In June, I touched on the oft-used cop out of the generic report -- “If I'm being attacked by the right and left, I must be doing something right!” -- noting:
In nearly four years that I've worked at Media Matters, the excuse I've heard most often from reporters and other media types when their work is called into questions is: “look, I get attacked from the right and the left, I must be doing something right.”
Yes, the excuse is worryingly simplistic. The ridiculous assumption being that if a story or a reporter's work in general is getting attacked from both sides of the political spectrum than those attacks must not be valid.
Eric Alterman -- a senior fellow at Center for American Progress and a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College -- destroys the excuse in his latest column looking at Andrew Breitbart's smearing of Shirley Sherrod as the jumping off point.
Excerpts of Alterman's stellar column can be found after the jump but I encourage you to read it in its entirety.
It is a rule of historical thumb that whenever mainstream journalists find themselves the subject of political controversy they fall back on the old adage that “if both the left and right are criticizing my work, I must be doing something right.” But as author, editor, and publisher Victor Navasky points out in his book, A Matter of Opinion, “Ideology is simply a body of beliefs or doctrines…If The Nation has the ideology of the liberal left and National Review has the ideology of the conservative right, then The New York Times, The Washington Post, the newsweeklies, and the networks have the ideology of the center, and it is part of the ideology of the center to deny that it has an ideology.”
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Examples of this tendency are not exactly hard to find. Writing with Politico editor-in-chief John Harris, Jim VandeHei pronounces the dawning of an "Age of Rage," equating Breitbart and company's perversion of the truth with the fact that some liberal journalists and academics participated in occasionally less than polite discussions about conservatives (and one another). In the careless reasoning of the Politico honchos these discussions deserved equation with Breitbart's nefarious techniques because both “featured sharp personal attacks against political opponents. Both revolved around indignant claims from people claiming to be victims of bias and the corrupt ideological agendas of their opponents—all the while stoking and profiting from the bias and conspiratorial instincts of partisans on their own side.”
VendeHei equates Breitbart's antics with The Huffington Post's reporting and opinion in another column. The result of these developments, both editors argue, is that “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.”
One of these so-called “responsible people,” Howard Kurtz, is also deeply worried. Kurtz is The Washington Post reporter and CNN talk-show host who reports on both entities (and their respective competitors) and receives a regular paycheck from both of them. In his Monday column, entitled, “In journalism's crossfire culture, everyone gets wounded,” Kurtz bemoans the rise of what he calls “the nastiness index” and the fact that “all of us are getting sullied in the process.” He laments that “Media outlets, which once merely chronicled this era of hyper-partisanship, now seem to be both the purveyors and often the targets of ugly attacks.”
In just the last few weeks, Salon Editor in Chief Joan Walsh and CNBC contributor Howard Dean have accused Fox News of racism; conservative crusader Andrew Breitbart has delighted in pushing a maliciously edited video smearing Shirley Sherrod and refused to apologize; Fox hosts have denounced mainstream organizations as Obama lap dogs for downplaying a case involving the New Black Panther Party; e-mails from an off-the-record discussion group showed one liberal pundit wishing for Rush Limbaugh's death and another suggesting that conservatives such as Fred Barnes be tarred as racist; Rolling Stone's Michael Hastings was accused of betraying journalistic ethics with the story that torpedoed Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and Hastings's critics were ripped as lackeys of the military establishment.
If you take a careful look at these examples, you'll see that Kurtz's argument is confused in multiple, albeit revealing ways. For instance, in order to make his case that left and right journalists are somehow equally culpable, he needs to cast Howard Dean and Shirley Sherrod as journalists—which, of course, they're not any more than Breitbart is. (Amazingly, Kurtz scored Sherrod, whose reputation was purposely and dishonestly assassinated by Breitbart and much of Fox News for using “excessive rhetoric” in her complaint of the treatment that caused her to become a national scandal and briefly lose her job.)
What's more, Kurtz equates the heinous and horrible statements made by these right-wingers in public forums with the private comments of individuals on “Journolist,” though, of course, one was purposely public and the other became public only when it stolen by Carlson's website, a controversy I addressed in my Nation column. (Though it was the private comments that caused an individual, Dave Weigel, to lose his job with Kurtz's employer, The Washington Post—a move that Kurtz endorsed.)
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But the notion that the nastiness and dishonesty that is coming from the left end of the spectrum is any comparable to that coming from Breitbart, Limbaugh, Beck, and the entire cast of characters at Fox News and on conservative talk radio would be laughable were it not mindlessly repeated by the allegedly nonideological guardians of objectivity at places like Politico and The Washington Post. It is also a license to lie, as Breitbart and company have demonstrated in both the ACORN and Sherrod examples.