I've come to recognize a common theme in much of the media coverage of issues that appear to split on right versus left party lines. While there are certainly a number of issues on which there is legitimate and well founded disagreement, more and more, the right wing has come to control the media through the use of false equivalency. This has been the most powerful tool of the right wing because it exploits a vulnerability in how the media treats the average news story: their quest for neutrality.
The decline of news reporting
As corporate consolidation has made the news media more tightly focussed on the bottom line and trying to make news profitable, there has been far less emphasis on crticial analysis of what's reported. Critical analysis doesn't garner ratings and it's expensive, requiring quantities of smart people researching and validating what is reported. Thus, absent that analysis, today what qualifies as news falls into one of two categories:
1) Raw reporting of "facts"
2) Opinionated talking heads saying what they think
The right wing has been quite obvious in their domination of the second part, but the far more indious efforts have been to alter what is reported as "fact".
How false equivalency works
The general trick in this form of deception is to take an issue and portray your side as having equivalent legitimacy to the other side of the debate. You make any number of ridiculous claims, with little concern about the truth of them, but just say them in a way that sounds legitimate. You don't have to be correct, you just have to show up and fill in the other side of the debate. A very important example of this is the coverage of the corruption scandals currently plagueing Congress.
What we see are dozens of Republicans getting dragged into the quagmire, and one Democrat. To defend themselves, the Republicans claim that corruption is rampant throughout Congress and that Democrats do this too. What they gloss over is the radically different degrees of corruption, and that's where the false equivalency comes in.
The moment that best hilights the problem was when Dean went onto the Today show and talked to Katie Couric about the Abramoff scandal. She asked him about Democrats that took money from Abramoff, and none, not a single one did. When Dean tells her this, she doesn't believe him. Now, upon further analsysis she recognizes that it is true but sees it as a technicality because some Democrats did get money from clients of Abramoff.
But of course then Couric falls into the same trap of false equivalency and assumes that's the end of the story. As it turns out, those clients radically decreased their funding for Democrats when Abramoff was hired by them. This suggests that the Democrats, rather than being just as on the take as Republicans were actually punished by Abramoff for not being Republicans. She could pursue it further, but then wouldn't that demonstrate a liberal bias? Thus the trap.
Give 'em hell Harry
Another good example of this was the AP's Solomon reporting on the supposed corruption of Senator Harry Reid. Here, once again, the media searches out controversey and false equivalency and ends up ignoring critical facts. The reality is that Reid was given access to a boxing match by a state regulatory agency for free. He couldn't have paid them back for that access since they couldn't accept the payment legally. Furthermore, he ultimately voted against the interests of that regulatory agency. That's not corruption, that's good governance.
But of course AP portrays the situation as a clear case of the kind of rampant corruption Republicans have suggested is endemic in Congress as a whole, not primarily them. Reid took free passes to a match that lead to him voting against the theoretical bribers. This is not like Republicans writing in earmarks on behalf of lobbyists in exchange for direct financing of their campaigns. This is not a menu of bribes and what they can get you. This is not corrupt in the slightest and yet if you read that article, you'd think the Senate Minority leader was just another crook.
How the media makes it worse
The problem is that the media has substituted critical objective analysis, which is expensive, for "fair" reporting which is cheap. The gist of this is that every issue is treated as though there are two equivalent sides and you report both sides. This dialectical approach is easy for the media to achieve, and gives them this false sense that they are doing their job. They don't want to portray themselves as biased, partly because of the RWNM bashing about supposed liberal bias, but also because their sense of journalistic integrity suggests they should be impartial observers.
The problem with this is that it is actually destroying Democracy as we know it. Because of the false equivalency, every issue is now treated as having two sides, and the two sides boil down to an apparent case of "he said she said." No matter how truthful and factual the left may present something, the right can counter with completely absurd arguments and still be given an air of authority. They don't have to be right, they just need to appear authoritative.
That "polarity" we keep hearing about in the US is the side effect of this deliberate effort to undermine the truth by the right aided and abetted by the media. With each issue you get reporting of left and right, not correct and incorrect. Thus the electorate splits along party lines because ultimately their "facts" are being split along party lines.
But what about blogs?
One could argue that the critical analysis now lacking in the regular news media is achieved through citizen reporters on blogs, pointing out the fallacies, etc. The problem is that blogs are fragmented. If I lean right and I read Red State, I'm not going to see the debunking of my positions that happens on DailyKos, no matter how valid that debunking is.
As we move forward, that fragmentation is only going to get worse, and only those with sufficent intellectual curiosity and a willingness to challenge their own preconceived notions will be able to get some sense of the truth. The rest will get what they want to get.
The death of Democracy
How can we have a Democracy when, at the end of the day, we all get two different versions of the world. Iraq is fine. No it's not. Global warming exists. No it doesn't. The economy is doing fine. No it isn't. The more fragmented the media becomes, and the more profit-centric their motivations, the less we are going to be able to cross those divides and get a real sense of what's going on.
The two party system will become, in essence, the two nation system. We'll still all be living in the same country, but the divide between political opinions will become all the more stark. How can it be "we the people" when it's "us the people" and "them the people"?