It’s no secret that I enjoy bashing the mainstream media. Particularly the cable news networks, where news stories are mere placeholders between Misbehaving Celebrities, White Women In Peril, and Partisans Screaming At Each Other Without A Capable Moderator. The media is too credulous, too easily cowed, too revenue-driven, and they’ve bowed to a decade’s worth of bashing by completely abdicating judgement, even when it comes to unambiguous things like scientific fact. It’s safe to say that I’ve created a web persona based in no small part on telling you what a bunch of silly, clueless bunglers the mainstream media really are.

By the standards of the internet, though, I’m their lapdog.

Inspired by the success of the right’s campaign against the “biased media,” my brothers on the left have jumped into the bashing game with both feet. My favorite lefty blogs are now full of the same stuff that you see on the right. Here’s what both sides seem to agree upon:

  • The MSM is working for the other side.
  • They’re completely incompetent.
  • They’re terrifyingly competent.
  • They’re dupes.
  • They’re cowards.
  • They’re the tool of evil geniuses.
  • They cunningly avoid reporting the other side’s failings.
  • They pick on our guys unjustly and without mercy.

And they say that there’s no common ground in American politics.

I’ve gone to a few blogs this week (on both sides of the aisle) and entered a couple of comments suggesting that we temper our criticism a bit, maybe tar the media with a slightly narrower brush, maybe acknowledge that there are reporters all over the world fulfilling a valuable, necessary, and perhaps even heroic function. At best I’ve been ignored. At worst… well, I can’t really say, though I suppose that with therapy I may eventually be able to point out where they touched me on a suitably anonymous-looking doll.

Another thing you can find in any blog’s comment section (if not in the blog itself) is the assertion that the MSM’s days are numbered because of the bold new science of blogging. Despite the fact that just about every bloggy rant contains a link to a story written by an actual reporter doing his or her actual job, the fans of blogtopia are apparently looking forward to a day when all news is comprised solely of regular folks’ commentary on the news. The deep logical inconsistency here would crash any personal computer (or even blow it up, if you’re using Windows ME), but it seems to have the same effect on bloggers that bullets do on movie monsters: They stomp on, enraged and roaring and unaccountably stronger than ever, grab the scantily-clad heroine, and head off for the nearest skyscraper. [Or back into the swamp. Or to their underground lair. It really depends on the blogger…]

Even as I type, I know that there are hoards of bloggers out there filling in the Universal Political Blogging Template, “If [our guy] did anything like what [their guy] is doing, the media would be all over it!” Or “Finally, even the mainstream media is finding the balls to report on what a [derogatory noun] [their guy] really is!” Or “But you’ll never catch those cowards/conspirators in the MSM asking [their guy] about THAT!”

If you were to cruise the left and right wing blogs this week, you’d learn, for example, these two facts about the mainstream media:

  • They never report anything good that happens in Iraq.
  • They never report anything bad that happens in Iraq.

From this you might conclude that the media never reports anything that happens in Iraq. [Ironically, this is actually the case over at the popular muslim-bashing right wing blog Little Green Footballs, because mentioning any negative event in Iraq is playing directly into the left’s hands, while mentioning anything positive leads to the idea that Muslims might be capable of running a free, democratic society. So even complaining about the media’s coverage of Iraq is kept to minimum over there.]

We lefties have even taken to employing the infamous Coulter Fallacy, wherein a newspaper is criticized for something that appeared on its Op-Ed page as if it were part of the paper’s news content. These columnists are mercilessly hounded as though they were the living embodiment of What’s Wrong With That Paper, when in fact they’re just bloggers of the print world. The fact that they’ve discovered a way to get paid for writing down every passing thought really shouldn’t be held against them (damn them to hell).

I’m not arguing that the left and the right are morally equivalent. I’m a liberal, after all, so I know that we’re a collective of clear-eyed rationalists while they’re a bunch of blinded, frothing ideologues. I mean, that’s a given. But I’m loathe to embrace the new left’s adoption of the right’s relentless-screaming-about-the-media tactic. Just because it works doesn’t make it a good strategy. The race to see who can destroy journalism faster can only have one outcome: More Celebrity Trials.

So I’ll come right out and say it, though my blogging license is sure to be revoked: The mainstream media is more often than not a good thing. They report stuff. They have well-publicized standards, and if they don’t live up to them, at least we know what they’re not living up to. I like them, and I’m glad they’re here.

Whew. Okay, now let me tell you why they suck…