The Nature of Things

One of the most annoying things about this presidential campaign, or politics in general in this country, is the false equivalence between the two sides that the media has invented, and that has become an ingrained part of our national consciousness and vocabulary. How often have you heard, "Both sides do it!"? But, in fact, both sides don't do it, and pretending that two things are equal doesn't make it true. Facts are still facts, even in 2016. Jen Sorensen's four-panel cartoon skewers the utter ridiculousness of the concept. Two. More. Weeks.

Already the 2016 presidential campaign is well under way which has had me thinking back to the last campaign in 2011-12 and how the media covered it.  There is a strong belief among conservatives that the mainstream media is always against them and that the way they write and talk about things is invariably slanted toward the left. An actual review of that coverage in 2011 told quite a different story. I suspect a similar review conducted in 2015 would show much the same thing.  For example, that well-known "liberal" media outlet The New York Times has yet to write a positive news story about Hillary Clinton. Indeed, one could make a pretty strong argument that, for whatever reasons, the paper has engaged in a vendetta against her. At the same time, the Times generally seems to be straining to report positive things about the Republican candidates. I wrote the following post on October 17, 2011 after the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism release...