Thank you to E.J. Dionne (who is neither Andrew Alexander, the Post's ombudsman nor Howard Kurtz, their resident so-called media critic) for
writing in the Washington Post what needs to be said over and over again where more eyes can see it.
The mainstream media and the Obama administration must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its propaganda to be accepted as news by convincing traditional journalists that "fairness" requires treating extremist rants as "one side of the story." And there can be no more shilly-shallying about the fact that racial backlash politics is becoming an important component of the campaign against President Obama and against progressives in this year's election.
...
[In the Sherrod "scandal,"] the Obama team was reacting to a reality: the bludgeoning of mainstream journalism into looking timorously over its right shoulder and believing that "balance" demands taking seriously whatever sludge the far right is pumping into the political waters.
...
The traditional media are so petrified of being called "liberal" that they are prepared to allow the Breitbarts of the world to become their assignment editors. Mainstream journalists regularly criticize themselves for not jumping fast enough or high enough when the Fox crowd demands coverage of one of their attack lines.
Too true. And as an added note, you know something at your paper's gone horribly wrong when an Op-Ed columnist has to call out your own
ombudsman for shitty journalism:
Thus did Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander ask this month why the paper had been slow to report on "the Justice Department's decision to scale down a voter-intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party." Never mind that this is a story about a tiny group of crackpots who stopped no one from voting. It was aimed at doing what the doctored video Breitbart posted set out to do: convince Americans that the Obama administration favors blacks over whites.
If I were really as fed up as he sounds in his column, I'd make my next ten columns about the same exact thing, since no one in the mainstream media seems to be getting this point.
