The Week - "Blaming Republicans for the government shutdown: The end of false equivalence?"

[TomCADem]

I think the Week is a bit premature in declaring that the media has begun to move off of its false equivalence brand of journalism. On CNN, Blitzer and Dana Bash repeatedly pushed the idea that Republicans are doing some sort of favor for them by raising the debt ceiling or passing a budget in return for negotiating over the ACA.

http://theweek.com/article/index/250470/newspapers-blame-republicans-for-the-government-shutdown-the-end-of-false-equivalence

"This sort of false equivalence is not just a failure of journalism," Al Jazeera America's Dan Froomkin writes. "It is also a failure of democracy."

House Republicans refused to pass what is normally a routine federal spending bill unless President Barack Obama and Senate Democrats agreed to defund or delay significant parts of ObamaCare, a law that was passed more than three years ago by both chambers of Congress, deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court, and at least tangentially endorsed by the American people when President Obama beat repeal-promising Mitt Romney last fall.

The result of this latest standoff over ObamaCare is that the federal government doesn't have a budget, forcing a major shutdown for the first time in 17 years. Froomkin urges his fellow journalists to stop pretending that Democrats are even partly to blame.

When the media coverage seeks down-the-middle neutrality despite one party's outlandish conduct, there are no political consequences for their actions. With no consequences for extremism, politicians who have succeeded using such conduct have an incentive to become even more extreme. The more extreme they get, the further the split-the-difference press has to veer from common sense in order to avoid taking sides. And so on.

[sibelian]

1. Ooo, centre drift mentioned in the press...

Not such a common occurrence...