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I've been ranting on this blog about how Minnesota's media won't adequately cover Minnesota's highest profile politician, Michele Bachmann. At times it seems like this blog, Dump Bachmann and City Pages are the only ones covering what she says and does. I have argued that Minnesota's journalists have a responsibility to cover what she says and does ... and they are failing.There's a reason why more and more people aren't going to traditional media like TV and newspaper for the political news. They aren't very good at it.
This is part of a larger national trend among journalists. With rare exceptions, the US media does not cover how far off the deep end the Republican Party has gone.
But according to longtime political observers Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, campaign coverage in 2012 was a particularly calamitous failure, almost entirely missing the single biggest story of the race: Namely, the radical right-wing, off-the-rails lurch of the Republican Party, both in terms of its agenda and its relationship to the truth.Mann and Ornstein are two longtime centrist Washington fixtures who earlier this year dramatically rejected the strictures of false equivalency that bind so much of the capital's media elite and publicly concluded that GOP leaders have become "ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."
The 2012 campaign further proved their point, they both said in recent interviews. It also exposed how fabulists and liars can exploit the elite media's fear of being seen as taking sides.
Most journalists seek to provided balanced coverage. This is their failing. When one side has an utter disregard for the truth, as Bachmann does, isn't it their responsibility to point it out?
Most journalists will hem and haw when confronted with this. Some will say they are "butthurt" about getting confronted. Others get angry when confronted. Some will try to point out examples of Democrats lying, but for every lie a Democrat tells, Republicans tell hundreds that go unreported.
"The mainstream press really has such a difficult time trying to cope with asymmetry between the two parties' agendas and connections to facts and truth," said Mann, who has spent nearly three decades as a congressional scholar at the centrist Brookings Institution."I saw some journalists struggling to avoid the trap of balance and I knew they were struggling with it -- and with their editors," said Mann. "But in general, I think overall it was a pretty disappointing performance."
"I can't recall a campaign where I've seen more lying going on -- and it wasn't symmetric," said Ornstein, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who's been tracking Congress with Mann since 1978. Democrats were hardly innocent, he said, "but it seemed pretty clear to me that the Republican campaign was just far more over the top."
Here's how bad it is statistically:
49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We found that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn't exist anymore.
This is from a PPP poll conducted after the election. What is so NOT funny is that ACORN hasn't existed since 2010.
Here's something a bit more scary.
25% of Republicans say they would like their state to secede from the union compared to 56% who want to stay and 19% who aren't sure.
Here's mathematical calculations of their crazy.
Suppose the PPP poll is roughly correct, and self-identified Republicans constitute 32% of the electorate, i.e. the 128.5 million people who voted in November. That's 41 million voters.Now let's suppose that PPP is also correct that 25% of those 41 million are willing, at least in theory, to advocate secession - i.e. treason against the U.S. government. That's 10.3 million. But we'll also assume, per Jensen, that the vast majority of GOP secesh - let's say 9 in 10 - are just blowing off steam. That still leaves a million voters.
And if one in ten among those million is willing to do something tangible for the cause: give money to secessionist splinter groups, get out in the street to protest? That's 100,000. And if one in ten of those is ready, under the right conditions, to take up arms? That's 10,000 potential domestic terrorists, spread from sea to shining sea.
Except in all likelihood they are not.distributed evenly, but heavily concentrated in the reddest of red states - the Deep South in particular, if this map of racist Twitter posts during the campaign is anything to go by.