Is It Really So Difficult to Do Actual Reporting?

Michael Gerson's column suggesting Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter for vice-president is the latest example of someone paid to report the facts actually refusing to do 5 minutes of work to, ya know, report the facts. The basis for Gerson's support for Ritter is that he is one of "two popular red-state Democratic governors."

Now, I think it would be great to see Ritter on the Democratic ticket -- but I also think it would be great for people paid to report facts to actually check the facts. Because had Gerson bothered to take 5 minutes looking at the actual empirical public opinion data, he would have found that Bill Ritter isn't that popular. In fact, he would have found that Bill Ritter is unpopular.

Let me reiterate -- this is about journalism, not about Bill Ritter. I think he'd make an intriguing choice for VP, and I wish he was more popular. But if I wrote a column about Ritter for VP, I would not come right out of the gate pushing a pure, provable fiction that exposes me as a slothful purveyor of fantasies that I fabricate in my own head. That such sloth pervades our most Serious Newspapers of Record should irritate everyone who takes the craft of journalism seriously.

Comments

[Nonamnesiac]

I'm a David Sirota fan, unabashedly. But I think what he's pointing out here, though accurate -- that the media is a bought commodity at every level imagineable and an institution that does not report the truth or even pretend to do so -- misses an even more important point. Even when the media does its job and brings the truth to light kicking and screaming because it had to, nothing happens.

The media, although actively participating in lying us into wars from the Manifest Destiny wars of the 18th and 19th Centuries through Vietnam and Iraq, did report the absolute truth that Bush and company lied us into war, committed high crimes and misdemeanors against the Constitution, allowed hundreds of billions of dollars to simply be stolen during the war effort and was criminally negligent in its handling of Katrina and other government responses to numerous things government is supposed to do.

And nothing happened. The collaborators from the Democratic Party simply locked arms with this overtly criminal administration and blocked serious resolution to halt the criminality. Instead they developed a cynical political reaction minimiziing the criminality while attempting to personally gain from it.

So in a world where journalists can't get anything done when they do their job, they take another approach -- personally enrich themselves and ignore reporting.

[dubster]

Yeah, I love how these so called journalists always espouse their views about who would be a potential choice for Obama as veep without being objective. People like Chuck Todd and David Gregory over at MSNBC, that continue to be proponents of Senators' Biden or Nunn because apparently they "check boxes" according to Todd. The boxes he (they) are describing are foreign policy expertise that both men do indeed have. However, what is disturbing to me is that if that is a criterion (foreign policy) that they are going by then why do they never mention Governor Bill Richardson? Who has not only they same amount of foreign policy experience as both of those previous men but actually exponentially far more experience than both of them combined, and that's just foreign policy. That's not even including his other qualifications that doesn't even pale in caparison - he has far more to offer electorally than Biden or Nunn. He actually "checks MORE boxes" than those two senators but they never even mention his name as is if he doesn't have valid experience. It's starting to get obnoxious especially when one of them has the title of "political director". They need to get w/ the program and do some rudimentary research.

[ScooterLiddy]

The only ones in Colorado that Bill Ritter is unpopular with are conservatives. Most progressives/liberals are quite happy with him.

[jbatch]

It is interesting that most of these fact-free journalists are conservatives. Check it out. That's a fact.