On a warm Saturday, I get to clean my pool. Enough time to look into aqua blue gallons that turn with sweeps and strokes and wonder how the Press itself, forget the pool, became so pH imbalanced.
The acidity of the bias in coverage, reportage and opinion has since the 2000 election gone from opaque to oblique to outrageous.
Some are caricature, the NYT, Atlanta Constitution, New Yorker, Vanity Fair, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, etc.
Others, Washington Week, resort to less representation by seasoned intellectual writers and allow junior journalism grads to report on substance. The out come is superficial and snarky, side of the mouth reporting that aligns with the common left take on any subject from guns to God and gays.
If there is one word to describe the writing/research objectivity coming out of print newsrooms and broadcast managerial direction, it is 'predictable.'
Pick your subject and you can speak the dénouement of a story before the sign off.
D. Milbank, J. Klein, R. Martin, M. Isikoff, H. Fineman, C. Brown, all lines on a grid. Plot the issue and you can anticipate and predict exactly where they'll lift a rhetorical eyebrow or end a story. No need to vector the result with these folks.
How they got to a place in their lives where they believe that they should use their voices to degrade or promote is the unknown. Is it mere 'anchoritis'? Perhaps an inflated sense of self owing to the public light?
In film and TV production, some Directors will call out, "the actors may now step out of the hot lights" upon finality of a scene. For the little legion of print and broadcast purveyors of their own passions, it would be hard to imagine them acceding to the invitation to withdraw, even momentarily from the heat of the shinning light.
So, I seek to balance the acidity in my pool with the required alkalinity that will make the clean, clear water balanced again.
What is the pH balance of the Press in America today?