Taking Lazy Press to Task (Again!)

I've been intrigued with a serious dustup at the Washington Post over the course of the last week. In short, the ombudswoman for the paper was quite lackadaisical/careless (at least) in the way she described the implications of the Abramoff case, doing the usual "everybody does it" non-reporting. As if anyone actually choosing to actively validate the incoming news hasn't run into a sewer-full of the same sort of dodgy equivocation on Abramoff (much almost certainly part of the predictable campaign of attach by the rove-scum). At best she seems to have been sloppy, lazy, and way too thin-skinned for the job she has. At worst, well aside from wondering if she has dated Jeff Gannon, I'm leaving that to your fertile imagination. She has taken considerable well-deserved flak for this and, interestingly, her blog has been temporarily put on hold.

Josh Marshall has a nice upbeat curtain line for anyone thinking we should still be looking to a two-party (or more) system with maybe even a hint of a fourth estate:

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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.