Salon - "Politico's 'Age Of Rage': More Evidence That It Still Hasn't Figured Out Journalism"

[TomCADem]

The media is currently in full CYA either (1) blaming the White House for listening to its reports of a black federal worker saying that we should not really serve white constituents (which turned out to be a doctored tape), (2) saying that Andrew Brietbart was an outlier, or (3) engaging in false equivalency by saying that the liberal media lies to.

The problem with all this of this is that it obscures the fact that our corporate sponsored media is failing us. A healthy democracy depends on a strong media, and a media that caters to millions in corporate adverstising dollars can't help but work to protect the hand that feeds it. Worse, that media becomes invested in protecting its legitimacy by portraying the Sherrod episode as a failure of the White House, rather than as an example of the failure of modern journalism.

http://www.salon.com/news/politico/?story=/politics/war_room/2010/07/23/politico_breitbart_rage

One thing that's becoming increasingly apparent about Politico editor Jim VandeHei is that he has no idea how to navigate the current media landscape. He understands that there is a Breitbart on the right and a Huffington on the left, and both of them are Bad because they are not Balanced like Politico.

That is the thesis of the Thinker he wrote today with his Politico co-founder, John "the considerably less annoying one" Harris. It is called "The Age of Rage," and it is about how no one will learn any lessons from the recent Breitbart/Sherrod affair. I share their pessimism, actually. But I don't think they're blaming the right parties.

The VandeHerris conclusion is that no one will learn any lessons because of the vile Internet partisan media that plays so rough.

Responsible people in power and in the mainstream media are only beginning to grapple with this new environment — in which facts hardly matter except as they can be used as weapon or shield in a nonstop ideological war. Do you dive into the next fact-lite partisan outrage — or do you stay out and risk looking slow, stupid or irrelevant? No one is close to figuring it out.

Actually, VandeHarris, lots of people figured this one out! It was really easy! This is how it worked:

Andrew Breitbart has repeatedly demonstrated that he has no concern for the concept of truth, and he has a documented history of posting misleadingly edited videos. The Shirley Sherrod video he posted was obviously stripped of context. But anyone who watched the edited clip Breitbart himself posted should've known his interpretation of it was a lie. In the edited clip, Sherrod mentioned that Chapter 12 bankruptcy for family farms had just been enacted. One simple Google search reveals that the events she is recounting took place around 1986, many, many years before she worked for the USDA. So there is two seconds of research that call Breitbart's post into question.

[Oceansaway]

1. Politico=Human Waste.....nt

[madrchsod]

2. politico reporters--- D average english 103 students