Reading Bobcat Hughes's diary yesterday about Katie Couric and her hack job on the Edwardses, got me to wondering. After several years now of blogging and letters-to-the editor about quality and bias in the MSM, have we made any progress? Those of us out here in the reality-based community have pointed out so many times the laziness and intellectual dishonesty of the MSM. Have the MSM heard? Are they taking the criticisms to heart and trying to improve?
At first blush, it certainly doesn't look like it, when, after all this time, we get such a sorry exhibition of "journalism" by Couric as she showed on Sunday.
It gets worse. Among the punditry, Bill "I've never been right about anything" Kristol is still out there showing his face and proudly exposing further ineptitude nearly every day. We have the examples of Joe Klein, and Tom Friedman, and Cokie Roberts, and Tim Russert and...
OK, the pundits are not necessarily supposed to be giving facts or pretending to be journalists, any of them. They're supposed to be giving their opinions, no matter how stupid and how consistently wrong. So we can cut them a bit of slack, and say "just ignore them."
But the journalists, and the news organizations (don't count Fox, it's not a news organization), the ones who would like to be taken seriously: What about them? I still see too often (and see too often diaried for those issues I don't see or miss) problems in the MSM with lazy journalism, with repetition of talking points (usually Republican), with plain, old bias showing. As many times as we (mostly bloggers, but even before blogging, writers of letters-to-editors) have pointed out the sloppiness, the laziness, the incompetence, it still keeps happening. The MSM still seem to think that doing a good job means giving equal time to Michael Crichton's or Jim Inhofe's opinions on global climate change whenever they do an article on a new analysis published in a scientific journal and coauthored by 30 climate scientists. Or they come out and do hack jobs like Couric's (to get their ratings up?).
So my question is this: Are we making any progress? Has anyone noticed even the slightest improvement in the quality of the output of the MSM over, say, the last three years? If so, who has improved the most? And who hasn't improved, or gotten worse?
Are we just spinning our wheels?