Every once in a while you run into a lawyer – or wannabe lawyer – whose idea of argument is to tell you “you’re not positive you don’t not know you’re right, are you? Are  you?  ARE YOU?”

The idea, of course, is to bog your own sense of logic and reason down with so many non-sequiturs and strawmen that you’re not sure you don’t not know you’re right.

Or something like that.

It may not make sense the way I explain it.  But if you watch what the partisan media will be doing this next eleven months, somehow it all makes sense.

It fits in with the great sales bromide “if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS”.

Which brings us, for the final time, to Katrina Vanden Heuvel’s WaPo op-ed earlier this week in the Strib, which is to this year’s effort to make people ignore the question “are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

Third, the media’s obsession with false equivalence: How the election is covered will almost certainly have a measurable impact on its outcome.

When we think of this, conservatives may think of things like “the inexperienced and radically-connected Barack Obama not getting vetted as much as your typical mid-sized city mayor, while GOP candidates get their records gone over with electron microscopes”, or “The Twin Cities media gave Tom Emmer and all his contributors the equivalent of a rectal exam, while the sum total of the Strib’s coverage of Mark Dayton’s well-known mental illness and alcohol issues was a single story the January before the election, about eight months before anyone outside the wonk class gave a crap”.
That’s not what Vanden Heuvel means, of course:

The New York Times’ Paul Krugman describes what he’s witnessing as “post-truth politics,” in which right-leaning candidates can feel free to say whatever they want without being held accountable by the press.

There may be instances in which a candidate is called out for saying something outright misleading; but, as Krugman notes, “if past experience is any guide, most of the news media will feel as though their reporting must be ‘balanced.’ “

[MItch doesn’t even know what to say here.  He’s at a loss for words. I mean, the obvious – “Paul Krugman has become the nation’s crazy great-uncle, slowly descending into madness as the family watches the disintegration around the table every Thanksgiving” – but Krugman’s a gimme.  The idea that someone could say “political reporters strive for balance” is absurd on its face; the idea that they pull punches on Republicans because they want to appear balanced is less deranged than “there’s a bunch of elders of Zion that have these evil protocols…” only in a moral sense.  Anyway – Mitch is otherwise at a loss to address that last bit, and invites contributions from his reading audience – Ed]

In that world, candidates can continue to say things that are “flatly, grossly, and shamefully untrue,” as The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne described it, without fear of retribution.

Obama has traveled the world and “apologized for America,” says Romney.

Except that, no, he hasn’t.

Wait – so the media is “biased toward conservatives” because they don’t attack conservatives’ opinions of Obama’s “America Last” philosophy in slavish detail?

The stimulus “created zero jobs,” says Rick Perry.

Except that it created or saved at least 3 million.

Wait – the media is “biased toward conservatives” because while reporting Republicans campaign rhetoric, they don’t counter with Obama Administration chanting points, which are themselves wrong and largely unchallenged in the mainstream “conservative” media?

Obama is going to “put free enterprise on trial,” claims Romney.

How does he square that with the nearly 3 million private-sector jobs created under Obama policies in the past 20 months?

And then, agreement with the Administraiton’s chanting points is the barometer of truth?

These three factors are key not only to understanding this campaign and election but to seeing just how far we have to go to reclaim a democracy that is driven by the people themselves.

The biggest factor in going as far as you “have to go”, if you’re on the left, is making people see everything but how far they’ve slipped since 2008.

Think the media is up to the job?

The Strib seems to be getting into its A game.

More over the next ten months or so.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, January 6th, 2012 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Campaign '12, Media, Slander Files. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.