I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

In other words, the editor would like to know if readers want to see erroneous statements pointed out as such, or whether the paper should remain "objective" and simply recite whatever statements its "newsmakers" make unchallenged. When hundreds of commenters questioned his sanity, Brisbane closed the comments and typed the mother of all bitchy replies:

A large majority of respondents weighed in with, yes, you moron, The Times should check facts and print the truth.

That was not the question I was trying to ask. My inquiry related to whether The Times, in the text of news columns, should more aggressively rebut “facts” that are offered by newsmakers when those “facts” are in question. I consider this a difficult question, not an obvious one.

This is a difficult question? To understand why, consider his disastrously poor logic and mangled interpretation of two poorly chosen examples to illustrate his point. In the original post:

As cited in an Adam Liptak article on the Supreme Court, a court spokeswoman said Clarence Thomas had “misunderstood” a financial disclosure form when he failed to report his wife’s earnings from the Heritage Foundation. The reader thought it not likely that Mr. Thomas “misunderstood,” and instead that he simply chose not to report the information.

Then he explains what a difficult moral dilemma this is in the follow-up:

If you think that should be rebutted in the text of a story, it means you think a reporter can crawl inside the mind of a Supreme Court justice and report back. Or perhaps you think the reporter should just write that the “misunderstanding” excuse is bull and let it go at that. I would respectfully suggest that’s not a good approach.

This is where I start to question what journalism school graduated this dipshit. No, it is not necessary to "crawl inside the mind of a Supreme Court justice and report back." Your reporter could, you know, investigate and report something along the lines of "In his 20 years on the bench, Mr. Thomas had filled out the form completely and correctly, including statements of his wife's income, every year. It is therefore unclear how Mr. Thomas could have misunderstood the form this year since the reporting procedure has not changed."

See? Look how easy that was. No head-crawling-in required. No journalistic experience required. Just a basic understanding of how to challenge a subjective claim (such as "I forgot" or "I was unaware that…"). Then he parses his second example:

Another example: on the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches “apologizing for America,” a phrase to which Paul Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the “post-truth” stage…If so, then perhaps the next time Mr. Romney says the president has a habit of apologizing for his country, the reporter should insert a paragraph saying, more or less:

“The president has never used the word ‘apologize’ in a speech about U.S. policy or history. Any assertion that he has apologized for U.S. actions rests on a misleading interpretation of the president’s words.”

Yeah, or rather than picking nits over the use of specific words the reporter could, you know, ask his interviewee to cite some goddamn evidence. "Mr. Romney, can you provide an example of President Obama apologizing for America?" Again: look how easy this is. I'm not even a journalist.

A clearer, less ambiguous example is the Republicans' repeated use over the last several years of the statement "Social Security is going broke" or variations thereof. Left untouched, it is indisputable that Social Security is solvent for at least 30, and likely around 40, additional years. That is very far from "broke", and even the qualifier that it is "going" broke is ludicrous given the timeframe. This statement should never, ever be reported unchallenged. Yet in practice it is never challenged. It is simply repeated after phrases like "Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said…"

It is legitimate to wonder how an editor from the New York Times could fail to understand this fundamental concept, or how he would need to solicit input from the mob to determine whether his reporters should practice basic journalism. But for someone so thoroughly steeped in, and partially responsible for the growth of, the Journalism as Stenography model, Brisbane's tentativeness is understandable. Modern journalism isn't about reporting and investigating and fact-checking, per se; it is about churning out a product, one that will appeal to the largest possible number of people. Muckraking is out, and keeping the sources happy is in. This is why we have "journalism" consisting of rehashed (if that) press releases.

Brisbane's comments are the logical end of the False Equivalency model of journalism, wherein every story must be presented with two equally valid sides. It's the "Some people say X, but other people say Y" technique writ large. How did this come to be? I think there are two answers to that question.

First, like on any other issue, people tend to idealize the past. American journalism has always been fairly weak on challenging people in positions of authority. Hearst and Pulitzer papers were hardly stuffed to the gills with Ida Tarbells. They were yellow rags with bleeding leads, and selling more copies was the only thing the editors cared about. While there may have been a greater emphasis on fact-checking as a result of fierce competition among newspapers, it's not like there's a golden age of investigative journalism in our recent past.

Second, the newspaper industry is dying, and fast. It is desperate to hold on to its remaining readers, and those readers are old. Really old. Old people don't want to be told that things they believe are not true. They're also the most likely to carp about Librul Bias if they aren't given an option to choose which "side" they will accept on any given story. The "Some people say X, but other people say Y" format was designed with their needs and wants in mind.

Brisbane is sad to watch here not because he is so clueless – and he is – but because you get the sense that he knows the right thing to do here and he realizes that he cannot do it. Editors are not editors because they understand journalism particularly well; they are in positions of authority because they understand the publication's need to market itself to the widest possible audience. They are gatekeepers who exist not to enforce the standards of good reporting but to screen every story through the question, "How can we write this story without conservatives getting mad at us?" And we will continue to be overwhelmingly screwed as a society as long as we define objectivity as quoting official sources uncritically and presenting opposing viewpoints as inherently equally valid.

The fallacy, of course, is that viewers are getting anything of value out of debates in which the candidates rarely answer the questions, usually stick to well rehearsed, soundbite-style remarks, and generally act like a bunch of high schoolers vying for Homecoming Court. Despite that, debates reel in the viewers. For example, Saturday evening's ABC debate posted "solid ratings" of 6.3 million viewers even though it had to compete with NFL playoff games. It's a positive sign that people want to tune in and watch these circuses in an effort to learn something about the political process, I suppose.

Wait. Are those ratings actually encouraging? The media reports on that subject lack context. What does 6.3 million viewers (or even 7.6 million from the highest rated of all the debates, back in December) mean?

First of all, it's obviously not a big number in the context of the voting-eligible population as a whole. It's also not a very big number in terms of…anything else on TV, really. That NFL playoff game opposite the Saturday debate had an audience literally five times larger (31.8 million). Even that highest rated debate with its 7.6 million viewers pales in comparison to the most pedestrian primetime offerings on the networks. The weekly Nielsen Top 25 shows that the current 25th-ranked show on TV is something called "Rules of Engagement" on CBS. Last week this show – a rerun episode, no less – got 8.5 million viewers. The best debate ratings can't even post the kind of ratings that get network shows cancelled. It's hard to feel great about our prospects or the level of political efficacy among the electorate when interest in what is supposedly the biggest of all electoral contests is so dismal.

Pessimistically, we could look at this as yet another indicator of how dumb, immature, and uninterested the average American is. We'd rather watch a blowout football game or some lowest common denominator CBS series than to watch debates among presidential candidates. Then again, without defending the viewing habits of the American public it is reasonable to suspect that people are intentionally avoiding these debates because there is so little content. The GOP field is a clown car of full of knuckleheads and they're revealing almost nothing of substance during the debates. Even if I feel like I should be watching, my brain understands that I'm not going to learn anything useful from doing so. So we see misleading reports of "good ratings" suggesting enthusiasm for or at least attentiveness to the election. Debates might deliver higher ratings than the network's available alternatives, but that's hardly an impressive claim.

Two things about this are amazing. One is that in the pantheon of Texas governors, Perry will manage to be remembered as "the dumb one." The second is that I feel slightly bad for Rick Perry.

If there is a technical term for what happened to Perry during this debate, I don't know what it is. I do know that it happens to me all the damn time. I get paid to stand in front of large groups of people and talk every day, and then I do it again in the evening for fun. Regardless of my level of preparation, the use of notes, or experience with the material, I still encounter these Perry moments regularly. Sometimes you just…go blank. It happens. Unless you're lying or happen to be having such a moment right now, you'll admit that it happens to you too.

Yes, I got plenty of laughs out of seeing this and exploited it for more than its fair share of jokes over the past few days. That said, this is a better indicator of how poisonous the modern media environment has become than of Perry's lack of suitability for the presidency. There are dozens if not hundreds of reasons that Rick Perry should never enter the White House without a ticket for the sightseeing tour in his hand; this is not necessarily one of them. Yet it took this – something he forgot rather than any of the ridiculous shit he actually said – to knock him from the rank of Serious Candidate.

To understand what is happening to Perry is to make sense of the millions of dollars campaigns spend on image control. You can campaign on the most idiotic ideas on Earth and the Beltway media will take you seriously if you have enough money, but god forbid you do something that lands you in a viral video clip. Then you're radioactive. Ask George "Macaca" Allen or Howard Dean and they'll tell you how an entire campaign can be derailed by a 15 second YouTube clip. The key, as many campaigns have figured out, is to spout whatever brand of insanity most pleases one's targeted donors and to "look presidential" while doing it. Be crazy, be an idiot, or be downright scary. Just don't look silly while you're doing it.

I would love to look back at 2012 as the election in which Rick Perry was soundly rejected by voters because he has been a disaster as Governor of Texas, he seems to consider nullification and secession to be intriguing concepts, and he is the worst kind of right-wing populist loon. Instead we'll note that he was the updated version of Howard Dean, the guy whose campaign ended when he made himself look stupid for a moment on camera. It's a sad commentary on both our media and the electorate that Perry was taken seriously when he proposed eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency, and given the gong only after he forgot its name.

I will spare you the video clip where her statement is discussed by Many Serious People, but here is what she said during the most recent debate regarding Rick Perry's executive order to have the HPV vaccine required in Texas:

"To have innocent little 12-year-old girls be forced to have a government injection through an executive order is just flat-out wrong," Bachmann said. "Little girls who have a potentially dangerous reaction to this drug don't get a mulligan," she said. "You don't get a do-over."

Afterward, she elaborated, explaining that "a mother" approached her after the debate:

She told me that her little daughter took that vaccine, that injection. And she suffered from mental retardation thereafter. The mother was crying when she came up to me last night. I didn't know who she was before the debate. This is the very real concern and people have to draw their own conclusions.

Let's briefly overlook the terrifying fact that the woman who wants to be president was repeating this story into a camera almost immediately after a complete stranger (or so she claims) said this to her in a chance encounter. Apparently that's the Bachmann mental vetting process – "Someone came up to me and told me vaccines made their daughter retarded. The best thing is for everyone to draw their own conclusions about the efficacy of vaccines based on anecdotal evidence." But I digress.

Having seen her statements, look again at CNN's link headline, "Bachmann's HPV claims disputed," in reference to the AMA and other medical organizations resoundingly rejecting her crackpot anti-vaccine statements. Only in a media environment in which Fox News and the cultural right have truly Won would this be summed up with such a headline.

"Claims disputed" might be an appropriate tag for candidates bickering over tax proposals – "Perry says cutting taxes would increase revenues, but Paul Krugman disagrees in today's column." Bachmann's statement, aside from being dangerously flippant and not thought-out, isn't "disputed." It's wrong. In an honest world the headline would read "Bachmann wrong about vaccines" or "Major GOP candidate does not understand basic science" or "Bachmann chooses anecdote from stranger over science."

But of course we don't live in that honest world. We live in one in which the media have been thoroughly cowed into "treating both sides fairly" – treating opposing viewpoints as equally valid regardless of whether the issue is objective or subjective – and are hyper-sensitive about offending their core daytime audience of stay-home moms with medical degrees from Parenting Message Board University.

For all the accusations of elitism on the part of the media, this is an instance in which a sense of superiority would come in handy. The media see their job as stenography, to quote people and then "let the reader decide" which viewpoint sounds better. What they should be doing is reporting facts. Michele Bachmann is wrong about the HPV vaccine, and she is wrong to repeat a story told by some random yahoo when its central claim has no factual basis. In fact the evidence is overwhelming that nothing like what this stranger told Bachmann can be caused by the HPV vaccine. But instead of reading a headline like, "Bachmann repeats debunked pseudoscience, offers inaccurate statement on vaccines" we see that her statement is "disputed," as though it is controversial, actively debated, and as-yet unresolved.

I don't know if that's true, but it isn't hard to believe. The media have a strong interest in crowds of freaks, and they remain interested in such groups long beyond the point at which anyone else does. To the public, even among racists, the Klan rated a strong "Who gives a rat's ass?" by the Eighties. But among the media the response remained the same: make sure you get a burning cross picture and a few good quotes about the Jews or something. Journalistic interest in the group persisted beyond its relevance to the point that reporters began outnumbering participants.

Last week in Naples, Florida a group of around 15 journalists showed up to cover a book signing by Witch/failed Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell. Exactly five members of the public attended the event, one of them apparently an odd teen who asked her to sign his book on demonology. Having five people in attendance doesn't even qualify something as an event. Basement punk shows can get 50 people to show up with little effort. The average PTA meeting has five times that many attendees. I could do a comedy show in Naples, Florida and get five people to show up.

I understand why the O'Donnell event is of interest to the media while events with larger crowds are not: they want to see the Tea Party Freaks in all their glory. They want misspelled signs, crackpots with guns, old people ranting about the gub'mint, flags aplenty, and some dipshit dressed as Paul Revere. Fox News aside, Teabaggers are entertainment for journalists and comedy relief in news broadcasts. The problem, of course, is that the continued obsession with the Tea Party ignores the fact that the Tea Party doesn't really exist anymore. For any number of plausible reasons the people showing up to events in 2009 and early 2010 aren't showing up these days. Tea Party USA is just another hacky activist group – as it always has been, arguably – fronted by dinosaur Beltway insiders like Ralph Reed and Dick Armey. It no longer even has the veneer of a populist uprising. Without the crowds of freaks it's neither entertaining nor a believable front group for a bunch of tycoons. It's just another fad entering its 15th minute of fame, a hollowed out orange peel from which the media are attempting to squeeze the last drop of ratings value. The unfortunate consequence is to further the false impression that the Tea Party continues to be politically relevant.

Unfortunately the media love elections because they are good for ratings, and they are good for ratings because the media have turned elections into a sporting event. Instead of Marv Albert telling us which team is leading and trailing throughout the basketball game, we have blow-dried anchors constantly reporting poll results to let us know "Who's ahead?" even though the answer is almost always "no one" once margin of error is taken into account. Instead of broken down, concussed ex-NFL players giving color commentary while scribbling on the Telestrator, we have washed up campaign consultants (Paul Begala, Bill Bennett, Alex Castellanos, etc.) letting us know What It All Means and What Voters Want. Academics call the excessive emphasis on day-to-day poll results "Horse Race coverage", a phenomenon that eliminates issues and reduces most coverage to reporting how various groups or individuals reacted to a campaign event. The latter – the instant big-picture analysis phenomenon – is just a lazy, stupid way of boiling the election down to a 25 word explanation for lazy, stupid viewers.

These phenomena have been affecting the way elections are covered for years. They are beginning to affect the election itself.

The Ames (aka Iowa) Straw Poll is the dumbest event in politics by a country mile, even compared to legendary shitshows like CNN/YouTube debates, the Thanksgiving sparing of a turkey, and the national conventions. Nothing says Scientific Poll quite like a $30 fee to participate. And nothing says Representative Sample quite like 15,000 non-randomly selected Iowans. This thing is so stupid that a candidate could dramatically alter the results by investing a pittance (in the context of modern campaigns) in a bunch of tour buses and admission tickets for the straw poll gathering. About $50,000 could easily bring 1000-1200 ringers to boost a candidate's showing, which is amazing when we realize how little distance in raw vote totals separates the candidates.

1. Michele Bachmann: 4,823
2. Ron Paul: 4,671
3. Tim Pawlenty: 2,293
4. Rick Santorum: 1,657
5. Herman Cain: 1,456
6. Rick Perry: 718
7. Mitt Romney: 567
8. Newt Gingrich: 385
9. Jon Huntsman: 69
10. Thad McCotter: 35

Yep, for a minimal investment, Herman Cain or Rick Santorum could have finished a strong third. Instead, the real third place finisher – Tim Pawlenty – quit. He quit the race because he finished third in this utterly ridiculous non-event. High school student council elections are more rigorous than this thing. The organizers auction off floor space to the highest-bidding campaign and candidates bribe attendees with barbecues and whatever else they feel like giving away.

I try not to watch much cable news these days, but what I have seen since the end of the debt ceiling "drama" has relentlessly hyped the Straw Poll. Tbe media have managed to turn this non-event – previously won by the likes of Pat Robertson – into a crucial barometer of candidate viability. Despite the silly rules that make this neither a real election nor a real poll. Despite the fact that Rick Perry was not on the ballot and Romney, who won the Poll in 2008, basically sat it out.

It is possible that there are behind-the-scenes issues that prompted T-Paw to quit the race. I'd like to think so, because the idea that hype could turn this organized silliness into a meaningful component of the selection process for the president of the United States is too depressing. If he had money trouble or simply didn't see himself being able to compete in the crowded field, why wait until the day after the Straw Poll to withdraw? Would another 1000 votes in this farce have made a difference?

The media have an agenda in our elections, and it is to fill airtime profitably. Election fever drives ratings and ad rates. The more mini-elections or "big events" they can create, the more they benefit. Something like the Straw Poll feeds into the pathology of 24-hour election coverage, providing a story that can be breathlessly anticipated, endlessly hyped, reported with numbers and rankings despite the fact that it is ultimately meaningless.

But hey, Bachmann's #1! How could 4,800 Iowans be wrong?

Dozens of news networks, newspapers, and blogs have run this story; the link I provide above is from the ABC News website, a generic mainstream source of news if ever one was. It's very interesting that the ABC News item, like nearly every mainstream news report on this story, omits mention of the following part of the Family Leader manifesto:

Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President.

I…see.

I've been expecting the Normalization of Deviance process to begin with Bachmann and it appears that her much-praised performance at the first GOP primary debate (inasmuch as "Wow, she doesn't sound nearly as bonkers as she is!" is praise) lit the fuse. Beaten into terrified submission by Fox News ratings and forty years of right wing pant-shitting over That Librul Media, the mainstream news industry treats Republican lunatics with kid gloves once it becomes clear that he or she is a "serious" – defined in this instance as financially and politically viable – candidate. If Michele Bachmann is a legit contender for the nomination then it's imperative to give her Fair, Balanced treatment, which is conservative for going out of their way to take her seriously and make her look respectable. Whatever needs to be overlooked in that process is acceptable collateral damage to reality.

It will be interesting to see going forward how often the Sunday Bobblehead crowd presses her on all of the truly, magnificently insane shit she has said and supported over the years. The Bachmann team is in overdrive trying to backtrack some of her previous statements and positions but in the internet age no candidate can effectively soften the kind of statements she has put out for public consumption…unless of course the Beltway media simply decide not to bring it up, instead letting her set the agenda out of desperate fear of being accused of Librul Bias. Or perhaps they honestly believe that any individual who can contend for a major party nomination is to be taken seriously by definition, which creates an environment wherein whatever brand of Crazy happens to have the GOP in its thrall at any given moment becomes the new normal.

(Atlanta) is starting to look like a garbage heap. And we got too damn many urban thugs, yo, ruining the quality of life for everybody. And I'll tell you what it's gonna take. You people, you are – you need to have a gun. You need to have training. You need to know how to use that gun. You need to get a permit to carry that gun. And you do in fact need to carry that gun and we need to see some dead thugs littering the landscape in Atlanta. We need to see the next guy that tries to carjack you shot dead right where he stands. We need more dead thugs in this city.

And:

This city harbors an urban culture of violence. And I want you to look around. You drive into the city. The railroad overpass is on the downtown connector covered with graffiti. And that– That is just an advertisement for everybody coming into this town that we really don't give a damn about those who would screw up our quality of life around here. We really just don't care. We don't care enough to paint over graffiti on the overpasses that come into our city, advertising welcome to Atlanta, here's some of our finest graffiti, from some of our finest urban thugs and their little gang signs.

The technique of using coded language to make racial appeals only works if sufficiently subtle. Unfortunately Boortz isn't bright enough to pull that off, instead ham-fistedly using terms like "urban" and "thugs" in place of "black". On the plus side, he gets his point across very effectively: his listeners should shoot some black people next time they leave the suburbs and venture into Atlanta.

Unsubtle racism aside, note the argument he is making here. Big cities like Atlanta are hellholes because there is too much crime (implicitly read: too many black people). But if "crime" is a key determinant of quality of life in a given place, small town 'murica certainly isn't the answer; since the 1970s a number of social forces – the meth epidemic, deregulation, supply side economics, Evangelical political militancy – have conspired to make the average small, rural town as much of a pit of despair as any big city. Among the boarded up storefronts, randomly exploding meth labs, third world teen pregnancy rates, and elderly, deranged population of fundamentalists, I'd take my chances with "urban thugs" in Atlanta over Pigsknuckle, Georgia.

What kind of community isn't a hellhole, Neal? Implicitly – and unsurprisingly given his audience – he is arguing that The Big City is wicked in comparison to its suburbs. In other words, Atlanta should be more like East Cobb and Sandy Springs…you know, where everyone has tons of money.

So Atlanta should be more like its suburbs, where the high financial bar for entry creates some of the wealthiest communities in the nation (GA-06 is one of the 10 wealthiest districts).

But income inequality is not a problem and income redistribution is the great Satan.

My butt itches.

Like most of you (I assume) I don't watch much Fox News. In fairness I rarely watch TV news on any network, relying instead as so many Americans do on the self-selection offered by the internet. What little I see on the FNC comes from clips circulated on the internet, brief glimpses while I flip through channels, and maybe a few minutes here and there during election season. For the most part it is an alternate universe – I know it exists and I hear about it often, but our paths almost never cross. Except when I visit my doctor. He and his unironic "These Colors Don't Run" bumper sticker have FNC playing on multiple TVs throughout the office, so I usually catch about 15 minutes in the waiting room.

Today, through sundry intricacies of our remarkable system of managed care that I needn't recount here, I waited well over an hour before the good Doctor saw me. It would guess that it has been a decade since I sat and watched 80 or 90 minutes of Fox News, probably not since I last lived with my dad and thus was indirectly exposed to O'Reilly every evening after work. That DiMaggio-like streak ended today. The volume was up so loud (the old people need to be able to hear it, after all) I couldn't bury my nose far enough in Popular Mechanics to ignore it.

I am not an unbiased observer, obviously, and I watch Fox the same way most people watch circuses or episodes of Two and a Half Men. Despite these handicaps I am confident that the following is a valid conclusion: anyone who watches this channel for multiple hours daily would be categorically insane after a few months. Everything about public opinion and the Tea Party and oddities of the American electorate make perfect sense after watching this for an hour or two. If this was your only source of news, you would become one of them. Your relationship with reality would be tenuous at best, and more likely nonexistent.

You can actually feel the propaganda techniques start to numb you after a while. In small doses it has no effect, and we see it with a mixture of disdain and bemusement. It just seems kinda silly. Watching it all day, every day (as the staff at the office in question do) would be like the prison camp scenes in The Killing Fields – listening to Khmer Rouge propaganda blared over a loudspeaker until insanity becomes the new normal. Is Fox the Khmer Rouge? Of course not. They've just mastered the same methods of persuasion.

If my hypothesis seems implausible, I invite you to try it yourself sometime. Resolve to sit firmly on the couch and watch Fox News for two uninterrupted hours. Let us know how you feel afterward.