The Hair-Tearing False Equivalency of American Political Violence.

[SteppingRazor]

(cross-posted in GD.)

Please, someone, anyone, stop Mika Brzezinski before she kills journalistic integrity again. Ms. Brzezinski if you're reading this, I'm begging you, just google "false equivalency" and read some of the commentaries on the various blogs that pop up. It won't take you that long. And, joy of joys, you'll be able to read examples from the left and the right! That means it's valid, right?

Mika's tendency to posit that an issue is a problem with both liberals and conservatives, seemingly regardless of the issue at hand, is hardly a problem of her own making of course. But the co-host of MSNBC's Morning Joe might just be the most obvious purveyor of this, one of the major reasons why journalists today enjoy public approval ratings somewhere below lawyers and just above pederasts. People like Mika make the rest of her journalistic tribe, of which I am, for better or worse, a member, look more like propagandists than truth seekers. And the truth is, after all, the only reason we do what we do. Or at least, it should be.

<snip>

The usual dog-and-pony show was there. The Washington Post's Gene Robinson, one of the few voices of sanity in the padded-room world of cable news, tried to explain that seeing no daylight between a threat on the left and the brick-throwing, loogie-spitting behavior of the right was perhaps not the proper conclusion to draw from all of this. Pat Buchanan -- a Nixon operative who, despite that pedigree, is still seen as a credible commentator for reasons that have never been properly explained -- tried to make the claim that the Black Panthers were the ones plotting to shoot police in the 1960s, so the left is just the same as those Hutaree asshats arrested in Michigan earlier this week.

<snip>

When you begin with Jim Adkisson in July 2008, killing people in their own church because of their "liberal values;" carry on through the several right-wing crazies who actually managed to kill police officers before being taken out, unlike the Hutaree; recall the killing of George Tiller and a guard at the Holocaust Museum; and then look at the behavior cited by Robinson, it becomes all too clear that a brick thrown through Rep. Louise Slaughter's office window is only the latest event in a long line of right-wing attacks that have now taken the lives of at least 10 people and wounded just as many.


More: www.huff.to/9LS9aZ

[BrklynLiberal]

1. Is she not too bright..or pushing an agenda??

Should she be at FAUX NOISE?

[SteppingRazor]

2. I think she's just desperate to not be seen as favoring one side or the other.

Of course, if you insist on painting every transgression as a problem on both the left and the right, what happens to the truth? The old saying that there's three sides to every story -- your side, my side, and the truth -- seems to have been forgotten by a lot of media figures today. It's the same thing as a journalist saying, "Democrats say this bill will do XXX, Republicans say it will not. ... up next, sports!"

Your job is not to just report on what both political parties say about an issue. Your job is to find out who's telling the truth and who's bullshitting and, in the all-too-common case in which they both are, to reveal how the truth is different than what either side says.

[BrklynLiberal]

3. What your are describing is a JOURNALIST! Very few, if any of these talking heads are truly

journalists. They sit up there and read what they are given, say what they are told to say, and give little if any thought to the truth of what they are presenting.

[SteppingRazor]

4. Yeah, the piece in the OP tilts at windmills. I realize that...

but regardless of how quixotic it may be, I still feel like someone, anyone -- me, or whomever -- has to hold these pigs' feet to the fire. How much more of this bullshit can journalism take before the entire industry is regarded as some sort of not-too-slick con job? Or has the tipping point already come and gone?

[BrklynLiberal]

5. Youo are right....absolutely.

[tom_paine]

6. Tipping point: probably come and gone, at least on journalistic integrity/skill

Unfortunately, as awfully Corporate-controlled as it gets, far far FAR too many people cannot or will not look beyond it.