Ezra, this is a really great post.

It's worth thinking about the role that blogs play in this as well. For instance, Josh Marshall would probably get extremely bored keeping up his Bridge to Nowhere coverage for the next two months. But if he and other big-league bloggers don't do it, it fades away as a part of the narrative of the campaign--the media considers its job done, and it sure looks like McCain intends to keep lying.

Bloggers like Josh, or you, or even Kos, presumably didn't start writing for the sake of pounding away on repetitive talking points every day. And yet the left blogosphere is one of the few ways for progressives to drive some small part of the national political storyline. What we need, I guess, are many widely-read boring repetitive blogs that endlessly parrot the party line. Has anyone registered bluestate.com?

Who are these Friends people of which you speak?

But pointing out that one party lies more than the other party makes David Broder cry.

Why do you want David Broder to cry? Why are you so mean?

A very important post. Keep on keeping on.

Excellent, thoughtful post, some things worth thinking more about.

A couple of quick reactions, though.

One, there still exists the Republican/Democrat double standard. You better believe that if the Dems were lying about their record and lying about their opponents' proposals to the degree that the R's are, it would be THE NUMBER ONE STORY IN THE NATION!!! The Dems would be shamed into submission, forced to apologize, do some serious penance, and it would lead to a 10-point loss in the polls instead of a 10-point gain. IOKIYAR rules.

Two, the only thing the media covers half-decently is sports. Imagine the middle of a pennant race, one team brings up a nobody from the minors and the team has a hot week. Wouldn't it be the number one story if the team were caught day after day throwing spitballs and using corked bats? They're cheating! That's what everyone would be saying. The press wouldn't let them get away with it, especially if they were trying to win a 4-year, no-cut contract.

This is the single most insightful blog post I have ever read. Thank you.

JJF,

I actually agree that relative to other subjects the press covers sports better.

However, the irony is that sports journalists missed (ie. failed to do their job on) the biggest story of the last twenty years. Steroids.

The sportswriter community dropped the ball in a similar fashion to the failure in reporting the Iraq War.

(Personally, I think that there is a good argument to be made for legalizing steroids and other performance enhancing drugs, but they're currently illegal and banned, and should have been reported on).

Best,

Hank Porter

The sad thing is that Marc is one of the better journalists at this kind of stuff. Much more informative than reading Cillizza, say, who writes mind-numbingly vapid stuff like Who Won This Week?

I think "willfully obtuse" is the perfect description though, and it is especially disturbing to see this from someone in a position like Ambinder's, who wields influence but isn't bound by the pressures of faux objectivity that TV anchors and co. have to put up with.

I'm also not sure I'd be so dismissive of the contributions Greenwald makes to journalism, although I'm sure Ambinder would insist that's not what he's doing.

Super posting. Very insightful.

They'll keep lying until they realise they can't. If they double down on lying, it's the job of the press to redouble calling them on it.

They're saying 'we own you'.

I guess where I part company with Ezra is on whether this is a new development. The "8 stories" Ezra talks about at the top of his post are selected from among some larger number. The selection will ALWAYS reflect bias. It's inevitable. The situation we are in today, with multiple sources of news, is not perfect but it's better than it was 20 years ago, not worse.

You really have to stop relying on MSNBC and Chris Mathews for actual news..

MSNBC allready had to demote Chris and Oldermann because of their ridiculous lies told throughout the convention.

The actual facts:

Plain NEVER supported 'The bridge to Nowhere'. The 'Bridge to Nowhere' was a couple hundred million dollar project EARMARK in Congress.

First, what Palin actually did is told the people of that community, YOU ARE NOT 'NOWHERE' AND I THINK IT IS UNFAIR TO KEEP DENIGRATING YOUR COMMUNITY AS 'NOWHERE'.

Next what she said was, we need to discuss a 'LINK' for your community to the mainland, she supported a 'LINK, not an EARMARK of a few hundred million dollar bridge.

By the time she had become Governor, and she STILL SAID THE SAME THING...WE NEED A LINK.

THAT IS WHY EARMARKS GET PASSED WITHOUT CONGRESSIONAL SCRUTINY OF WHETHER THEY MAKE ANY ECONOMIC SENSE.

So what did Governor Palin do, she made a Executive decision, she said this community needs a link, so they built a ferry to connect the community to the mainland. This was done a far less cost and satisfied the need.

You will notice, noone has been able to come up with a single quote of Palin supporting the 300 Million dollar as an EARMARK AND BYPASSING THE NORMAL CONGRESSIONAL PROCESS? Why is that?

It is two DIFFERENT things to support the Congressional Committe process for projects and supporting earmarks that bypass that process.

It is simply convient for Mathews and the rest of the left to now not distinguish between legitimate Congressional processed projects and earmarks.

Of course Obama requested over a BIllion dollar in ACTUAL EARMARKS, where he actually did not want the projects to go through the normal budget and authorization process.

I've been following the Matt/Marc exchange, and I like the way that you put it here. Moreover, I don't think that this situation *is* all that different from the Press's role under the old media regime, when they still relied upon a continuity of narrative to cover the areas of their interest (in national politics, their decision not to cover F.D.R.'s handicap or J.F.K. rumors come to mind).

And I think it's worth noting that the need to tie information to narratives to make it intelligible is larger than journalism. As you point out, it's a broad feature of fiction, including T.V. serials, but also anthropology and history, to name a few (c.f. Hayden White on Metahistory).
On a side-note, I think journalists tend to select these narratives a bit unconsciously -- and the narratives tend to reflect, for this reason, their assumptions and predilection. (For instance -- hypothetically -- if someone happened to be a pretty strong and disappointed Clinton supporter, this might have a huge effect on which narratives seemed appropriate. It's not that you'd "choose" to emphasize on or another, but rather, that some would seem relevant, and others, Glen-Greenwaldian media criticism.)

what Palin actually did is told the people of that community, YOU ARE NOT 'NOWHERE' AND I THINK IT IS UNFAIR TO KEEP DENIGRATING YOUR COMMUNITY AS 'NOWHERE'.

Strange, then, that she so often and so gleefully refers to the "Bridge to Nowhere" in her speeches since being picked as McCain's running mate.

Another story worth reporting on would be that McCain hacks such as "ObamasaidheMuslim" are practically drowning in McCain campaign chotchkeys they've collected by posting talking points on liberal blogs.

And if Congress actually killed the bridge and not Palin, why did she still get the money?

The fact is Congress still gave Alaska the ENTIRE APPROPRIATION AMOUNT THEY PLANNED TO PAY FOR THE BRIDGE. The only thing Congress removed was the EARMARK language specifically requiring the money to be used for the bridge.

So if Palin REALLY wanted the bridge earmark, she could have taken the money and used it for the bridge....SHE DIDN'T!
SHE DIDN'T!

End of story.

Ezra, your analysis is self-evidently an excellent description of the problem, but what I want to know is: how do we get there from here? Who do we pressure? What do we press them on? Or is there simply no hope, because our current attitudes regarding the media's proper role are too deeply entrenched?

the transition from the fundamental scarcity being information to information being in abundance and the fundamental scarcity being mediation

This to me gets at the real issue. The problem with Marc Ambinder's defense that, hey, we did cover that, is that it makes unreasonable assumptions about how viewers/readers consume news. Nobody reads the paper cover to cover, nobody watches 24 hour news stations 24/7, and really no one comes close. So say a politician says something misleading, and in 1 out of 10 stories referencing the quote the relevant fact check is included, and the rest of the stories merely refer to the quote. You've helped the politician mislead voters. Never mind that you did a story where you fact checked them. Close to 9 out of 10 of those of your viewers aware of the quote are not aware of why it is misleading. Fact check it every time you mention it. Fact checking is for every story, every time it is covered. I'd go so far as to suggest it is for interviews and op-eds too, but that will never happen.

Jesus, Ezra. The first 3 paragraphs of that post are the most important things you've ever written. not that the whole post is not great... but those first 3 paragraphs should go in stone and be shipped to every Journalism school in America.

This is a really, really, really great post. Ezra and TAP assignment overlords, I cannot tell you how much I want to read a feature-length elaboration of this argument.

Did I say "feature-length"? Yes. Yes, I did. Because so many of the things Ezra's touched on this post (there's a lot!) deserve a lot of careful elaboration. Also, because campaign reporters themselves will find all kinds of bad faith ways to blow off the basic line of thinking unless it's spelled out for them with every detail laid out explicitly and defended meticulously. (Witness Ambinder's straw-man characterization of Yglesias' original post. It's obviously not because he's stupid or dishonest, because he's definitely neither of those things. But that sort of mischaracterization will be inevitable unless these ideas are laid out with care and in great detail.)

Seriously. IMHO this would be as awesome a story about political journalism as Fallows' "Why Americans Hate the Media" (or whatever that awesome piece was called). Which is to say, really, really really awesome.

Obamasaidhemuslim --

Plain NEVER supported 'The bridge to Nowhere'. The 'Bridge to Nowhere' was a couple hundred million dollar project EARMARK in Congress.

She did support the bridge, when asked specifically about it, see http://www.adn.com/sarahpalin/story/510378.html. That isn't a statement in favor of a "link," it's a statement in favor of a bridge.

So what did Governor Palin do, she made a Executive decision, she said this community needs a link, so they built a ferry to connect the community to the mainland. This was done a far less cost and satisfied the need.

Governor Palin did not build a ferry. The ferry was already running, it is the link that already existed. It is what made it possible for residents of Ketchikan to use their airport located on Gravina Island.

It is simply convient for Mathews and the rest of the left to now not distinguish between legitimate Congressional processed projects and earmarks.

I don't think you understand what an earmark is. It is not something that bypasses the congressional process, unless you are thinking of the Coconut Road earmark, which is an unusual case and almost certainly illegitimate. An earmark is quite simply when congress gives line items allocating money to specific projects, rather than, say, allocating to a federal agency and letting them figure out how to spend it. They have gotten a bad rap lately, but they are nothing new or unusual, especially in transportation or defense appropriations.

On a side note, I'm sure you can't stand Chris Matthews so you assume liberals must love him. He isn't a liberal, and I doubt Ezra or many of his readers watch him on a regular basis. Some liberal bloggers feel it is their duty to watch Chris Matthews from time to time so they can report on it, and they usually end up wishing they had spent their time gouging their eyes out. Search Eschaton for references to "Tweety." Chris Matthews appeals to low information voters who go by gut feel rather than any opinions on issues. In fact that's exactly the sort he is.

Excellent post. However, the insoluble problem of media mediation is at the heart of it exactly what you say:

The press isn't allow to admit that they construct these narratives at all, and so can't transparently justify why they choose to use one and not another. Which creates mistrust and anger.

If the press hammers at The Bridge to Nowhere issue in the manner of calling it a "bald-faced lie", folks that see it as more political posturing and typical campaigning rather than Richard Nixon proclaiming that he was not a crook, will be put-off.

Folks who happen to be on the other side of the aisle politically will, even if they accept the general validity of the story, will wonder where are all the stories on these other lies that the other political party has told (or is telling currently, to their way of thinking).

If they are more extreme in their political alignment (though, generally, nobody thinks of themselves extreme in their ideology, no matter how extreme others may find them), they will simply assume that the media is in the tank for "the other guy", and they can tell when the media is lying about a story because "they're lips are moving".

As such, it's an intractable problem in the media. Perhaps that's why folks like factcheck.org exist, and do what they do. However, even factcheck.org hardly satisfies highly partisan folks ("Sure, that's stuff on Obama sounds about right, but they're completely clueless on that McCain story!") . . . and factcheck.org simply does not get the the same level of attention that Fox News, CBS, NBC, CNN or the New York Times enjoys.

I expect that fact checking statements on the news, every time, is probably not a solution from the media's point of view. Because someone is going to feel one point is overly fact checked and another never is. If every interested party was to be satisfied (and they never would actually be satisfied), fact checks would mount on top of fact checks, and soon enough the new item would involve more fact checks than the source news. It would also have the side effect of making the news unwatchable as news. Every news story would be excessively long, and more or less resemble an episode of myth busters.

And, in the end, journalists are human beings. If they get bored over McCain's malfeasance regarding Palin and the Bridge to Nowhere, they aren't going to want to hammer it home. They want to go on to other things. Their editors may want them to go on to other things in order to not have the network sound like it only knows how to play one note.

The media really is the elephant in the room when it comes to political reporting. Much of modern reporting doesn't make sense on a meta-level (what does it all mean) if you exclude the influence the media has on the whole process.

The Republicans are masters at gearing their campaign towards taking advantage of the media. But when the media ignores this aspect of the campaign and just reports on "what happened today", the overall flow of the campaign just looks really strange. But if they were to report the role the media has in propagating campaign messages, then maybe the public might have a better chance of understanding just why the campaigns do what they do.

It's like the parties dance around a minefield (the media), trying to avoid getting blown up (gaffes!) but the public, not knowing there are mines in that field, just see a bunch of crazy people dancing around like idiots.

There's a reason politicians act the way they do. If the media was more honest in reporting this then maybe it wouldn't look all so confusing.

Ezra,

Can Obama post their talking points directly to your blog or do they send them over for you to cut and paste?

Humorous that you claim information is now in abundance yet you can’t seem to get any correct information.

http://www.retireted.com/teds-connections/earmarks/

In the words of Alaskan Liberals;

“Gov. Palin recently cancelled the Gravina Island Bridge near Ketchikan…”

Where is the lie? Everyone that knows what they are talking abou admits she killed the project. The money was sent yet the bridge isn’t being built, if Palin didn’t kill it then were is the bridge? Do you think if you write lie enough that makes it true? Quote the lie, disprove anything they claim, if you fail to do so then you sir are a lier!

I think JJF hits on the problem here but doesn't identify what actually drives the media coverage: the greater degree of message discipline that republicans manage to maintain whenever something like this comes up. It's not just Obama hitting Palin on the lie on the stump (though I think that's great). Every day, the DNC needs to be putting out press releases about this. Every surrogate, every democrat you see on TV, needs to be saying "Palin lied about the bridge". They need to say it forcefully; they need to say it dismissively. They need to build an argument around it. They need to toss it off as a one-liner as the host goes to commercial. They need keep saying it until it becomes "the truth", which then makes it the *frame* with which the media reports.

Instead, we get surrogates all over the map, seemingly freelancing, advancing their own agenda as much as Obama's. It's not so much the media's fault that IOKIYAR - it's the democrats' fault for not holding the republicans accountable.

Ezra, your analysis is self-evidently an excellent description of the problem, but what I want to know is: how do we get there from here? Who do we pressure? What do we press them on? Or is there simply no hope, because our current attitudes regarding the media's proper role are too deeply entrenched?

The implicit assumption there is that changing what the press does in a significant way would solve the problem as you see it. However, the more vigorous the fact checking, the more turned-off a certain segment of the viewers will be, the louder the accusations of unfairness will be from those getting fact checked, and the more pressure they will be under to "fact check" the other side--i.e., make a bigger deal out of anything that could seem illegitimate the folks who would ostensibly benefit from the rigorous fact checking of their opponents. Which could potentially mean more minor issues getting blown up to seem "equal" the the more egregious lies of the opposition, in order to be "fair". Which would not satisfy the folks who felt the press wasn't doing enough fact checking in the first place, because making a misstatement from a Democrat out to be the same level as an outright lie on the Republican side. Which wouldn't be satisfactory to a large segment of the news consuming public.

And so on.

Another useful thing for the media to do would be to either correct the record every time a lie comes up, or not boradcast the lies. these politicians do not have a right to coverage if they are going to abuse it.

I think the big problem here is that the (over)abundance of information paralyzes the media. In general, the massive(!) amounts of spin out there make discerning the "right parts of the story" extremely difficult. In this particular instance, there is enough noise (for instance, the link nate included to a Dem website claiming Palin killed the bridge) that I can forgive the press for not "refuting" the ad's claim.

I teach political science at the college level, and I think that this is the real legacy of the internet: both sides have *some* information at their disposal to refute the other side's points, and so any discussion boils down to meta-arguments about which side's sources are better. At least half of the time I hold in-class debates, both sides have "information" to back up their points. Argumentation and politics have become more sophisticated, in the "sophistry" sense. Not sure where I'm going with this...

Postmodern commentary as to the elusive nature of "truth" seem trite here, but somehow apt, as well.

Confirmation bias runs rampant in the blogosphere, and in our discourse.

Everyone that knows what they are talking abou admits she killed the project. The money was sent yet the bridge isn’t being built, if Palin didn’t kill it then were is the bridge?

'abou'? Is that like a Caribou? Our favorite illiterate parasite tries to blow smoke.

1. Ted Stevens and Don Young got the federal earmark in 2005.

2. After publicity, the earmark was removed in 2005. Or rather, Congress supplied the money no-strings attached, meaning that it could be spent on the bridge or something else.

3. Palin campaigned for the bridge in her gubernatorial run in 2006. "I think we're going to make a good team as we progress that bridge project." (Sept. 2006)

4. Rather than build the bridge and use funds from Alaska's treasury to supplement the cost, Palin canceled it in 2007. While keeping the $442m in federal funding. She built the $25m access road with federal funds because that remained earmarked to a specific project.

Sarah Palin: great at spending other people's money. A bit like 'nate', really.

the news in black and white

after i read this post, i closed my eyes, and tried to remember what it was like before 1980, which was the first year of cnn.
i tried to remember what the news was like, growing up.
there was a large tv set in a box with rabbit ears and until the mid-sixties, the evening news was in black and white.
maybe that was better.
maybe it seemed starker, and without color, it seemed real, but set apart from everyday reality.
the news lasted a short time.
and in that time, there was a trusted commentator like walter cronkite, or eric sevareid. and there was little editorializing.
they were not glamourous.
they were not snide.
they didnt vent on television.
today, wolf blitzer asked a strategist from the obama campaign, how michelle obama would try to undermine the effects of palin's campaign.
it was such an outrageous question.
if he truly had integrity, why would he even choose to use the word, "undermine?"
eric sevareid would never have said anything like that.
everyday,at four-thirty, the candy stores and newstands had the late edition of the regional evening newspaper.
headlines, regional stories, tv listings, comics, a crossword puzzle, ads and a horoscope. and on sunday, there was the bigger newspaper, and then, the sunday new york times.
on sunday mornings, there was "meet the press."
there were photojournalists in life magazine, whose work caught the starkness of world events in potent photographs of war, parades, sputnick, civil rights marches, assassinations, marilyn monroe, kruschev, the suez canal.
somehow, those black and white photographs encapsulated events of the day with amazing clarity.
people went about their day, living quieter lives connected to smaller communities.
life was in color, but the news was in black and white. more clearly defined.
maybe, being in black and white, made it less personal. gave it a starkness and an objectivity.
people's lives seemed less noisy.
....then came color tv.
the news looked different.
and the newpaper photographs became colorful, instead of being in black and white.
the colorful news
became a kind of "imitation" of reality, airbrushed and photogenic.
and then came colorful ads, and more of them.....
and then, came cnn.
and then, the news took on a life of its own.
like a humming mill that no longer separated the wheat from the chaff.
and then, there was the advent of websites and blogs, and cell phones and blackberries and bluetooths.
and everything changed.
and the world became an infinitely noisier place.

It's like the fourth estate has turned from watchdog to concern troll. "Obama says X, but will Joe Average see that as elitist?"

Jason, that's simply brilliant. The journalist, the ultimate concern troll.

Your article transcends the Palin bridge comments, but because the key fact and the key lie is still not understood or being reported acccurately, it still needs to be stated. Palin is winning points because she is posing as a maverick who stood up to Congress and said, "Thanks but no thanks!" That she supported receiving federal money for the bridge, and then after she was elected kept the money but did not apply it to the bridge is well documented and reasonably well understood. The regurgitated line, "she was for it before she was against it." misses the main point though. The most important issue is not that she changed her mind. The BIG LIE is that she NEVER said "NO" to Congress. EVER. The earmark was first considered before she became governor, but had been removed PRIOR to her taking office. Consequently, Alaska received a pot of federal money without limitations on how it was to be spent. There was no earmark to say no to, so she couldn't have told Congress, "Thanks but no thanks." Hence, she lied about standing up to Congressional waste or pork. AND she kept all the money.

Indeed, Eric E.

Josh Marshall has a video of Palin saying to an audience in October 2006 -- presumably a gubernatorial debate -- "I support these infrastructure projects... and I support our congressional delegation."

She turned against the bridge when it turned out that the $233m of earmarked money for the bridge, that became no-strings-attached money after the earmark was struck out, wasn't going to pay for it.

What happened? The state took half of the money for other projects, and 'set aside' $113m for the bridge. Then, when Palin announced that the plans were scrapped, she said that the cost would be $398m, and that there was a $329m shortfall, which suggests that that $113m was now $69m.

She changed her mind on the bridge, but only when she faced the prospect of spending state money on it. The federal apportionment had

This is like asking your parents for a loan to buy a nice car, then spending most of the money on rims and LEDs for your friends' cars, and the remainder on a bicycle, while your parents' car gets T-boned.

Or, as someone called John McCain said in August 2007 after the I-35W bridge collapse:

"Maybe if we had done it right, maybe some of that money would have gone to inspect those bridges and other bridges around the country. Maybe the 200,000 people who cross that bridge every day would have been safer than spending $233 million of your tax dollars on a bridge in Alaska to an island with 50 people on it."

So basically you're saying that the press needs to repeat the fact that Palin's lying about the bridge, over and over. Is it that important? Also, I think Kerry's dishonesties weren't reported on so much because the press thought they mattered; they became a story because Bush's entire campaign message was that his opponent was a flip-flopper. If Obama wants this bridge to be the big story, he has to make it the big story himself.

Excellent post.

I agree with Asher that a big difference between the Kerry coverage and Palin coverage is that in 2004 Bush spent significant resources driving the whole flip-flop narrative--making it a central theme in talking points, campaign ads, etc. So far, Obama hasn't really done that.

If Obama dedicates significant resources to driving the "Palin kind of lies a lot" narrative, then I think we might see something like the sort of negative coverage that Kerry got.

I think there's a lot of things tied up in this post, conflating a number of problems into one, rather shapeless mass that cant really be solved: yes, it would be nice if "the media" could see "its role" in politics better... but that's different from saying "they can't seem to factually report key stories in the race" and that is different from "information has gone from a scarce resource to an overabundant one." Tying them all up together neglects the fact that, separately, all are somewhat debatable.

More pointedly, none of this talks about the changes in consumption of information, a piece which also seems key to understanding where we are and more key to any discussion of how we get to somewhere else. As the "bridge to nowhere" responses in comments show, where you stand depends on where you sit to read your "news." Get your information from conservative blogs and news sources, and "the bridge to nowhere" story is one of a number of "trumped up" negative assertions about Pain that prove how scared the Dems are to be facing a strong, confident woman. Read liberal news sources and blogs, and Palin's role in the bridge to nowhere story is being misrepresented so as to give her "maverick" cred she doesn't deserve. You could, and many do, cherry pick "hot button" isssues one after another to show similar aprroaches over and over, again and again. Almost no one - and I've seen this for a good ten years now - tries to understand these stories as they're seen from different sides, to try an assemble a sense of "the facts" that probably falls somewhere other than where either side needs them to be. Or at least, uses multiple points of view to try to separate "the facts" from "the opinion."

Much of what we deal with now has to do with the death of "objectivity" - a theory, which it always was, that one could report "the news" from some distanced, uninvolved point where opinions don't matter. This is a great approach for things can be quantified in numbers, for events that are easily told as "this happened, then this happened" stories. It's a less useful approach when we want to understand why things happen as they happen or get a deper understanding of complex ideas. We are a better, more informed society, in some ways, than we've ever been. It's possible, using the web, to become familiar with a wide range of ideas on a vast array of topics. It's also, unfortunately, a way to get a great deal of misinformation, and inaccurate data. And we don't have the kind of filters in place that can really help separate good, accurate information from bad.

Rather than dither, endlessl;y, on the failures of "the media", it seems to me bloggers can be most helpful by doing the work that many news organizations - because, for many of them, their business models are failing because of the internet's low value notion of the worth of information - really can't do. Get the facts. Organize them in a way that allows people to get the information and draw their own conclusions. Ezra did a masterful job of this when he assembled a vast array of information on health care plans around the world. It can be done. We rarely do it. And if that doesn't make us - as bloggers, consumers, and opion makers - part of the problem... what does it make us? Because at some pint it's not about "them"... it's about us.

> Almost no one - and I've seen
> this for a good ten years now
> - tries to understand these
> stories as they're seen from
> different sides,

Interesting set of theories, but leaves out the key fact (if you will) that one "side" owns 95% of the news media, and owns 100% of the means for bullying the refs - which it doesn't hesitate to deploy.

Cranky

Where is the lie? Everyone that knows what they are talking abou admits she killed the project. The money was sent yet the bridge isn’t being built, if Palin didn’t kill it then were is the bridge?

This does speak to the problem with the Democrats staying on message and hammering the Bridge to Nowhere home everyday. The fact is, there is no bridge. At some point, Palin was involved in the process of killing the project. There are specifics that make the circumstance less clear (and that would also require a fact check of the fact check to provide greater context to the previously provided context) and so on. The McCain camp, like it or not, has a leg to stand on--wobbly though it may be. She was against the bridge after she was for it, and perhaps after it would have made any difference, and that clarification certainly has some value . . . but to some folks, that's just a footnote to the general message: she is philosophically opposed to pork. Political realities, changing dynamics in the state, yadda yadda yadda, but she's opposed to pork. Done.

The argument can be made that she said no to the Bridge to Nowhere . . . because, at some point in time, she did indeed say no to it. Might be after she said yes to it, but I'm expecting a full hour news show breaking down what happened with the Bridge to Nowhere might be overkill. For example, it wasn't exactly a bridge to nowhere, and it was a legitimate and beneficial project (potentially) for anyone who travels to or from Alaska, and for the distribution of products to and from Alaska. Certainly, there may have been reasons to dump it, but one could see why, at first Blush, Palin would have supported such a project. I'm sure there's some reason why she changed her mind.

Just, like many things involving billions of dollars and years of construction, the issues on the ground are probably a little more complicated than "I said no to the Bridge to Nowhere!" - "No, you didn't!"

It's like the parties dance around a minefield (the media), trying to avoid getting blown up (gaffes!) but the public, not knowing there are mines in that field, just see a bunch of crazy people dancing around like idiots.

Man, that is so true. And that's a great illustration for Ezra's point . . . political campaigns or so whacky because of the danger represented to them by the media, and the pundit class, and the news analysts, and the tabloid journalists. If it was all just C-SPAN (all coverage, no commentary, no editing), campaigns would probably be a lot saner, but a lot more boring.

I'm not sure, honestly, which would be better.

One problem is that the media seems to define objectivity: conventional wisdom as seen from the perspective of a "Real American". Everyone from Fox News to the most liberal of bloggers defers to this vast population of chimeras who are white, male, straight, Christian fundamentalist, cowboy/wall-street financier/oil execs living paycheck to paycheck on the family farm in the Confederate Midwest. No one stands up for themselves and says "I'm a real American and I think this is bullshit."

just speaking to the mainstream television media, the show formats are created in a way that discourages/precludes depth or discussion.
all heat and no light....it feels like an assault to our senses and cognitive skills.
short bursts of brashly dueling, adversarial and vituperative pundits. always, the same recycled people whose insights are tired and whose voices should be retired...and in this election season, the new voices have become even fewer.
even new shows follow the same frenetic and vapid format.
starting with "morning joe entertainment show" at the crack of western dawn, right through the day, there is not one show in the mainstream, formatted like the moyers report, that allows for any concentration of thoughtful, deliberate interaction and dialogue.
not even half an hour of a moyers- like format.
recently, a pundit, in commenting on obama's responses at the saddleback forum, said, "they were too thoughtful. he shouldnt do that again."
the person with whom he was speaking said, "dont we want those running for higher office to be thoughtful in their ideas?"
i think the culture has become so kinetically mindless, so noisy....the commercials melt into the shows....the noise has become so seamless, that unless we are jolted with an outrageous soundbyte, or some inane phrase is hammered into our dazed and multi-tasking heads, we barely can wait, can barely listen.
i think we could all think more clearly about political and all other matters, if we took a long walk every afternoon, rather than crowding our senses with mostly uselesss information that turns into agitating, highly addictive noise.

by the way, on september 10th, do you think one moment of news-time will be given to discussion of the truly incredible hadron super-collider experiment, or will it be overshadowed by patrick buchanan discussing sarah palin's rimless glasses and red shoes?

inquiring minds....

I find it helpful when thinking about the press to remind myself that they sell advertising and so to attract more viewers is there primary goal.

If I really want to know something I ask people that I know who are engaged in the subject. E.g. I have talked to people who have spent time in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think I got a much better idea of what is going on from them than I would get from the press. Of course these individuals often have bias so I take what they say with some skepticism.

I also read studies again the studies are also often full of biases and show should be viewed with a healthy does of skepticism.

Please, people! Let's leave the theoretical musings for Nov. 5. Right now, as someone has already pointed out, what's important is to get from here to there. In other words, Obama has to win the election.

This morning, I read that McCain is leading Obama by 4 points in the polls...

BTW, I live with a science librarian and a budding physicist (plus a kid who loves Nine Inch Nails). All I hear at the dinner table is talk of the large hadron collider.

Jason, that's simply brilliant. The journalist, the ultimate concern troll.

Motion seconded! This should become a serious blog theme in the weeks ahead.

BTW, this: "The job of the media, in other words, is now to also emphasize the right parts of the story." I'm having a hard time with. Defining "right" more thoroughly should be your assignment. Deciding what matters is almost an impossible task for the media. Your asking them to decide between whats in their interests as employees beholden a private industry and their interests as fact checkers and reporters of government. This is campaign reporting, not government reporting really. Someone, someway, you have to find a way to appeal to their better, i.e. moral, interests.

pseudonymous in nc,

link the lie thats all you need to do to settle the argument. One link to any quote from the campaign saying anything not true about the bridge.

There is a reason you resort to insulting me and go off subject, you can't back up your claim. All these people crying about the lies and not one can link to the lie.

Brilliant post!

This morning, I read that McCain is leading Obama by 4 points in the polls...

Convention bounce. Almost always happens. Happened for Obama, then happend for McCain. Had the order of the conventions been reversed, the bounce probably would have been, too.

Give it time.

While much about this election is historic, the statistical history is on Obama's side for this election. No party has won a 3rd term when the incumbent is as unpopular in the polls as Bush (yet). The polls as to what party people identify with more are all over the map, but most of them seem to agree that more folks identify as Democrats than did in the 2004 election. Things looked close in 2006, but the Democrats took back the house and the senate. Obama is running a solid campaign. I'm not sure what more he can do at this point.

It's up the the True Believers to not believe it's a fate accompli, and actually show up and vote.

She was against the bridge after she was for it, and perhaps after it would have made any difference, and that clarification certainly has some value . . . but to some folks, that's just a footnote to the general message: she is philosophically opposed to pork.

So is it better (for a conservative) to accept no-strings-attached money from Congress instead of accepting the same amount of money to build a bridge? It seems nutty to me to imagine that a fiscal conservative would be against money for a bridge project (even if it is a bridge to nowhere), but wouldn't be against sending the same amount of money to a state without any strings.

Does anyone have information on what the money was actually used for?

jacgueline (above)
writes about how much better the media was before 1980. It ain't so. I remember in about 1976 going to a piece of performance art at the Rhode Island School of Design. It was the TV news dissected. First it was a TV news show. Then it was a dissection of the show. At the end I realized how hollow and empty was the TV news. I really don't think the TV news is now that much worse, really. And now at least we have the option of watching PDS which is genuinely, I think, better than the 1976 ABC, CBS, NBC evening news.

Ezra:
This is a great post but I would add another factor that contributes to the media's unwillingness to counter distortions and lies from the Right. In my view, it not reasonable to expect the political press to withstand the browbeating they get from the Republicans when the Democrats seem utterly incapbale of quickly and forcefully responding on their own behalf.
The Democratic responses and, especially those from the Obama campaign, after the second and third nights of the Republican convention were slow, weak, and did not respond directly to the charges made by the Republicans. A good opposition party would have drawn attention to the insults against community organizers and would have used Palin's record to immediately refute the "maverick" label. The Democrats still do not know how to respond to the Right's most egregious distortions.
The media cannot be expected to scold the Republicans and debunk their distortions, and fix our national political conversation all by itself. Most of this must fall on the Democrats.

great post. the rule of thumb here is that media does whatever is its self-interest and/or in the interest of its employers. Right now, that means IOKIYAR.

solution: progressives need more power. media criticism is okay as far as it goes, and so is alternative media, but what we really should do is buy up GE and News Corp and Times Warner. Where are these rich progressives when you need them?

Excellent post. Let me paraphrase: The press's problem is that the product they're selling has become commoditized through increased productivity. The press's solution to this problem is to add value to the commodity by bundling it with a service. In this case the service is what Ezra is calling "mediation."

But the problem is that "mediation," "commentary," and "advocacy" all lie perilously close to each other on the scale between objective facts and subjective opinion. If you're not careful, you run an extreme risk of substituting elite opinion (i.e. the opinion of those constructing the narratives) for popular opinion.

Having read Ezra for a while, I'm pretty sure he thinks that's OK in a lot of cases. (Cf. everything he's written on healthcare.) But, unlike popular opinion, elite opinion can't exploit the wisdom of crowds. It doesn't have emergent properties that allow new syntheses to emerge from a chaotic soup of information. Instead, it tends to impose a small number of narratives on its society and then ruthlessly culls out any opinions that don't conform to one of those narratives.

A similar thing happens all the time in the blogosphere. When you have extremely efficient information flows on the internet, you form groups that self-select. This shows up as extreme orthodoxy of opinion within the each self-selected group. Any deviation from that orthodoxy results in the heretic being expelled from the group pretty quickly.

In politics, we call this "polarization."

I don't have a solution to this problem. Unfortunately, Ezra's solution above is not only stable but profitable. That means that it's going to continue to evolve. It'll be great for the press. I'm not so sure it's great for societal health.

But, unlike popular opinion, elite opinion can't exploit the wisdom of crowds. It doesn't have emergent properties that allow new syntheses to emerge from a chaotic soup of information. Instead, it tends to impose a small number of narratives on its society and then ruthlessly culls out any opinions that don't conform to one of those narratives.

Wha’?

What do you think we have now? It’s called ‘conventional wisdom’. It’s the way we make sense of information, and it’s a human characteristic. Sometimes you get the “wisdom of crowds”, sometimes it’s the stupidity of crowds, as in the real estate and tech bubbles.

Conventional wisdom does change over time, sometimes rapidly, as with the collapse of the Soviet Union, often with the gradual acceptance of new information. But it’s not going to go away.

Repubs have a better understanding of this process and how to exploit it. The media and Dems don’t know how to deal with this yet. Certainly the Dems can’t just sit around and blame the press, but Ezra’s point is that journalists are just in denial about what is going on.

andy....

in thinking about the news before the advent of cnn, and in the years of early television....i was trying mostly to point out some of the changes that have taken place.
clearly, there were fewer resources for information...mostly one would rely on the library or a home encyclopedia for background ...and the availability of instant information globally is one of the great miracles of the last twenty years.
the point of comparison was that since there were fewer resources for instant news, there seemed to be less noise, less cultural invasiveness....and less stimulation.
which seemed to make the world seem less shrill and carnivalesque.
information traveled more at the speed of human comprehension, rather than the speed of light.
or something like that.

(just the theoretical musings of someone who remembers black and white tv and the technological marvel of rabbit ears!
sometimes, i think it is nice to share with younger people, how sweepingly profound some of these changes have been and how they have affected our culture and perceptions.
it sure has been an amazing cultural journey...

Ezra:

Thanks for a great post, along with your earlier post asking if the media had been too tough on Palin. I've been posting links elsewhere in Left Blogistan, and have emailed this post to friends.

But the bloviating is just a tidal wave. I heard part of an interview that Brian Lehrer conducted today on his show on WNYC with Richard Cohen, whose column today in the Washington Post asked if Obama was too cool to be president, and unwilling to show passion and fire in confronting McCain over the lies both McCain and Palin have been making. Cohen is another one of the concern trolls masquerading as opinion writers. Both the interview and his column were masterpieces of trollery. How do any of us, all of us, push back against this?

What do you think we have now? It’s called ‘conventional wisdom’. It’s the way we make sense of information, and it’s a human characteristic. Sometimes you get the “wisdom of crowds”, sometimes it’s the stupidity of crowds, as in the real estate and tech bubbles.

No, we have two, maybe three conventional wisdoms, very rapidly imposed by media narrative. Interesting ideas or analysis get lost because the predominant narratives suck the oxygen out of the room. We'd do better, and have better conventional wisdom, if the process slowed down some and was more diverse.

No argument that sometimes you get great whopping stupidities. But mostly you get mediocre, lowest-common-denominator pabulum, because that's the easiest narrative to sell. You also get the most dramatic narratives possible, because that attracts viewers/listeners/surfers/readers and boost the ad revenue of the media. That usually makes for bad policy, since good policy is hardly ever dramatic.

I appreciated this article as well as “Was the Media Too Hard on Palin.” Your comments harken me back to my youth when my father advised us not to put too much value in the media because they lie to us and control information. As the years have passed, I am more and more aware of his teaching. But the fact remains that what we have is what we have and the question has to be ‘how can the media be built into one that is truly a mode of transmission rather than an agent in control of information.’ If the media was truly a mode of transmission, we would be able to assess not only this year’s election, but Enron, the Iraq war, and Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae. It is one thing to comment on what the media does wrong and it is another to offer suggestions on how this idea can become an agenda for change. I would love to hear what your ideas would be to move this idea forward. The situations that surround us seem to become more perilous as time goes on and it would be advantageous to us all to have better information.

That was a very informative post, thank you.

I've become to see this election as a school yard standoff.

McCain-Palin are calling Obama every name they can think of. Palin was brought in to make sure the base was in on this, but now with the new disgusting ad on Obama and sex education, they are taunting him.

To me it is this simple: They know Obama is a gentleman and wants to play like a gentleman and are actually enjoying their taunting because they really want to see him break a sweat.

Meanwhile, the public looks on like the playground crowd and they too want to see whether this gentleman is going to throw his punches too. Because, after all, in an age of so many threats they want to know whether they want to throw in their lot with the gentleman or the bullies.

And make no mistake of it, that is what McCain-Palin is. Principles? No.

Besides, has anyone been following the story Ron Susskind broke about how the failure of the British courts to fully convict 8 men in the plot to bomb airlines bound for Canada and the United States was derailed by Bush-Cheney's 2006 electioneering antics?

Check it out on CBC's "The Current." It's one more example of how the GOP wanted to play politics with anti-terrorism to win another election. And in the process, five men with Al Qaeda ties go free.

Correction: the program was "As It Happens."

Here's an excerpt:
Audio is available at CBC.ca "As It Happens."

RON SUSKIND Duration: 00:09:10
"They became known as the "liquid bombers" -- and forever changed how we travel. They are a group of young British men accused of plotting to bring down at least seven trans-Atlantic flights two years ago. Their homemade bombs were going to be placed in soft-drink containers and carried aboard planes destined for cities like Montreal and Toronto.

"Yesterday, after four months, a trial of eight of the "liquid bombers" wrapped up in London. Three of the men were convicted of conspiracy to commit mass-murder, while five others were cleared of all the charges against them.

"During the trial, prosecutors tried to convince the jury that all eight men had links to al-Qaeda, and were part of a large scale plot to blow up aircrafts. But they failed to make their case -- and now those prosecutors are saying the United States is partly to blame.

"Investigative writer Ron Suskind agrees. His recently published book The Way of the World tells the story of one of the largest British investigations ever. Nearly two thousand operatives, many of them from the MI-5, were tracking suspects around the world who were believed to have ties to the alleged attacks. They were closing in on Rashid Rauf, one of the ringleaders who was based in Pakistan. And then, in the summer of 2006, Mr. Rauf was suddenly arrested. The orders didn't come from the British. And few intelligence officials in the United States knew anything about it. Only George Bush and Dick Cheney, along with a tight circle around them, knew about the decision to detain him.

"To tell us more about the arrest, and how it might have shaped yesterday's verdicts, we've reached Ron Suskind, in Washington D.C."

are you available for marriage, perchance? because, i would like to marry you.

(that is, if you don't mind becoming a polygamist. i've always had a soft spot for the notion of my being in possession of a harem of men.)

(see? women can be sexy, er, sexist, too!)

The ball is in Obama's court now. His campaign certainly can't depend on the media to do the right thing and to repeat it over and over again. Obama will lose if his campaign continues to issue bland talking points or to suggest that McCain and Palin are making "inaccurate" or "misleading" or "technically correct misrepresentations."
Recognizing that the media craves narrative, drama and conflict, Obama needs to make this personal and use the L-word. If Obama himself stepped up to the podium and called John McCain and Sarah Palin LIARS, I'm pretty sure the media would notice. In fact I bet they'd get as fired up as a pig with a new shade of lip gloss. That would force the issue back to the top of the news cycle and voters could decide for themselves. Of course the McCain campaign would cry foul, but then maybe they'd have to defend Palin's record.

Brilliant post. Should be carved on tablets.

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