Howard Kurtz writes a nice, “fair and balanced” column on how ugly the public discourse is getting, using a set of on the one hand, on the other hand examples:
In just the last few weeks, Salon Editor in Chief Joan Walsh and CNBC contributor Howard Dean have accused Fox News of racism; conservative crusader Andrew Breitbart has delighted in pushing a maliciously edited video smearing Shirley Sherrod and refused to apologize; Fox hosts have denounced mainstream organizations as Obama lap dogs for downplaying a case involving the New Black Panther Party; e-mails from an off-the-record discussion group showed one liberal pundit wishing for Rush Limbaugh’s death and another suggesting that conservatives such as Fred Barnes be tarred as racist; Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings was accused of betraying journalistic ethics with the story that torpedoed Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and Hastings’s critics were ripped as lackeys of the military establishment.
The first liberal example is a matter of opinion and one Kurtz doesn’t bother to evaluate on its merits, possibly because he believes any description of racism is inherently illegitimate. The conservative example is just a straight up a fact. The second liberal example of ugliness in the public discourse involves discourse that wasn’t public, while the second conservative example involves Fox manipulating other news organizations into covering a non-scandal. The third juxtaposition involves another two more accusations that aren’t actually evaluated on the merits, merely presented as examples of media ugliness.
It’s bad enough when the media coverage is he said she said, but it’s even worse when the media criticism is he said she said. Of course, if you’re conservative, this works for you, because a deliberate attempt to malign someone’s reputation is presented as equivalent to someone’s private conversation that never would have been aired had it not been misleadingly presented by a conservative media outlet as proof of a media conspiracy against conservatives.
