Vanity Fair's Todd Purdum writes that Washington is broken, a proposition with which I am not inclined to disagree. I do, however, want to follow-up on one passage:

The mainstream media have published lengthy reports that, by any objective standard, should have thoroughly refuted the idea that Obama is a Muslim, or was educated in a madrassa, or favors the creation of “death panels” to ration end-of-life care. It doesn't matter. A national Harris poll this spring found that 57 percent of Republicans believe that Obama is in fact a Muslim (and, for good measure, 38 percent believe he is “doing many of the things that Hitler did,” and 24 percent believe that Obama actually “may be the anti-Christ”). Obama's senior adviser Valerie Jarrett looks back wistfully to a time when credible people could put a stamp of reliability on information and opinion: “Walter Cronkite would get on and say the truth, and people believed the media,” she says. Today, no single media figure or outlet has that power to end debate, and in pursuit of “objectivity,” most honest news outlets draw the line at saying flatly that something or other is untrue, even when it plainly is.

While Purdum is critical of the refusal of “honest news outlets” to state flatly that something is untrue, he is too kind. I would submit that when a news organization knows something is “plainly” untrue, but refuses to say so, it ceases to be an honest news outlet. And that the news media might not be quite so broken if people who understand the ways in which news organizations fail their readers weren't too polite to spell it out. Journalists who stop short of saying flatly that something they know is untrue is untrue may think they're being “objective,” but they aren't, as Purdum indicates. They're favoring falsehood over truth. They aren't being honest. But if we keep saying they are, they won't change.

The modern lack of a Cronkite figure, and the role that absence plays in the pervasiveness of misinformation and the lack of broad public understanding of important truths is a fairly common observation; I've probably made it or something similar a few hundred times. But the good old days weren't always good -- and public discourse circa 1975 was not uniformly well-informed, high-minded and myth-free. The presence of a Cronkite figure -- Walter Cronkite, in fact -- didn't keep a not-insignificant number of people from believing, for example, that the moon landing was faked:

[M]illions of people doubt the authenticity of the lunar missions, much to NASA's exasperation. Over the years, the agency's public services department went through reams of paper answering incredulous schoolchildren, teachers, librarians - and even US lawmakers like former Sen. Alan Cranston (D-California) and Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-South Carolina), who had written to NASA relaying the doubts of some of their constituents. …

[W]hen Knight Newspapers (one of the two groups that later merged to form Knight-Ridder Inc.) polled 1,721 US residents one year after the first moon landing, it found that more than 30 percent of respondents were suspicious of NASA's trips to the moon. A July 20, 1970, Newsweek article reporting the results of the poll cited “an elderly Philadelphia woman who thought the moon landing had been staged in an Arizona desert” and a Macon, Georgia, housewife who questioned how a TV set that couldn't pull in New York stations could possibly “receive signals from the moon.”

There have always been, and will always be, a distressingly large number of people who believe crazy things that are obviously not true. That isn't new. One thing that is new is the ease with which those people are able to hijack the national debate, in part due to technological advancements and in part due to the widespread belief among “honest news outlets” that crackpots and dimwits and liars and frauds must be taken seriously.

There's value in exposing those who traffic in nutty claims, particularly when they do so while trying to appear reasonable to the majority of Americans who aren't inclined to believe that Barack Obama is Kenyan or Bill Clinton is a murderer. But there's a difference between exposing charlatans and frauds and doing their jobs for them. News organizations risk doing the latter when they obsess over whether the President is really a socialist Kenyan dictator rather than, say, what's the best way to bring down unemployment.

Crazy conspiracy theories and urban legends aren't the only politically salient misconceptions -- and weren't in Cronkite's day, either. And it's quite possible that the large number of Americans who don't know (for example) that government spending can stimulate a struggling economy is a greater threat to the nation's future, and to a functional democracy, than the number of Americans who think the President is Muslim.