A Columnist Fills the Gap Left By the Ombudsman and Media Critic

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.

A Sign of Improvement in Journalism?

A recent surge in fact-checking in the MSM turns out to be pretty popular. Who knew? The trend started with NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen's "simple fix," and was picked up first by ABC's Jake Tapper on This Week, then by the always inept CNN and Howard Kurtz that managed to take a good idea and apply journalistic "balance" to it. Here's Jay Rosen's timeline of the whole thing, including the ridiculous refusal by David Gregory, host of MSNBC's Meet The Press to adopt it, saying that viewers can fact-check "on their own terms," whatever that means. This prompted the creation of Meet The Facts, a website attempting to crowdsource the fact-checking that Gregory refuses to do, for whatever reason. (I apologize for for the link barrage on a new topic - I had a draft post about this a month ago and just realized I never posted it. This topic is important, however, and the links are well worth reading, particularly the timeline.)

Right around the time David Gregory said no, Colbert even jumped in on the action. (I linked it because embedding the video isn't working for some reason.)

Anyway, so the fact checking is catching on, and the AP is noticing its popularity. Amazingly, they've even noticed that Kurtz's version of "both sides lie equally," "balanced" fact-checking is not what people want.