ONE MORE TIME FOR THE PUNDITS IN THE BACK

Are media commentators really so clueless about the media?

- MONIKA BAUERLEIN

"THIS AGAIN??" I thought when I read the Washington Post's editorial, a couple of weeks before Election Day. The topic was "pink slime" news, a.k.a. political campaign literature made to look like a newspaper. A good issue for journalists to address. But a few paragraphs in came a lazy and familiar trope: "People know more or less what they're getting when they tune in to Fox News or open up a copy of Mother Jones.

These institutions' primary purpose is to make money by putting out news..." I may or may not have flung something at the wall, an impulse that seizes me every time some media pundit feels compelled to drag independent investigative reporting down to the level of propaganda to make their "both sides do it" arguments. To its credit, the Post ultimately corrected the editorial. But why do such false-equivalence comparisons keep happening in the first place? Basically, because of a fundamental misunderstanding of today's news (and political) ecosystem among many in the legacy media. These pundits desperately want "the right" and "the left" to be equivalent so they can stake out a position in the middle between two extremes.