The Safe Place

In America, political journalists in the business of objective news reporting pull themselves to the safe place of "both sides" reporting as a purported best practice in their field. When you play the "both sides" game you innoculate yourself from criticism of bias.

Reporting "both sides" is not always wrong or inaccurate, but forcing all political reporting into a "both sides" box is one of the great journalistic failures of 2016. And it continues.

On MSNBC this morning, Craig Melvin announced in his lead-in:

source:msnbc

"A disrupter in Congress...
How Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio Cortez draws the right's outrage and forces members on the left to look over their shoulders all at the same time.

Take a look at the subject and the predicate. Ocasio-Cortes just is a maverick - is that now that John McCain is no longer with us? Is that why - just to fulfill the press's need for a maverick?

And what action did she take to draw the right's outrage? Is it really outrage at some action? More likely she represents a threat or an opportunity. A threat if she is well liked, or an opportunity if she lets certain conservatives check all the boxes of their antagonism - a) female, b) outspoken, c) latina, and d) young. After her election, a Washington Examiner reporter tweeted a picture of her taken from behind, challenging her personal story by claiming her being too well dressed to be poor. That also gave him the excuse he needed to take a photo of her butt. More recently, an old video of her joyfully dancing with friends at Boston University was tweeted in an apparent effort to discredit her for being what? Young, attractive, energetic, and happy? That most recent episode demonstrates that something peculiar is going on here with the urgent attempts to take her down. Ordinarily a freshman member of Congress has very little power - one vote among 435. So the rapid fire attacks on AOC demonstrate that Republicans feel a need to make the story about her. It's a tell - something about the Republicans. Not AOC. That is the real news. The Republicans want AOC to be their spokesperson for the Democrats. And for that story, let's keep "the left" out of it. Don't bring in "the left" to force the appearance of balance. Just tell the real story.

"How conservative operatives jumped on the election of AOC to attract attention and foment anger and resentment of this new member of Congress as a way to distract from serious policy discussion"

Not perfect. But would be much better. Much closer to the truth.

Melvin made it worse after he came back from the "break."
"Love her or hate her Congress youngest member AOC has become a lightning rod for Republicans 
She has also become a darling of the left."

There he goes again. Both sides. You can't say anything about one side without invoking an equal and opposite statement about the other "side" That may seem harmless enough, but that approach has made it almost impossible to state the obvious as plain fact or even as the most likely set of facts in any situation where "both sides" leads to fallacy.

The presumption that both sides are always the same is a fallacy that flies in the face of the reality we have faced over the past two years. A man is president of the U.S. who did certain things and did not do certain things.

He never ran for or served in any government office or as a general in the military.
He never functioned in business in any way similar to ANY business leaders in the U.S. He just is not Rex Tillerson, let alone Jamie Dimon, Bill Gates, or anyone else.

He ran beauty pageants.
He ran casinos.
He traded in real estate, such as condos and office buildings. Much of his real estate was sold to Russian oligarchs and criminals.

And so on. Ignoring that stark asymmetry  with a both sides approach guarantees that reporting will distort the truth about Trump. Which is why we are where we are today. And failure of major news organizations to recognize that problem with their reporting guarantees that 2020 will be a replay of 2018.