Info-Pimping

Charles Madigan writes a good defense of the the media in general and while I tend to get particularly annoyed as of late with some of the stories I see coming out (David Broder saying Democrats aren’t sympathetic to the military for example) I think it’s important to praise those who do good work.

Madigan, Zorn, Miller, Sweet, and Chapman strike me as exceptionally good columnists and very good at fact checking. Chambers, Fornek, McDermott, usually Pearson, and Zeleny (now at NY Times) (and I’m sure I’m forgetting some people so don’t whine like bloggers to me) all are very good reporters who get their facts straight and despite caterwauling primarily from the right, are excellent observers of the political scene.

As I’ve said before, I’ve fallen victim/perpetrated info-pimping and try and be as straightforward with readers when I screw up with those incidents.

The problem many liberal activists and bloggers perceive and I think does exist is that over time the right wing has established an echo chamber that is particularly good and working the refs. The answer to it for most of us is to work the refs too. It’s a problematic solution because it adds to the postmodern notion that facts are relative to one’s view of the world. By doing the same thing, the notion that both ‘sides’ are the same is reinforced and we get more he said-he said journamalism that doesn’t try and accurately portray reality–hello global warming skeptics hacks.

But what else is the answer? Today we see a stupid meme from Fran Eaton and the Illinois Review show up in a fairly long story in the Tribune discussing how conservatives are arguing that Trinity is a black supremacist church that has weird beliefs on the middle class.

This despite a document on the church web site I found several weeks ago explaining what is meant by Trinity’s 12 precepts which does explain the statements very clearly. There is a reality underlying the accusations and it’s not friendly to Eaton yet the community paper Eaton writes for published her commentary and the Tribune picked up the story.

All the facts are correct in the story (except that the web site doesn’t have further context), but it still leaves the impression that there is something advocating weird views on the middle class or is even black supremacist. The story about the ‘controversy’ furthers the purpose of the story in the first place to make Obama sound out of the mainstream even though the values under the Black Values System are very mainstream points of view.

The journalistic practice of being fair and finding opposing viewpoints furthers the purpose of those trying to push the story. I don’t know how to fix this problem. I have a lot of respect for many journalists and while I criticize the profession, I’m glad the good reporters are there for the very reasons Madigan cites, but too often we are dealing with freak show stories that shouldn’t even be in the media and the media reports on them because of the ‘controversy.’