The Washington Post's Paul Kane responds in an online forum to charges from Media Matters that he uncritically repeated a GOP talking point about the budget reconciliation process:
I'm sorry, what's to defend?
Someone tell Media Matters to get over themselves and their overblown ego of righteousness. We reported what Olympia Snowe said. That’s what she said. That’s what Republicans are saying. I really don’t know what you want of us. We are not opinion writers whose job is to play some sorta gotcha game with lawmakers.
The idea that a straight-news journalist has no obligation to put the opinions of people he quotes in the proper context, or that such context is the solely the purview of opinion columns or blogs, is about as naked a defense of journalism-cum-stenography as you're likely to get. And while I agree with Kevin Drum that it's a bit much to expect journalists to provide this context each and every time the topic is brought up, there's another dynamic at play here. Republicans, if they know their opinions are going to be repeated verbatim in the press without so much a trace of context, have incentive to make increasingly outlandish claims. And moderates like Snowe have additional incentive to increase their own relevance to the political process if they can be seen as both principled (preserving Senate tradition) and bipartisan (lets avoid a party-line vote). Journalistic stenography helps makes this possible.
--Mori Dinauer
