How The Media Is Or Isn't Coming To Terms With Republican Extremism

As a companion piece to the post below, please take time to read long- time journalist James Fallows' article in The Atlantic on the traditional practices of the "mainstream media" and how Republicans have played it for decades. 

Hardly anyone still working in today’s media can remember an era in which “mainstream media” practices, as we now think of them, actually prevailed. By which I mean: a few dominant, sober-sided media outlets; a news cycle punctuated by evening network-news shows, morning (and sometimes afternoon) newspapers, weekend newsmaker talk shows, and weekly news magazines; and political discourse that shared enough assumptions about facts and logic that journalists felt they could do their jobs by saying, “We’ve heard from one side. Now let’s hear from the other."

I can barely remember any of that, and I got my first magazine job (with The Washington Monthly) around the time of the Watergate break-in and subsequent Woodward-and-Bernstein scoops, when all parts of the old-style journalistic ecosystem were still functioning.

Although that era is long gone, and had its share of problems even at its best, its mental habits persist, as we’ve often discussed in the “false equivalence” chronicles. The recurring theme here is the discomfort of reporters, old and young alike, with recognizing that the United States doesn’t currently have two structurally similar political parties approaching issues on roughly comparable terms. We have one historically familiar-looking party, and another converting itself into something else.

The article takes off from there to illustrate how the "mainstream media" has been slow to pick up on the increasingly nihilistic extremism of the Republican Party, it's obstructionism, and the use of the Benghazi!!! tragedy to score political points against Hillary Clinton.  The question is, are we seeing a longer- term adjustment to the way the media covers politics, or is it just a temporary, belated clarity in some media quarters =cough= David Brooks =cough=.  (Our guess is below.)

And how has the "mainstream media," with its traditional practice of "he said, she said" journalism, and its reliance on and commitment to unnamed (i.e., Republican) sources enabled Republicans in catapulting "perceptions" of a Clinton "email scandal?" 

Thanks to the endless leak-driven reports, “everyone knows” that there’s a problem with Hillary Clinton and her emails. It’s not a one-day story, like Colin Powell’s also having used personal email when he was secretary of state, or Mitt Romney’s having erased all email records at the end of his time as governor of Massachusetts. Instead it “feeds the perception” of Hillary Clinton’s shady evasiveness. It “raises questions” and “has a drip-drip-drip” effect, to quote things I’ve heard on the news in the past day. Count how many times you hear the phrase “Clinton email scandal” in the next news report you listen to, and wait to see if anyone explains exactly what the scandal (as opposed to misjudgment, bad decision, etc.) was. 

Of course, it's long past time for this charade of treating the Republican Party as a responsible political entity to end.  But, as we and others have said, it's not likely you'll see that happen in the "mainstream media."