Fair and Balanced

With the election over, the losers are bound to do some Monday-morning quarterbacking.  This happens after every election, whether the country goes Red or Blue.  Indeed, the football analogy is apt--a football team takes the time to analyze a loss so as to not commit the same errors.  Unfortunately, in this era of meta-journalism (reporting about reporting and reporters, as if that were news), much of the blame is bound to be placed on the media itself, and I saw a good bit of this by the folks at Fox News (and other outlets) this morning.  To be clear, the media has a strong influence on any election, as indeed they should, since their job is to inform the voting public.  It's been said that the media contributed to Ford's loss to Carter in '76--when the public saw that Ford was up in the polls and likely to win, the public was reminded that they were unhappy with him.  However, recognizing that the media influences an election is not the same as saying that the media was responsible for the outcome of an election.  As I've already pointed out, simply noting that MSNBC reported more negatively about Romney than Fox did about Obama is absolutely void of meaning until content is offered (that is, quantity is meaningless without quality).  This is where fair and balanced comes in.  Often the public assumes that fair and balanced means that for each negative story reported about Romney, the same network must report a negative story about Obama.  This, of course, requires a news network to make up news on occasion just so as to fulfill this false sense of balance.  In other words, in order to do their job, journalists are forced to abandon journalistic integrity.  Scott Whitlock complained that MSNBC mocked Romney's international gaffes while fawning over Obama's world tour.  Fox News' Rich Noyes presented "Five Ways the Mainstream Media Tipped the Scales for Obama".  As I see it, there are two ways to react to these claims (not to say accusations).  First, you can deny.  This is the simplest reaction, and the one which will be chosen by most, I suspect.  Second, you can admit that this is precisely correct.  MSNBC especially took Romney to task, and much more often and much more harshly than they did Obama (and more than Fox did Obama).  This is because Romney said some of the dumbest things imaginable during this campaign (the Putin comment), contradicted himself over and over, and chose a terrible running mate (only Palin could have been worse).  Obama certainly made his own mistakes on the trail, but were I to recount them now, I'd be falling into the trap of that false notion of fair and balanced I noted above.  The articles by Whitlock and Noyes are intended to show that certain media outlets are not fair nor balanced, implying that they are not doing their jobs.  Instead, with their lists and descriptions of the Romney campaign's errors and misjudgments, they are really making that case the the media outlets they have in mind have done their job quite well.  In effect, they are asking, "why should Romney be taken to task for a mistake someone else... noticed.  Maybe Romney should call Bob Loblaw.