This is from a few days ago, via:

Glenn Kessler is a fact checker. His official job is to evaluate whether politicians’ claims are true or not. But this suggests he sees his job as not evaluating whether the Bain outsourcing claims are true, but what the motivations are for people disclosing them. That’s not his remit, folks. He is a fact-checker. And even if the SEC Commissioner was providing the information out of a sense of partisan gain, so what? Doesn’t make it any more or less factual. Does Deep Throat now retroactively not count because he wasn’t really Henry Kissinger? And his complete black-and-white view of the matter doesn’t suit the complications of the issue, I agree entirely with this.

I remember reading a book by the guy who took over IBM in the mid-90s, Lou Gerstner. IBM was in serious trouble when he took over–its core PC business was pretty much toast–so he turned it into a service-oriented company instead (his successor even sold the PC business later on). He talked about how the biggest obstacle to this transformation was the culture of IBM, how certain ways of doing things–which had once been good, smart ideas–wound up becoming calcified dogma so that they became an end in themselves, even if they didn’t work. People forgot that they were just ideas that people had to solve specific problems. Bipartisan balance in the press is much like this. In the ’50s and ’60s, it was a sign of professionalism, of having abandoned the nasty, dubious, self-interested partisan practices of yesteryear. (And, of course, the parties basically agreed on everything, so there wasn’t much of a downside!) But as the decades have passed, and several generations of newspeople have come of age imbued with the amber glow of balance, it’s gone from being a best practice sort of thing to an end in itself. Kessler’s hilarious obliviousness just shows how D.C. journalists can’t really make an argument for balance because it’s not something that journalists argue about. It’s like gravity, it’s just there. Problem is, the nation and the media are in very different places now than they were during Eisenhower’s era–the nonpartisan, mainstream media is being edged out by opinionated news and commentary. Its level of trust has been on decline for as long as I’ve been alive, and it’s only getting worse. These are the problems. But the ideology of this crowd is not fixing the problem–the mainstream media has, if anything, become even more obsessed with balance in recent years, and it hasn’t fixed the decline. I do not believe the public only wants opinion and commentary, but whatever they want from the news, the media simply isn’t providing it. This is a group that desperately needs to question its assumptions and to do some soul-searching right away, because what it’s doing just isn’t working, and every Glenn Kessler is just one more brick in the wall. I have zero confidence they will do this, though–being as Thomas Mann and Norm Ormstein were completely ignored for suggesting that Republicans have manipulated Washington to their advantage, this generation of journalists shows little ability for introspection or often even critical thought, so the decline will continue, little by little, because they’re unwilling to listen and too comfortable with the boundaries of their world to change. Yup, it’s like an ersatz version of late-period The Sopranos.