Judging from my extremely scientific while-I'm-on-the-treadmill sampling method, the cable news networks are working extremely hard to report out a story of crucial importance: "Has the media been too hard on Sarah Palin?" Watching them try to examine this story is sadly hilarious, like watching a puppy unhappily considering whether it has, in fact, been a bad dog. But beneath the dark comedy is the incoherence. The media cannot "report" this story out. They are the subject. And it requires a judgment. It's a question with one of two answers. Either "yes, for reasons of bias/sensationalism/whim, we have been reporting on Sarah Palin in a way that's not justified by the facts, and the importance of the facts, surrounding her career," or "no, we have been subjecting Sarah Palin to a proper level of scrutiny, and it's not our fault that her career had been previously unexplored and contained more than a few dark corners and surprising twists." They cannot do that, of course. The media is incapable of admitting itself to be an actor. They shape the public's understanding of politics, but pretend they are a mode of transmission rather than an agent in control of information. That gets you the consistently confusing coverage where the very people who will decide how the public understands an event makes that decision by speculating how they think the public will understand an event. It is the pretense of objectivity at the expense of honesty. But it reaches new heights of absurdity when the subject is not politics, but the media itself, and the media must answer questions about itself by asking how they imagine viewers are judging their coverage. And it is sad, too, watching people who once wanted to be Carl Bernstein reduced to moderating a focus group that exists only inside their heads. Because the media cannot see how to do their job if they assume responsibility for the impact they have on politics, they refuse to ever assume any responsibility at all, and that means never doing anything for which they can be held responsible. If you render a judgment, you are responsible for that judgment. If you pretend that you simply convey the judgments of others, they are responsible. The latter approach is far safer, but also far more dishonest. It means you can never do your job forthrightly, nor justify your work because the reportage is important and the conclusions correct. I guess there's a reason that the term "news media" has broadly fallen out of usage, and now we just call them "the media."
