Twosiderism, the MSM, and Kool-Aid drinking

(Sorry that I had originally published this, and backdate published it, before it was ready.)

 I've used that last phrase elsewhere about people like Aaron Maté, Max Blumenthal, Mark Ames, Jordan Chariton, Yasha Levine, Matt Taibbi, and others.

They're a loose cluster of people who claim to think outside the box of what I call the bipartisan foreign policy establishment here in the U.S.

However, they carry this to an extreme, and that's the twosiderism on their own. Especially on things like China's Uyghur detention camps, they're willing to drink Xi Jinping's bullshit or whatever just because the U.S. foreign policy establishment calls him out for this. (As does most the Western foreign policy establishment.)

Well, beyond two wrongs not making a right, this is not really outside-the-box thinking. Instead, it's creating your own new box.

On things like the New York Post's story about Hunter and Joe Biden, Glenn Greenwald has been a willing member. And, he too is wrong.

Yes, it's Vox, Ezra-land, but Jay Rosen, who is interviewed there by Sean Illing, isn't Ezra Klein.

Rosen just mentions the Post piece in passing as part of a larger issue. And that is that political journalists have for decades more and more treated political reporting as insider baseball. 

There are two other problems he mentions.

One is commercial pressures. Here, the equivalent of the old "if it bleeds it leads" would be "if Trump tweets he leads."

The second? The MSM's long desire for "the view from nowhere" or "equal time." Well, on broadcast media, the Fairness Doctrine hasn't existed since Reagan. Print media has never been bound by any such thing. Electronic media of the Internet era of course isn't.

Rosen does say that leaders in the MSM have adapted a little bit to Trump exploiting the "fairness" issue. Not as much as they need to, but somewhat. The "if Trump tweets he leads"? In their DNA, though.

To the degree they are truly playing inside baseball, the Times etc. deserve a callout. But, where are the stenos calling out the Post slouching more toward Gomorrah? Or the Wall Street Journal making its news pages a harbor of coronavirus conspiracy theories, herd immunity puffery and antimasking?