Andrew Sullivan chats with Marc Ambinder about the pressure among the press to be “Fair and Balanced.” They didn’t bring up the recent Pew research study which claims that McCain received more negative coverage than Obama in the last few months, but it’s an important piece of the puzzle:
When a campaign is behind in the polls, should you say it’s not, lest you appear biased or negative? If the GOP vice presidential nominee is implicated in an ethics scandal every other week, should you ignore it, because the Democratic nominee is not?
You should not. Because it’s false, it’s fake — and having screeching partisans like Bay Buchanan and Paul Begala shout each other down, with no regard for the reality at hand, on your cable TV show, is no effective means of informing the public.
Yet Pew suggests that you probably should, because you don’t want graphs like this driving people to daytime radio and Fox News:
Courtesy of Pew Research
It is, and always will be, an issue of principle.
Does the media worry about how the world perceives it — or about how it perceives the world?
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