Steve Benen highlights an article by E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post that sums up the main beef I have with the mainstream media:

If you doubt that there is a conservative inclination in the media, consider which arguments you hear regularly and which you don’t. When Rush Limbaugh sneezes or Newt Gingrich tweets, their views ricochet from the Internet to cable television and into the traditional media. It is remarkable how successful they are in setting what passes for the news agenda.

The power of the Limbaugh-Gingrich axis means that Obama is regularly cast as somewhere on the far left end of a truncated political spectrum. He’s the guy who nominates a “racist” to the Supreme Court (though Gingrich retreated from the word yesterday), wants to weaken America’s defenses against terrorism and is proposing a massive government takeover of the private economy. [...]

Democrats are complicit in building up Gingrich and Limbaugh as the main spokesmen for the Republican Party, since Obama polls so much better than either of them. But the media play an independent role by regularly treating far-right views as mainstream positions and by largely ignoring critiques of Obama that come from elected officials on the left.

My related critique is pretty simple. Over the past decade, the mainstream media has devolved into primarily a he-said/she-said, horse-race-announcer style of “reporting”. Instead of reporting on the facts underlying a given politician’s claim, news organizations too often take the easy road and simply frame a story as “The Left and Politician X says A” and “The Right and Politician Y says B”, without a serious discussion of which side is actually telling you the truth. In my view, this bears no resemblance to what journalism is supposed to be about.

I have no idea if this is ever going to get better but I’m not holding my breath.