They really don't get it

Last week must have been defend the media week at the Washington Post. In addition to Dana Milbank's piece saying the media plays fair, on March 15 media critic Howard Kurtz, in John Kerry, Media Critic, continued the fantasy. After reading the piece you come away believing that they really don't get it.

Kurtz said Major news organizations tried--not hard enough, in my view--to fact-check the charges and countercharges by both sides. Sometimes journalists were slow--as on the Swift Boat charges--to undertake this work. Most networks aired the candidates' attack ads with only a minimum of truth-squadding. The bogus Kerry Intern rumor spread like wildfire. But there was at least an attempt to hold both sides accountable.

...Hold both sides accountable. Again with the moral equivalence. No respectable news organization would continually equate murder with jaywalking, however in politics its more than acceptable. As Mark Halperin of ABC News pointed out last fall that the Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done

Too many in the media believe that they can not compare candidate's actions so that a small distortion is the same as a series of blatant lies, or that as Kurtz apparently believes, Al Franken is little different than Rush Limbaugh.

Kerry pointed out that "there's a subculture and a sub-media that talks and keeps things going for entertainment purposes rather than for the flow of information. And that has a profound impact and undermines what we call the mainstream media of the country. And so the decision-making ability of the American electorate has been profoundly impacted as a consequence of that."

The Daily Howler recently pointed out that this subculture results in two Americas, that Cable viewers live in one America, newspaper readers in another. And that's the problem. People like Kurtz look at the print media and pronouce fairness abounds. The rest of us look at cable TV and are unsurprised that, as Kerry said, 77 percent of the people who voted for him [Bush] believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11.

Kerry said the problem was that the media didn't act as an arbitrator of what was accurate, i.e. examining the issues and point out the facts and also who was lying. The press at times attempted to say what was accurate, but it was beyond them to investigate the dishonest statements on cable. And they wonder why many have lost respect for the media.

They just don't get it.