New York Times asks readers: Should reporters report facts?

From the Daily Kos:

But the question posed by the Times' Public Editor is considerably less colorful.

"I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about."

He goes on to explain that an opinion columnist, like Paul Krugman, clearly has the "freedom" to call out untruths in a way that mere, factually-based reporters somehow do not. His example is Mitt Romney constantly claiming that Barack Obama has been "apologizing for America" when in actual fact that has never, ever happened, as the Public Editor himself points out.

Now if you reflect for a moment, you may come to the conclusion that this is a Hell of a Thing, as the kids say today (where "kids" means your grandpa, and "today" means several decades ago). The writers of opinions are free to check facts, but the writers of facts are largely prohibited from it. This only makes sense if you consider facts to be opinions, and opinions to be facts, which in turn seems to make the whole point of reporting on either rather pointless: You might as well go to a palm reader and report whatever comes out of that as God's honest truth. It'd be the same damn thing, yes?

In any event, this leads to the grand question of the day, which is whether reporters should bother to check what spews from the primary face-orifaces of their subjects, or whether that is a separate job that should be done apart from the main article so as to not upset the cadence of the bullshit-spouting person in question.

And

Mind you, this is a novel fucking thing. It requires contemplation. If a candidate states a flat lie—not something dubious or ambiguous, but a clear, flat lie, on the order of my opponent eats puppies—ought a reporter, as part of reporting, report that the lie is a lie? This would seem to be all fine and good, except that it conflicts so greatly with the conventions of modern political reporting as to make it a daring-sounding thing. Convention dictates that you should just report "so-and-so says his opponent eats puppies," and ignore the obvious bullshit of the thing; if someone else in America wants to object and just happens to have their very own opinion column in one of America's top newspapers, they can feel free to take a stab at it, but otherwise convention dictates that we drop the whole thing because doing otherwise might insult the fellow who is declaring that his ideological rival eats puppies.

More here.

Virtually every lefty source I check out online was railing about this today, as they should have been. I mean, the piece I posted about a couple of days ago, the whining of the establishment journalist class over how tired they are of observing that GOP presidential candidates routinely lie about Democrats, was worth noting, but this one takes the cake. The New York Times, supposedly the "newspaper of record," meaning the first official take on history as understood by Americans, is asking if reporters ought to report that politicians are lying when politicians lie to them.

Of course, as virtually all observers have observed, such psychotic journalistic "values" come from caving, again and again, to right-wing claims of liberal bias in the news media. To some extent, I'm sympathetic. Conservatives have been relentless since the Nixon era in their attempts to pigeonhole the press as being some sort of mouth piece for liberalism, which is, of course, impossible because the establishment media are, well, establishment, and therefore necessarily reflect the concerns of the establishment, you know, government, the corporate state, Big Money, etc. But it's been a jihad for decades, and journalistic entities are, above all else, businesses, and very worried that a bad reputation would be harmful to the bottom line. So I'm not that sympathetic.

That is, the MSM are cowards, and instead of continuing to report facts that are inconvenient to conservatives, they transitioned into a sort of he-said-she-said point/counterpoint thing. As Paul Krugman once observed, the way the establishment press covers politics today is such that if a Republican asserted that the world is flat, the headline would be something like "Shape of Earth: Views Differ."

What's really damned annoying is that big time media people are arrogant condescending assholes and think that the way they currently report the news is the best possible way to do it, utterly refusing to admit to themselves that conservative attack dogs bullied them into it. That is, they've so fooled themselves into believing that they chose to do the news this way, that actually reporting the truth comes as a novelty or an idea with potential that needs contemplation or some such.

In short, their heads are so far up their asses that they can ask such a question and not for a moment suspect that everybody who knows what's going on is laughing at them like they shit their pants. All the news that's fit to print, indeed.

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