I highly recommend this very quick read: In Defense of the New York Times (and Independent Journalism)
I heard Steve Schmidt’s comments about the New York Times yesterday on NPR. In case you missed (and don’t want to click the link), here’s what he said:
Whatever the New York Times once was, it is not today by any standard a journalistic organization. It is a pro-Obama organization that every day attacks Sen. McCain, attacks Gov. Palin, and excuses Sen. Obama.
Now, I have a lower-than-average threshold for media bashing (for clear reasons, chief among them that I have two journalism degrees and spent a few years working as a journalist). I’ll listen to people say silly or untrue things about politics all day without feeling the need to respond, but I just cannot stand it when people want to blame everything on “the media.” But I will not get off on that particular rant right here.
I’m just really glad that Dionne stood up and said, “Give me a break.” Someone needed to.
Like Dionne, I can understand why a fledgling campaign might think attacking “the media” is a good idea, but in the end, it just opens that person (or campaign) up to the challenge — here, well-founded — that they’re making shit up.
Unfortunately, the (albeit small) segment of the population that listens to such garbage and immediately accepts it as truth are impossible to dissuade… and that’s why it gets me all riled up, because *that* actually matters.
And since I’ve got you here, let me just say one thing that I always like to point out to people who are convinced “the media” are biased beyond remedy and have political axes to grind. JUST BECAUSE a newspaper (say, The New York Times, though to the best of my knowledge the Times has not yet done so in this election) has endorsed a candidate DOES NOT mean the reporters covering the election have personally endorsed the candidate. The general public seems not to understand that candidate endorsements happen with the editorial board — in other words, the people who write *editorials* (translation: opinion pieces) — and NOT with the reporters at large! At the risk of flogging a dead horse, that means that the reporters DO NOT participate in candidate endorsement decisions. Further, most newspapers (and certainly ones like the Times and The Washington Post) keep the editorial board completely separate from the reporters whose news stories you read, so the editorial board (doing the endorsements) wouldn’t even have the occasion to come into contact with — much less to influence the reporting of — the news staff.
{/end rant} 🙂