policy choices. Calling bullshit has never been more vital to our democracy.
I argued the same thing over a month ago, and I certainly wasn't the first to do so. This is so fundamental to healthy democracy, so critical to good journalism, and so frustrating. Like I said at the time:
Journalists need to become referees. Arbiters of fact. Couric should have immediately challenged Wallace with polls that directly contradict her claim that most Americans don't want Democrats in control of Congress. Conservatives would have screamed bias but there is no bias at work, just getting to the facts. People like Wallace shouldn't even be on news shows since they are offering no intelligent analysis, just political talking points. But that doesn't mean you can't have spirited debate between two sides on an issue (not any and every issue, mind you, which is a separate problem in the news today). Let the two sides argue. But when one of them lies, distorts the facts or misinterprets reality, the journalist-as-referee steps in and corrects them. What's so hard about that? The problem is the pressure that is placed on news organizations by conservative activists, the kind Halperin was talking about. But this isn't about bias, its about the fucking facts. If journalists don't have the cajones to challenge lies and stand for the truth, then they have no business being journalists. I know Couric is just reading the news from a teleprompter, but shouldn't she at least bring the basics of journalism 101 to her program?
Add to that the other institutional pressures Froomkin cites and you have your problem. Would any of the three networks' nightly news anchors really be in danger of losing their jobs if they were to host a segment where they call out bullshit? If Katie can have "Free Speech" and host professional asshole Rush Limbaugh, why can't the others have a segment where they call bullshit?
It's all so simple...