Oh media, you irrepressible scamp

There's a lot of talk about the effectiveness and the methods of the media going around, particularly in respect to the way the media is covering the health care fight. It started a bit when Walter Cronkite died and there were numerous snarky comments about how the newspeople covering his death and trying to honor his contributions don't seem to be able to perform the basic functions of their job in the way that Cronkite did. But the discussion has started up again as we see more and more polls showing that large sections of the public believe various lies about death panels and new polls showing that despite all the coverage of health care, people still don't understand what is being discussed.

Ahh, but then the media doesn't actually cover the substance of health care debate, it covers the politics. As Paul Krugman points out in the Times: all the media does is partake in horse race reporting. Why? Short answer: they aren't smart enough to cover the policy parts. Long answer: they aren't smart enough, it's easier to do politics, they're lazy, making factual assertions is scary. But then again this isn't surprising, the media has long reduced coverage of everything to horse race politicking and actual knowledge has to be sought out through the labyrinthine tubes of the intarwebs. This is the profession where a professor can be heralded as a genius for opining in print that the solution to the types of problems is that maybe, just maybe, newspapers should fact check a little harder, and maybe, just maybe, that they shouldn't print the lies in the first place. Use "news judgment."

But maybe the media just isn't good at getting the facts right and should stick to opinions about who won what political battle and how the success of a bill lies not in its content but in who conceded the most and who can claim victory. I mean just look at what happened when the Times tried to speak factually about Cronkite:

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite’s career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite’s coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. “The CBS Evening News” overtook “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents’ reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of “The CBS Evening News” in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International. An appraisal on July 18 about Walter Cronkite’s career misstated the name of the ABC evening news broadcast. While the program was called “World News Tonight” when Charles Gibson became anchor in May 2006, it is now “World News With Charles Gibson,” not “World News Tonight With Charles Gibson.”

Yeah.......stick to the horse race stuff. Just...just...yeah.