From Paul Krugman's NYT blog: (posted Aug. 14)
Journamalism
Two contrasting headlines from two very different news outlets.
New York Times: “False ‘Death Panel’ Rumor Has Some Familiar Roots”
Politico: “Sarah Palin and 'death panels' - is she helping or hurting her political future?*
* I think the HL may have been changed to Sarah Palin doubles down on 'death panels'
This gets at one of my biggest gripes: reporting that focuses on the political game without ever informing readers or viewers about the actual facts. Back in 2004 I did a survey of news coverage on the rival Kerry and Bush health plans; on TV, at least, there were a number of reports on how the plans were playing politically, but none — none at all — on what was actually in the plans.
Kudos to Jim Rutenberg and Jackie Calmes for actually informing readers. As a correspondent points out, however, it might have been helpful to remind readers that the reasonable-sounding Sen. Grassley of paragraphs 6 and 7 was the same Sen. Grassley mentioned in paragraph 2 as one of the people spreading the smear.
In an Aug. 14 column, Krugman noted he wrote the following in 2007 about Barack Obama's call for an end to bitter partisanship:
(A) “different kind of politics” was a vain hope, that any Democrat who made it to the White House would face “an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false.”
So, how’s it going?